Looking for Richard Romeo & Juliet
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva THE BARD IN AMERICA 'Looking for Richard' & 'Romeo' Having performed Richard III on and off between movie assignments for the last two decades, Al Pacino decided to make...
...The few words left simply hold up the action-away with them...
...Boz Luhr-mann, the director, has extracted from each scene just those few lines that give enough information for the plot to function, plus a few more that are too beautiful or too famous to be jettisoned...
...as rain pelts down on him, we may feel the Latin-Catholic sensibility of both play and movie reach its exquisite apogee...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva THE BARD IN AMERICA 'Looking for Richard' & 'Romeo' Having performed Richard III on and off between movie assignments for the last two decades, Al Pacino decided to make his exploration of the play into a movie self-assignment...
...Before the final tragedy in the crypt, there is such a spectacular chase scene with police helicopters tracking the fugitive Romeo that you have to wonder if the cops won't burst into the church and interrupt the final soliloquies (which, of course, are reduced to practically nothing...
...it is nor hand, nor foot Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man with a wonderful blend of naivete and nascent lasciviousness (her sly shading of the last seven words) that I found delightful...
...To see Wynona Ryder struggle with the tricky psychology of Lady Anne yielding her body to her husband's murderer is to grasp how an actor can flounder, yet grow through floundering...
...It is Shakespearean snack food.espearean snack food...
...Listening to Kevin Conway speak the role of Hastings with diction that's lucid, pleasurable to the ear, and utterly American, we can hear the fact of American Shakespeare, a fact that has been with us since John Barrymore's Hamlet (if not Edwin Booth's) but is seldom acknowledged in the knee-jerk identification of British accents with the Bard...
...In Romeo, I enjoyed his send-up of the Montague-Capulet brawls as Sergio Leone showdowns right out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly...
...But Luhrmann hasn't really transformed Romeo and Juliet...
...Above all, watching Pacino himself arrive at rather glib solutions for his portrayal of Richard in the early Machiavellian scenes but then achieve an utterly convincing portrayal of the later, enthroned Richard as a kind of slow-moving deep-sea monster is to understand why Pacino has chosen to return to the role so many times...
...How strange that this should happen again in the sound period, only now with the actors able to speak their own captions...
...In this movie, however, the eloquence has been re-absorbed by the bustle...
...Watching Alec Baldwin, as the doomed brother of Richard, control the fear in his face as he confronts his assassins and then casts about for a way to dissuade them, we understand exactly what Baldwin is working toward: the portrait of a smooth talker who can't quite con his way out of the ultimate tight spot...
...the actor seems needlessly slack in every scene in which he doesn't scream, weep, or fight...
...For the script of the latest Romeo and Juliet isn't just an abridgment of the play...
...Shakespeare's plays have often been successfully transformed into works of art very different from their source...
...In fact, midway through this film you may begin to wonder why there's any poetry at all...
...His is a real "movie movie," its dialogue being just another component of the soundtrack along with gunfire, screeching brakes, and the slapping of surf onto the beach...
...His journey has been long but getting there is all the fun...
...He is a clever filmmaker with a romantic sensibility drawn to high camp, and his last film, Strictly Ballroom, was a perfect marriage of romance and campiness...
...Looking down at the boy from camera's viewpoint above the plaster head and hearing Romeo scream "Oh...
...I am Fortune's fool...
...Despite the absurdities any modernization entails (why does the state's governor allow his son, Paris, to marry into a gangster clan...
...Even in the days of silent movies, Shakespeare's plays were brought to the screen, and in these efforts the language was, of course, reduced to a series of captions...
...Since, even in this version, Romeo is meant to be a poetic youth in love not only with love but with the expression of love (we first see DiCaprio scribbling his soliloquy as thoughts in a diary- nice touch...
...By contrast, Claire Danes not only radiates dewiness but has the ability to infuse a passage such as: What's Montague...
...The answer is supplied in nearly every shot of this lively, bumpy, and very funny movie and it has nothing to do with deformity, political ambition, the nature of evil, or the divine right of kings, but everything to do with the eternal hunger of actors for great roles, juicy dialogue, and tantalizing acting problems...
...That beach is Verona Beach in present-day Florida where this update is set as the portrayal of the rivalry of two gangster families...
...For when Shakespeare's people do something, it is usually by saying it...
...I also liked his transformation of the so-called balcony scene into a swimming pool dip, although the frustrated yearning that is usually emphasized by having the lovers occupy different levels is here pretty much lost amidst the splashing and gulping...
...The beginning of the balcony /swimming-pool scene (as entertaining as it is) is more concerned with whether a security guard will discover Romeo than with the stirrings of love...
...Early on, Pacino tells us that the object of his theatrical and cinematic search is to discover just what Richard III can mean to us today, "us" being actors and audience...
...Think of Verdi's Othello and Falstaff, Jose Limon's ballet, The Moor's Pavane and, of course, West Side Story...
...For his documentary, Looking for Richard, Pacino persuaded some Hollywood and New York talents to form a temporary and ill-paid company (Alec Baldwin good natured-ly grouses on camera that "we're working for $40 a week and doughnuts"), and obtained permission to shoot several scenes at The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum that has a medieval look...
...how can the chief of police-Shakespeare's prince of Verona- banish a killer instead of locking him up...
...The bustle of Cinthio and Plutarch and Hollinshed is transformed by the poet into verbal hang gliding...
...Most of the rest of the cast is apt, with Miriam Margolyes (nurse) and Pete Postlethwaite (a very post-Vatican II Friar Lawrence) so fine that you wish they had more to do, which is the same as wishing they had more to say...
...Courtesy of Don McAlpine's voluptuous photography, there are several haunting images, especially that of Romeo, having just killed Tybalt, falling to his knees before a huge statue of Christ...
...He's hyped it up and thinned it out...
...This movie challenges neither its actors nor its audience...
...Leonardo DiCaprio, as Romeo, is fine at delivering such raw emotion, but his voice lacks range and trenchancy...
...Luhrmann almost pulls this stunt off...
...The camera follows the star-director and his assistants as they scout other locations in New York, interview scholars and British actors at Stratford, England, set off a fire alarm by accident as they enter Shakespeare's birthplace, get thrown out of an outdoor cafe by New York's Finest for filming without a license, question New Yorkers on the street about what the play signifies to them (blank responses from everyone except one eloquent bum), and squabble among themselves about the project's progress...
...Spoiled by the acrobatics and gunfire that had gripped them for the first hour, the teen-agers at the screening I attended became fairly restive during the relatively talky pathos of the last half...
...it's a specimen of clip art...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
