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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 10/31/1996, B: Peter Keough,

Barely Bard

Romeo & Juliet takes a few liberties

by Peter Keough

ROMEO & JULIET. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Written by Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann based on the play by William Shakespeare. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, John Leguizamo, Brian Dennehy, Paul Sorvino, Diane Venora, Pete Postlethwaite, Christina Pickles, Harold Perrineau, Paul Rudd, and M. Emmet Walsh. A Twentieth Century Fox release. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

It's about the time that Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) delivers his Queen Mab speech RuPaul style in a silver mini-skirt and platinum wig that you'll likely decide whether Baz Luhrmann's version of the Bard is going to work for you. Had Tex Avery conspired with Monty Python and René Magritte, the results could not have been more outrageous, intoxicating, and subversive. But is it Shakespeare? Is it tragedy or farce? The best thing is to ignore such questions and succumb to Luhrmann's outpouring of effervescent bad taste, wicked wit, surreal imagery, and crude, campy good humor. Neither as inspired as the Richard III of Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine nor as inspiring as Trevor Nunn's upcoming Twelfth Night. Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet, like Shakespeare himself, nonetheless spans the extremes of broad comedy and profound poetry.

That's captured in the film's synthesized setting, Verona Beach (actually, a souped-up Mexico City) -- a combination of LA, Gotham City, and Toonland. Tabloid headlines spell out the play's prologue as TV news footage illustrates the "new mutiny/Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean" between the Montague and Capulet clans. A contingent of the former get jumped in a gas station by a squad of the latter headed by Tybalt (a snarling, overacting John Leguizamo, duded up like Zorro in black and sporting patent leather boots with three-inch silver heels). He makes short work of them with his "Sword 9 mm," and Luhrmann makes short work of the scene's staginess by employing speeded-up action and having his actors react with cartoonish mugging.

As in his overrated Strictly Ballroom Luhrmann's stylistic trademarks are caricature and pastiche. Here, however, the artifice revitalizes the familiar story and puts in relief the further artifice of Shakespeare's language. Every character but the leads is a loony grotesque. The head Capulet (Paul Sorvino, playing the same role as in the execrable All You Need Is Love) is a pasta-accented padrone; his wife, Gloria (Diane Venora), is a dissipated Blanche du Bois; and Friar Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) has a Celtic cross tattoo'd on his back and directs his choir in singing Prince songs. In such a crowd, the sheer normality of Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Claire Danes's Juliet takes on extra poignance.

It helps, too, that despite some awkward line readings and too many hysterics, DiCaprio and Danes capture the stunned joy of adolescent first love. In one of the film's most breathtaking sequences, Romeo attends the Capulet masked ball high on acid, and he and Juliet first gaze at one another through a huge fish tank that separates the men's and ladies' washrooms. Later, she dances with her intended, "Dave" Paris (Paul Rudd), under Romeo's gaze, unable to refrain from giggling. Not many films have so beautifully rendered the moment when two souls become one.

Not all is slapstick and smooching in Verona City, however, and Luhrmann demonstrates a flair for darkness and doom not evident in Strictly Ballroom. The tone grows stormy and ominous after the luminous exultation of Romeo and Juliet's secret marriage: an overarching ruined façade serves as a proscenium under which the sky and the sea, which darken and roil, and the pervasive religious iconography -- looming statues, crowds of plaster saints, ubiquitous sacred hearts -- seem no longer campy but diabolical. The shockingly violent murders of Mercutio and Tybalt career jar against Juliet's blissful boudoir meditation on the qualities of her new husband. Marooned to a Mantua that is a dustbowl trailer park, Romeo misses the letter that would have saved them (sent by the Fed Ex-like "Post Haste" delivery service), and the two lovers hurtle toward their last kiss.

Even in that ultimate tearjerker of a scene Luhrmann can't restrain his puckishness -- it takes place in the midst of a police siege reminiscent of the end of Rebel Without a Cause. In this case, though, irreverence is a higher form of respect. Like the beachside proscenium in Verona City, Luhrmann's art frames the sea of Shakespeare's genius.