Romeo & Juliet
Now that we are in the second century of cinema, it feels less and less urgent to go to the William Shakespeare well when it comes to adapting the Bard’s work to film. Part of that is because, after Olivier and Branagh, Zeffirelli and Polanski, and other great artists who have looked to Shakespeare for so many of their finest films, it seems almost futile to try and match the work those filmmakers did in bringing us almost definitive adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays to the screen. One has to find a new, fresh way in to reinvigorate the material, and show us something we didn’t really consider before. Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” did a good job of that this summer, along with ’90s versions of “Romeo + Juliet” by Baz Luhrmann and “Richard III” starring Ian McKellen. Now, we have a new version of “Romeo & Juliet” written by Oscar winner Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park,” and creator of PBS’s “Downton Abbey”)– you would hope that a writer with such a strong voice would be able to enliven a classical setting of this tragic love story?
Sadly, you would be wrong. I don’t know whether you can blame it on Fellowes, who was only adapting the Bard’s work, or director Carlo Carlei (whose feature resume includes “Fluke” and “The Flight of the Innocent,” neither of which I’ve seen), but somewhere down the line, their approach doesn’t work. Yes, it has moments, many of which are provided by Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence and Hailee Steinfeld (from “True Grit”) as Juliet. (Douglas Booth, who plays Romeo, is less compelling as the other half of this star-crossed pair.) But throughout the film, I couldn’t help but flashback to Luhrmann’s hyper-stylized 1996 film of this story (which maintained the text of Shakespeare, even as it set it in modern times) starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes (whose “Homeland” co-star, Damian Lewis, plays Lord Capulet in this version), and think that in the end, that one came closer to what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote the play. It’s a handsome film, no doubt, and all of the actors do well enough at times, but it’s a very flat film, without the fire and energy needed to make it seem vital for a new generation to see what the big deal is about Shakespeare after all these years.
