Thirty years in the past, Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the current day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary city place referred to as Verona Beach. The end result was a terrific success, extra of successful, I think, than Luhrmann ever had once more; it was irreverent and questioning in simply the precise means, a sunburst of power, however instinctively respectful to the story, with Luhrmann chopping the unique textual content with co-screenwriter Craig Pearce however not altering or modernising it. It is full of life, extravagantly joyful, then passionately unhappy, and its lurid 90s crime-chic design doesn’t look dated. And on this Romeo and Juliet, Luhrmann by no means suspended the ahead momentum to indulge campy musical setpieces, maybe as a result of Shakespeare’s language is the music and the dance; the textual content retains the interpretation grounded.
The 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, but to have his large breakthrough in Titanic (one other story of starcrossed lovers), performs younger Romeo Montague, whose household is locked into an unexplained Sicilian-style blood feud with the Capulet household. Romeo is a younger loafer and would-be poet, scribbling traces of verse right into a pocket book, and at this stage dreamily moping over a younger lady referred to as Rosaline, whose silent offstage existence is the play’s minor incidental thriller. (Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles play his mother and father and so they have a lot much less of a job than the elder Capulets.)
Claire Danes, at 16, performed Juliet Capulet – she had already been the piteous Beth in Little Women reverse Winona Ryder, however had grow to be an enormous star on account of taking part in the lead in TV’s cult teen classic My So-Called Life. This was the movie that basically launched audiences to her intelligence and sweetness and to her unmistakable tearfulness: that verge-of-a-sneeze nostril wrinkling and lip trembling that got here earlier than crying. Juliet’s mom is performed by Diane Venora and her dad by the formidable Paul Sorvino, bringing rather a lot of the glowering paterfamilias presence he confirmed as gangboss Paulie Cicero in Scorsese’s Goodfellas – although right here he has longer hair and a extra florid Italianate accent.
A comparatively minor fracas between the 2 households’ hothead youthful contingents brings down a livid official sanction on them each, and Capulet senior is resentfully compelled to ask some Montagues to his ball; it is right here the place we meet some of the unique minor characters. Harold Perrineau is queer or queer-adjacent Mercutio, whose Queen Mab speech celebrates MDMA euphoria; John Leguizamo is a black-clad, snake-hipped Tybalt, cousin of Juliet, all the time on the lookout for a quarrel along with his enemies. And Paul Rudd performs the supercilious, goody-two-shoes younger Paris, a probable younger fellow that the Capulets have earmarked as an appropriate husband for Juliet, and as ever with Rudd roles from the 90s and 00s, his Dorian Gray youth is a unbroken marvel.
Romeo meets Juliet and the lightning bolts of love and transgression strike without delay – although maybe not sufficient is stated about how erotic they discover the easy forbiddenness of their love. Here is the place the younger lovers’ two co-conspirators and enablers are available: the nurse, robustly performed by Miriam Margolyes, who covers up the rising romance, and the cleric, who is to marry them in secret after which devise a weird and reckless faux dying scheme, compounded with irresponsibly incompetent letter-delivering by Father Laurence, performed with visceral pressure by Pete Postlethwaite. When the ultimate refrain talks about some being pardoned and a few punished, this certainly means leniency for the nurse however not Laurence – but maybe, contemplating the respect for patriarchy and the fabric, it might have been the opposite means round.
DiCaprio’s efficiency is wonderful; his Romeo is remodeled and astonished by the actual factor; he has play-acted at love till now, and he hasn’t realised how susceptible it will make him. Danes seems to be extra mature than he does (although in truth six years youthful) and he or she is such a sensible, trendy participant, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.
