No-one who has seen Moulin Rouge will be suprised by Baz Lurhmann's frenetic and pyrotechnic take on Romeo and Juliet. The same rich, saturating colours, the same hyperactive camera and willingness to use other people's words to tell his own story.
Anyone looking for a straight reading of Romeo and Juliet will be disappointed. Luhrmann has kept the original dialogue, but the setting has been moved to "Verona Beach", and the waring families are now two business empires, with punks and gang members as their footsoldiers. "Longsword" is the brand name engraved on a gun barrel, and Queen Mab is a tab of ecstasy. Arguments about authenticity are fairly irrelevant, as Lurhmann has simply made a film which demands to be judged on its own merits, not by how far it brings Shakespeare's "intentions" to the screen.
It is a fast and impressive film, literally exploding into the first act with a Montague-Capulet gunfight in a gas station. Lurhmann's restless, MTV-style camera work equally enhances the action and the comedy (by making Tybalt move at superhuman speed, or Juliet's mother fluster and flap), slowing down for sequences of almost halted time when the lovers catch sight of each other. Unfortunately he sometimes seems incapable of engaging the audience's attention at normal speed, and a lot of the dialogue drags.
Clare Danes plays Juliet as a dreamy ingenue, and comes off better than Leonardo DiCaprio's rather petulant and brittle Romeo. One real strength is Harold Perrineau's ranting, cross-dressing Mercutio, who moves from near-hysteria to portentous sullenness with impressive ease. Perrineau manages to infuse his part with a desperate, doomed comedy that climaxes in his terrifying death scene, and leaves a real hole in the cast for the rest of the movie. John Leguizamo, icily malevolent as Tybalt, steals the brilliant first scene. Pete Postlethwaite brings some much-needed gravitas as Friar Lawrence, and Miriam Margoyles is coyly grotesque as the Nurse. Dash Mihok is enthuastic as Benvolio, but, like some of the rest of the cast in this Shakespeare film, seems ill at ease with speaking verse.
Lurhmann has made a gorgeous and intermittently thrilling movie but much of the best sequences, like the lazy long shots of run-down Verona Beach, have nothing to do with his source material. He mines Shakespeare for moments of high emotion to create "sturm und drang", but fans of the original play may find this a little busy and hip, its high gloss blurring the lines underneath.
