Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

 

Of all the Shakespeare productions committed to film, perhaps the most gaudy is Baz Luhrmann’s production of Romeo & Juliet, set in a cinematic future that looks like Santa Monica on a bad acid trip. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio – it comes in his filmography right between The Basketball Diaries & Titanic – and Claire Danes, this film has every element needed to go unimaginably awry. And yet it doesn’t – with choirs singing Prince’s When Doves Cry & squealing chase scenes involving large American convertibles & helicopters, Tybalt played by John Leguizamo & Mercutio portrayed (half the time in drag) by Harold Perrineau (Link in the later Matrix films, plus a regular on Oz & Lost) – this impossible recasting of the romantic tragedy works wonders. It does so because it stays faithful to Shakespeare’s language – precisely what turns Westside Story into such a hopeless mush of cliché.

Only Pete Postelthwaite’s Father Lawrence comes across as an actor trained in the traditional tones of Shakespeare – his ease with the language actually sounds “off” compared with the mumbling, half-swallowed lines of so many of the younger members of the cast. It may just be their inexperience with Elizabethan English, but it’s so consistent throughout that it comes across as a style, much as the sleek black leather Capulets contrast visually with the beach boy slacker mode of the Montagues. We don’t so much hear these all-too-famous lines as we do overhear them. Luhrmann’s strategy has been to surround this younger cast with a first-rate team of character actors – Paul Sorvino as papa Capulet, Brian Dennehy as the patriarch of the Montagues, M. Emmett Walsh as the apothecary. But the structure of the play is such that few of them have enough dialog or face time to have much impact – Sorvino has one important speech, Dennehy none. The two who make a significant impact are Miram Margolyes as Juliet’s nurse, whose ability to speak Shakespeare with a thick Latina accent is a revelation, and Vondie Curtis-Hall as the prince, played here as the hands-on head of the police, descending from a chopper in the night to announce that “All are punishéd!”

I’m not a fan of the musical as a form, can’t even remember Luhrmann’s first film, Strictly Ballroom, although I know I went to see it, & actively hated his third, Moulin Rouge. Yet Romeo & Juliet as a music video – and this is the surface texture of the production above all else – works. It empowers the anarchic shifts of the rapidly evolving plot, enables the narrative bridges that work okay on the stage but would normally come across as preposterous in the contemporary medium of film (The protagonists are completely smitten after how many seconds of visual contact? This blue liquid will cause Juliet’s body to feign death for 24 hours?) and enables Luhrmann to open up the set until anything is possible (Mantua, the city to which Romeo is exiled for killing Tybalt, is a trailer park in the desert).

“What,” asked Colin, “would Shakespeare have made of such a production?” (One impetus behind viewing so many productions this year was a Shakespeare unit my sons had in seventh grade that included everything but reading or seeing Shakespeare.) What he is really asking has to do with the timeliness of a 16^th century text in a 20^th century production that is able to project itself prolepticly into some dystopian future. Turned around, it can be understood as a question of the historical specificity of the text. And this in turn harkens back to the set of assumptions that our friends in the NEA have been making this year in funding the production of so many performances of Shakespeare in such out-of-the-way and aesthetically underserved locales as Philadelphia’s Main Line. The premise of the NEA is that Shakespeare is shorthand for something akin to the Great Books approach to education, a focusing in on the common texts – Harold Bloom’s canon, for example – that “everyone” should know. Yet Shakespeare, as Baz Luhrmann captures quite effectively, was a radical at all that he did. The play is as much about power relations as it is young love. Indeed, as the messenger to Mantua is transformed into something akin to express mail, Jesse noted, “This play is about the importance of the postal service.”

And of service in general, as the friar & the nurse prove as crucial to the unfolding of events as do the intransigence of the parents or the totalitarian prince. As anyone over the age of 30 – or is it 35 now? – who spent any time in the old Soviet bloc countries should remember, in totalitarian regimes of any type, civil society plays itself out differently. One functions around the official & oppressive mechanisms – here, no one thinks to even tell the parents, even as the friar envisions that the wedding will force the houses of Montague & Capulet to seek a rapprochement. The play is as much about the consequences of the gap between these two realms, the civil & the social, as it is about the individual players. Imagine, if you will, Althusser’s old twin forces of social control, the ideological state apparatus (ISAs), which include the church, the media, even style & subculture, and the repressive state apparatus (RSAs), entailing the courts, the cops, the formal political regime. In Romeo & Juliet, the totalitarian nature of the RSA has cast the ISA adrift & all that befalls Mercutio & Tybalt as well as the title characters can be attributed to the anarchy that rises up from this divorce. That is certainly one possible reading of Shakespeare’s intentions & it’s fascinating that in 1996 Baz Luhrmann, who grew up in rural Australia & has shown no other inclination toward social perception in his films, unleashes this strain in his hyper, loud, but ultimately reasonable rendering of the play.