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Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Clare Danes. This film is an enigma. It's hard to understand, and yet compelling. It offers the viewer Shakespearean lyrics and couplets through the mouths of characters living in the 1990's. Swords are transformed into silver plated handguns, stone castles to mansions in the hills with heated swimming pools and security systems and horses to mutant Chevys. Writer and director Baz Luhrmann--that's not a typo, really, his name is actually Baz--has a lot of fun updating the setting and backdrops of the bard's tale of forbidden love, but leaves the dialogue alone. The English spoken is seemingly the same as when my high school nemesis, William Shakespeare, was supposed to have lived back in the sixteenth century. This irritates me slightly because, English majors avert your eyes, I feel Luhrmann has ignored the part of Shakespeare that truly needs updating. When the on screen action sizzles, and the cuts come faster than any number of John Woo films, no one cares what Tibault means when he uses words like "thoust" or "doust" or "forsooth", we're looking at the huge guns pointed at the guy filling up his gas tank. However, when things slow down again, and we watch Mercutio give a soliloquy on the beach, we're suddenly watching a foreign film without the subtitles.I can understand the creative idea behind Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but let's not forget that the language Shakespeare used when he wrote Romeo and Juliet contained a lot of the English slang of the time. While I'm not suggesting Romeo exclaim, "My heart beats so quickly, for she is the bomb," when looking at Juliet for the first time, I think this film could have been helped by a few changed words here and there. Even though you don't always understand or follow the gist of what the characters are saying, there is something catchy about this film. The colors are lavish, the facial hair scintillating, and the camera working splendid. The fine performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Clare Danes and John Leguizamo also add interest to the movie. If you're looking for something truly off the wall and different, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is just that, but be warned, there are no Cliffs Notes for this movie.
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