Director: Baz Luhrmann
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Harold Perrineau, John Leguizamo
Have I Seen it Before: I can say with certainty that couple with being alive and conscious in the 1990s, and having HBO for most of that time, I had plenty of opportunities to see the movie. Ultimately, owing probably due to a measure of unavoidable—but able to be shed—adolescent chauvinism, I don’t think I got much of anywhere past the scene where Romeo (DiCaprio) first lays eyes on Juliet (Danes).
Did I Like It: A Shakespeare adaptation is about the easiest thing not to screw up, sort of like the dramatic equivalent of boxed Mac & Cheese in the food world. As such, it can be the purview of the profoundly lazy. Dress everyone up in period-specific attire, don’t futz with the script too much (it’s got to help that Shakespeare can’t bring a case to arbitration with the WGA), and you even get bonus credit if you just copy and paste the full text and make us sit there for four hours.
But really, you should get even more credit for fitting the expansive scope of any one of his plays into a manageable running time.
This would count then, wouldn’t it?
Real credit, though, should be given when a Shakespearean adaptation reaches for the Orson Welles standard and tries to make that text work in a context that feels closer to the audience for which it is intended. One could have just put DiCaprio (who, let’s face it, has more interesting work ahead of him after he could sell an army’s worth of tickets with just his face alone) in the role and called it a day. Actually giving a MTV-obsessed generation some identification with the material, all the way to the point where the various Montagues and Capulets might have been equally at home in a season of The Real World as in Verona (or Verona Beach), would have made Welles—and quite possibly the bard himself—proud.
This doesn’t even begin to cover the delightful, anarchic absurdism at the core of any Luhrmann work, does it?