by G. Jack Urso
 |
| Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). |
The love story
of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most popular Shakespearean plays and its
various film incarnations have achieved great success and acclaim. The film
experience though often goes beyond entertainment to become social commentary
and the timeless quality of Shakespeare’s plays makes an excellent platform for
this type of filmmaking. While not everyone can relate to the revenge and
madness of Hamlet, or the lust for power by Macbeth, we all have fallen in
love. Therefore, it is no surprise that Romeo
and Juliet is a favorite for actors and audiences alike. The challenge with
Shakespeare is to relate the timeless themes to the ever-changing time and
culture of the audience. Romeo and Juliet
proved to be the perfect vehicle for such an approach, particularly as seen in
the 1968 and 1996 film adaptations.
Romeo
and Juliet (1968)
Franco Zefferelli’s
1968 film version is closest in production to what is considered the historical
origin of Romeo and Juliet, Northern
Italy during the Renaissance. The costumes and scenery are all geared to that
time period and great care was taken to present the play in as authentic a
surrounding as possible. Although Zefferelli shot many scenes in Verona, he
found the alleged Capulet home and the local church not the best places to
film. Instead, he chose scenic Tuscany and Umbria as more appropriate to his
needs (Hartung and Simon 206).
 |
| Hussey and Whiting. |
Leonard Whiting
and Olivia Hussey, both teenagers at the time, are about the same ages as Romeo
and Juliet were intended to be and they convincingly handle the Shakespearean
dialogue with admirable proficiency. One criticism is that Zefferelli, Franco
Brusati, and Masolino d’Amico (the screenwriters) cut and chopped the original
Shakespeare with abandon. For example, Juliet’s soliloquy before she takes
Friar Laurence’s potion (Act IV, Scene III), which goes on for forty-five lines,
is reduced to “Love, give me strength!” (Hartung and Simon 208). While some
purists bemoan the loss of even a jot or tittle of the Immortal Bard’s words,
it is seldom that even a staged version of the play does not see some changes
made to the text.
Much of
Shakespeare’s English is no longer in common use or simply antiquated.
Additionally, Shakespeare often wrote to describe things visually he could not
stage. Now that modern technology can create impressive special effects,
changes to the text on that basis alone are justified.
The enmity
between the Montagues and the Capulets in the context of the Vietnam War and
political riots in 1968 adds a dimension to the film that later audiences may
not pick up. At the time, however, the utter senselessness of the conflict and
how it connected to the audience’s lives was not missed.
Romeo
+ Juliet (1996)
Baz Luhrman’s
1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet
leaps off the screen and demands your attention. It begins like a gritty 1970’s crime drama
and fires away at us with jump cuts and MTV style camera work. In fact, much of the film looks like a music
video.
Something of a
hybrid between West Side Story and
Zefferelli’s film version, this Romeo and Juliet is child of both. Social
criticisms run throughout the film, as in West
Side Story, but are never fully integrated into Luhrman’s narrative. Like
Zefferelli’s film, the focus is more on the universal themes in Shakespeare’s
work, rather than the retelling of an Italian Renaissance folk story, though
Zefferelli does place his film within its original historical context.
In Luhrman’s
adaptation, the Capulet boys and the Montague “ganstas” recall the Jets and the
Sharks from West Side Story, the
first adaptation to put Romeo and Juliet
into a modern context. The racial
dynamics are the same (White vs. Hispanic) and music plays a nearly equally
important part in both versions. Consider the scene in Luhrman’s film where
Romeo convinces Friar Laurence to marry him and Juliet. In the background, the choir seems to be
singing a standard religious vocal arrangement when suddenly you realize that
it is “When Doves Cry” by Prince. This
is a particularly affecting moment, for those who are familiar with the lyrics,
in which the singer questions how his parents’ behavior has affected his
own. This underscores just for whom the
movie was made — young people still working out who they are in a violent
world.
 |
| Romeo and the Montagues (Romeo + Juliet). |
Luhrman also plays
with our sense of reality in the way he depicts the Chorus with an anchorwoman
reporting the action in a newsbreak. For me, this aspect of the film recalls the
killing of the “Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo” during the height of 1990s’ War
in Bosnia, which made the news in 1993. The star-crossed couple in this case was
a young Serbian Christian male and Muslim girl who fell in love. Born literally
on the wrong side of the tracks, the couple was killed by snipers attempting to
flee across a bridge to a better life. The war kept the bodies from being
recovered for eight days dialogue (“Romeo”).
