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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996)
directed by Baz Luhrman, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes
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© 2005 John Murphy

I was a gawky, four-eyed twelve-year old when this movie was released in 1996. I was negotiating, for the first time, the treacherous battlefield of middle school hallways: the gossip, the insecurity, and the foreign sensations of first infatuations. It was a perfect time for me to see this movie.

Nearly ten years have elapsed but I vividly recall what a relief it was to go to the local Cineplex (not the art house theater) and watch a Shakespeare movie on a big screen surrounded by kids roughly my age, middle and high school students, as opposed to the obligatory middle-aged crowd. I already loved Shakespeare thanks to Kenneth Branagh—the seven year old version of me thrilled to his Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech while not understanding every other word—and yet, woe is me, few of my pimply contemporaries shared this peculiar passion for the 400 hundred year old Bard.

I also remember the trailers for this movie. Promos edited to machine gunfire flashed rat-a-tat shots of gang gunplay, adolescent romance, bright colors, and explosions, all backed by a pounding, bass-heavy soundtrack. By the end, breathless, my 12 year old equivalent was amazed and delighted to hear the Movie Trailer Voice, gravelly and intense, intone (as only the Movie Trailer Voice can intone) “William Shakespeare’s…Romeo and Juliet.” There it was. “William Shakespeare.” Suddenly, the old Bard seemed cool. Not just to me, but to all my classmates too.         

The theater was packed when I went. I recognized some kids from my school. The median age was probably 16. The lights dimmed. The screen flickered. The movie started. And off we went. Here was a world we recognized, a garish world of guns, trendy fashions, and solipsistic teenagers scribbling poetry in their notebook. The audience snickered with recognition at Romeo’s pleading to Juliet, “Wilst thou leave me so unsatisfied?” And Juliet’s retort, “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” Gunplay and drug use and raging hormones. Well meaning adults and over-possessive parents. All aided and abetted by a hip soundtrack and attractive young stars-in-the-making, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.    

Now I’m a world-weary college student, no longer the wide-eyed innocent thrilling to Radiohead b-sides and drooling over Claire Danes (okay, that’s not quite true). I recently re-read—for the first time in many years—my painfully sincere review of this movie from 1997. And I quote: “Claire Danes as Juliet is less convincing with the text, but ooh boy can I understand Romeo’s attraction! (uhh mmm, to get back to professional critiquing) she is a very charismatic talent, with a luminescent face that speaks countless words.”

Hmm…glad I didn’t submit that insightful excerpt for any of my college admission applications. And my standard for “professional critiquing” was apparently pretty loose in those green years. I should’ve just written a fan letter.

So how does the movie hold up? I’ll be honest: I can’t quite dissociate myself from the movie’s nostalgic associations (just as I can’t help but always love Branagh, even at his ham-fisted worst). But I’ll try and be objective.

The text is gutted. I doubt if even half the play survives on screen. My mom and I naturally bitch and moan on this website over the brutal beating most texts take on the journey from page to screen, but this movie has a unique advantage: Luhrmann’s target audience, the generation weaned on MTV, generally have the attention span of a cocker spaniel. So I can forgive Luhrmann taking a “Cliff Notes” approach to text-pruning.  

What holds up surprisingly well are the performances. The supporting cast is filled out nicely with well-cast veterans and some fresh-faced newcomers. I love John Leguizamo’s cocksure Tybalt, all pointy teeth and resin-lined voice. Harold Perrineau is a surprisingly affecting as the cross-dressing, drug-dealing misfit, Mercutio. He feeds Romeo a suspicious looking pill (ecstasy? acid?) before the Capulet party, and the results are appropriately trippy.  

Pete Posthlewaite as Friar Laurence possesses the kind of natural ease with the dialogue that suggests many years of hard-won training on the boards. He wraps his lips around Shakespeare’s Gordian knotted language as easily as if he were reading a grocery list—and with a put-on American accent! He’s a wonderful actor, and gives a memorable turn as the well-meaning Friar Laurence—the coolest Friar you’re likely to meet—with a crucifix tattoo and a penchant for Hawaiian shirts. 

Since this film DiCaprio has proven himself a worldwide mega-star, headlining such moneymaking behemoths as Titanic and The Aviator. His pretty boy good looks ensure that he’s always being underrated as an actor. He’ll continue to give dedicated, impressive turns in classy film from now ’til kingdom come and moviegoers, in their blissful ignorance, will continue to say, “Wow, that boy can really act.” Here he captures the passion, the poetry, and the primal rage that imprison Romeo at any given moment. He’s a slave to his emotions. He spends his time scrawling poetry in little black books and looking fashionably disaffected. He drops Rosalind in an instant after a one-time encounter with Juliet. He kills Juliet’s kin, Tybalt, to revenge his friend’s death, his face twisted into a terrible mask of rage. Later, after exile, he dies by his own hand thinking Juliet dead.

Ah, Juliet. Claire Danes. Okay, here’s where the objectivity becomes difficult. She seemed like the epitome of mysterious older girl sensuality to me when I first saw this movie and now I’m writing from the perspective of someone a few years her senior when she made this movie. Though I was enraptured by her many moons ago, it’s apparent to me now that she doesn’t have the same grasp and fluidity with the words DiCaprio possesses. What she does have is a winning smile and angelic features and an almost painful sincerity that broke so many hearts on the popular MTV program, “My So-Called Life.” She brings these strengths to be bear, certainly, but doesn’t quite pull off the tricky iambic pentameter.

But let’s not fool ourselves: I still have a crush on her.     

Roger Ebert pooh-poohed this adaptation, but wrote in 1968 of Franco Zeffirelli’s touchstone version, “It has the passion, the sweat, the violence, the poetry, the love and the tragedy in the most immediate terms I can imagine. It is a deeply moving piece of entertainment, and that is possibly what Shakespeare would have preferred.” Oddly enough, I think his words apply to this film as well. R + J is an adrenaline rush. Scenes fly by in a hallucinatory whirlwind of MTV-editing, eye-popping colors, visceral camerawork, and dynamic performances. Luhrmann is clearly on ADD overdrive the entire time.

I believe the Bard himself would like this movie. It has the spirit of the play—the tempestuous first love, the overbearing parents, the head-on collision with fate. It’s aggressive and passionate and full of tumbling forward-moving energy. “Vitality” is the word Harold Bloom uses to summarize Shakespeare’s enduring popularity and I think the adjective applies here. Luhrmann understands that the generation-spanning attraction to Shakespeare isn’t always his words, strictly speaking, but rather the intensity and the passion that the words emote. We all know what it’s like to be young and in love. Shakespeare gives words to those feelings. And they happen to be better written words than any others in the history of the English language. So what’s lost here is the poetry, but what’s gained is a new generations of kids saying, “Maybe Shakespeare isn’t so bad, after all.”