The Shakespeare festival at our house continues apace, as we watched Michael Radford’s minimalist interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. Minimalist in that Shakespeare’s dialog is stripped of the “extraneous” elements necessary to make the narrative move forward on a stage, as Radford’s camera & editing offer us reaction shots instead of asides. The pace is that of a motion picture, rather than that of a play – and the use of exteriors & sometimes extravagant interiors emphasize the distinction.

Merchant was the first play of Shakespeare’s I ever saw performed live, a production of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco sometime around 1970 that envisioned the whole affair as a movie by Fellini (notably Juliet of the Spirits). I’ve subsequently seen productions by both the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival (back in the days when it was still operating out of an amphitheatre in a neighborhood park) & People’s Light Theater Company here in Chester County. It’s a difficult play to mount from several perspectives. The question of whether or not Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock is anti-Semitic is one obvious issue, but just as difficult is determining the proper balance in the play between the tale of justice, revenge & mercy betwixt the usurer & the merchant Antonio and the love story between Bassinio & Portia. I’ve seen the play presented where Shylock & his story was the dramatic as well as moral center of the play, and where Portia & her role took on those functions.

Radford’s version falls into the latter category, not so much because he means it to, I think, but because as an actor, Lynn Collins blows everyone else – a considerable group, including Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino & Joseph Fiennes – off the stage with her embodiment of Portia. It’s as brilliant & confident & subtle a presentation of any Shakespeare character as I’ve ever seen on film – and her radiance is magnified because she must play opposite the badly miscast Fiennes, as hapless an actor as we have in film today (& the man who made Gwyneth Paltrow seem a great actress when playing opposite her in Shakespeare in Love).

If Shakespeare’s text & Radford’s cinematic direction give the film two of its major engines, the unevenness of the acting gives it its third. It’s not that Irons or Pacino are bad, by any means – they’re two of the finest actors living – but they seem to have decided that they’re in different films. Irons’ Antonio is depressed & withdrawn – he swallows almost every line he’s given. Pacino, in contrast, does what I think of as a Meryl Streep, presenting every one of his speeches as tho it were a concert by Luciano Pavarotti, with no other players on the stage (he does make an exception for Irons). Pacino’s Shylock comes across as a Hasid from the Lower East Side, which is completely out of tune with the other characters, all of whom – even the Texan Collins – have adopted some version of Elizabethan English. The result is a presentation that is interesting as a study, but as off-key as any I’ve seen since Harvey Keitel played Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ. When I think of Pacino’s intensity as Roy Cohn in Angels in America – one of the great performances of all time – the project Pacino worked on immediately prior to Merchant, it seems evident that the problem here is that of a decision – Pacino’s chosen to accentuate all the ways in which Shylock differs from the Christians of Venice – that’s gone overboard. Every other character lives in 1596, but he’s in 1905 & in North America to boot. Fiennes, on the other hand, can barely handle Shakespeare’s language – you cringe when he opens his mouth.

Anticipating Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, Radford & Pacino have decided that the portrayal of Shylock is not anti-Semitic, but rather a treatise on anti-Semitism itself. This may well be letting off Shakespeare too easily, tho it does allow the play to carry a sense of currency – literally, immediacy – that it could not otherwise have. Radford opens the play with a scene showing the blatant racism of Venice & adds text on the screen recounting the problems of Jews in 16^th century Venice & why, unable to own property, they became money lenders, a social function expressly forbidden to Christians. But if you’re going to present the “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” speech as tho it were being delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems positively odd to have both of the play’s two key Jewish roles, Shylock & his daughter Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson), filled by non-Jews. Jewishness here is not Jewish, as such, so much as it is Other.

So the bits & pieces here don’t gel. I may some day happily watch this version again, tho, just to see Lynn Collins demonstrate how Shakespeare ought to be done & because it’s fun to watch Al Pacino work, even when he’s moseyed into a cul-de-sac of wrong choices. But if I really want to see the master at his best, I’ll go rent Dog Day Afternoon.