Luhrman anticipates
that the constant media exposure to the media of his 1990’s-era audience creates
a focal point for the cultural references in the film. The influence of West Side Story, the song “When Doves
Cry,” and a lingering memory of a news flash from the Bosnian war, contributes
to this adaptation of the play as much as do the modern-day costumes and
Shakespearean language.
As a side note,
the two young, doomed Sarajevian lovers, Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić, were both born in 1968, the same year as Zefferelli’s
film (“Romeo”).
The
Short End of the Script
Even among
Shakespearean aficionados, few people will sit through every word as originally
scripted. One needs only to look at the
receipts from Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film version of Hamlet, which retained Shakespeare’s play word-for-word. Despite
the critical acclaim, few people turned out to see a movie that ran over four
hours long. With a budget of $18 million, the box office brought in only $4.7
million as compared with the heavily
edited 1990 version (directed by Franco Zefferelli and starring Mel Gibson) which
ran about two and a quarter hours long and earned $20.7 million (“Hamlet (1996);”
“Hamlet (1990)").
While Branagh’s dedication to retaining the original
play in its entirety is certainly laudable, it fails in that it neglects the
needs of the audience, which was always foremost in mind of the Immortal Bard.
After all, Shakespeare was a businessman who dealt in popular entertainment. He
had to make practical business decisions and cater to his audience’s tastes when
writing and staging his plays, so it is not unreasonable to think that we
should also make the same pragmatic decisions today.
 |
| Howard and Shearer. |
Both Whiting and
DiCaprio handle the dialogue with great talent and it is hard to choose a
better “Romeo.” Some critics, as well as myself, felt Clair Danes was not as
impressive as Juliet as Olivia Hussey (Ansen 74). While Danes is talented, one
senses an awkwardness on her part with the dialogue and the underlining
emotions. Hussey, on the other hand, displayed a practiced handling of the
dialogue that, when combined with her youth and believability of her
performance, leave an indelible impression. To Danes’ credit, her death scene
with Romeo was powerful and far more haunting than the same scene with Hussey.
Context
and Conclusions
In comparing
these two films, it is inevitable that we take a look at how the social context
of the times the films were produced influenced the making and the
interpretation of the films. Zefferelli’s film is jokingly referred to as the
“Flower Child” Romeo and Juliet
(Ansen 73). Even at the time of the film’s release in 1968, at the height of
the Vietnam War, “the futility of war” message played up by Zefferelli was
strongly identified with by the young audience at the time (Hartung and Simon
207).
In Luhrman’s 1996
film, we see the John Gotti-like Lords Montague and Capulet, the Kennedyesque Count
Paris, street gangs, drive-by shootings, drug abuse, and a gender-bending
Mercutio. It is a world of good intentions corrupted by the “moral pollution”
of today’s society (Ansen 73).
One common
element to both films is how they avoid the slaying of Count Paris by
Romeo. Perhaps the implications are too
great for the scope of the films. Paris represents the youth who do not
question the status quo, and his murder by Romeo seems excessive to modern-day
audiences. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the inclusion of this scene
and how it is “interpreted” for the screen could have enhanced the conflict and
content of the films, particularly so in the 1996 film version.
The timeless
quality of Shakespeare’s play not only lies in his ability as a playwright, but
also in his talent for choosing subjects that appealed to the most common
instincts of his audience: love, lust, jealousy, hatred, pride, madness, revenge,
compassion, and cruelty. We are all capable of these acts. We seek movies out
not just as an escape, but also as a cathartic experience where we are able to
put our passions into the context of the world in which we live. Zefferelli’s
and Luhrman’s films succeed because they fulfill that part of our need as an
audience.
Works Cited
Davies, Anthony. Filming Shakespeare’s Plays. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print.
“Hamlet (1990).” Box Office Mojo. IMDB.com Inc., n.d. Web. 29 Jan.
2013. <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?
id=hamlet91.htm>.
“Hamlet (1996).” Box Office Mojo. IMDB.com Inc., n.d. Web. 29 Jan.
2013. <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?
id=hamlet96.htm>.
Hartung, Philip T., and John Simon. “Romeo and Juliet.” Film 68/69 .
Eds. Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris. New York: Simon and
Shuster, 1970. Print.
Romeo + Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrman. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio and Clair
Danes. 20th Century Fox, 1996. Film.
Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Franco Zeffrelli. Perf. Leonard Whiting and
Olivia Hussey. Paramount Pictures, 1968. Film.
“Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo.” Frontline. PBS. 10 May 1994.
Television.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Eds. Virginia A. LaMar and
Louis B. Wright. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1959. Print.
Related Content
● ● ●
