Romeo and Juliet: Zeffirelli vs. Luhrmann

So Valentine's Day has come and gone, and for the holidays, I usually watch movies that have to do with the holiday, watching horror movies in October and Christmas movies in December and such.  That means February is the month for romances, and one of the all-time greatest romances, dating back to before the movies were even invented, is William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  So I watched the acclaimed 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version again, the one starring a very young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, and then I watched, again, the modern Baz Luhrmann edition starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.  It's not Leo's and Claire's fault:  They were fine.  But there simply is no comparison!

Check out each of the music videos to get a taste for the tone of each:

Romeo & Juliet directed by Franco Zeffirelli

The website Time Out: New York, when listing the 25 best Shakespeare-to-screen adaptations (linked here), listed this Franco Zeffirelli version at number 10, stating that you probably saw this first in high school thanks to a lazy lit teacher.  I don’t think these reviewers know what they’re talking about!  Seeing that film in high school was the first time Shakespeare made any sense, and I loved how the writing – quite foreign to the ear of a high schooler raised on H.R. Puffenstuff and Speed Buggy cartoons – finally came alive and made sense.  Even if I couldn’t understand the language, I could follow the story because the actors imbued these strange words with the passion they deserved.  Now when I watch it, I can understand it all the more, and appreciate the art that went into it – both the Shakespeare play, and the Zeffirelli movie. 

     There’s a scene in this movie, when Romeo has killed Tybalt and lies crying “with his own tears made drunk” as Friar Laurence describes him, and when he mourns over all that has befallen him, the Friar urges him to see his fortune rather than his misery.  It could have been Romeo that died instead of Tybalt, and the Prince could have ordered Romeo found and executed instead of giving him a way out with exile, and the poetic way these things are said by the Friar, emphasizing the word “there” over and over, showing Romeo his blessings:

What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

In another scene, Romeo spends the night with Juliet, and instead of talking plainly about the fact he has to leave at the break of day, lest Juliet's family finds him there, they instead talk about the singing of nightingales and larks ringing in the arrival of each, and when Juliet denies that it is finally day, and begs Romeo to stay, he, knowing it is day, decides he will do as Juliet wishes, and stay even if it means his death!

I have more care to stay than will to go:
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How is't, my soul? let's talk; it is not day.

But when Juliet distinctly hears a lark, however, she realizes it is day, and that Romeo must flee, and says:

It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division;
This doth not so, for she divideth us

It means so much more now that I can comprehend the meaning of their poetic words, and therefore it means all the more!  I can certainly see why Shakespeare is loved among English teachers, and I wish I had the time and inclination to get into him more than I have.  Alas, I haven’t read much; Hamlet, The Tempest, MacBeth, and a few others, and I’m a bit familiar with King Lear, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Henry V, and a few of his sonnets.  I’d like to know and understand him more.  For a writer, it certainly couldn’t hurt!

     This movie has stayed with me over the years, and I always had strong feelings about the death scenes at the end – they are quite powerful – and it makes this play actually surpass Hamlet for me as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.  Romeo believes Juliet dead, and drinks that poison, and then later, she sees him lying there and wishing for a drop of poison to help her afterward, then hearing noises and wishing to be brief, grabs his dagger, saying “Oh, happy dagger, this is thy sheath.  Rest there and let me die!”  I didn’t understand until much later that she was referring to herself as the sheath.  It stirred emotions in me I didn’t even know I had.  This is intelligent, thought provoking, and very emotional.  It makes me want to understand all of it so much more than I do!

Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann

I think Shakespeare himself would be appalled!  It’s almost like director Baz Luhrmanm said to himself, “I wonder how I can screw this up?”  It’s basically the same play, and the same words from Shakespeare (some of them anyway), and DiCaprio and Danes aren’t really all that bad in it.  It’s everything else that completely sucks!  Luhrmann pulled the same trick with Moulin Rouge, and in that case, it eventually worked… somehow.  But this movie was nearly a bastardization of Shakespeare’s play, and because it takes place in some freakish netherworld full of glitz and glam, with enough cross-dressers and heavily made up extras to populate ten John Waters movies, and the fast-paced, in-your-face editing style of the most garish music videos, to say it caters to a niche audience is to miss the point.  The two styles clash like most of the visuals in this movie.  The MTV crowd who might like the music and the gaudy fashions aren’t the type to like Shakespeare, and the refined Shakespeare crowd should find the abrasive and tasteless rendering deplorable, to say nothing of the fact that the screenwriters attempted to rewrite parts of the play, such as when Juliet wakes just in time to see Romeo down the poison, and he is still alive and speaking his final words when Juliet kills herself, this time with a gun to the temple! 

            What I liked about this movie was the Shakespeare play, which is good enough to stand on its own.  What I hated was everything else!