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Selling Shylock
Merchant makes a case for the villain
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Someone should put Zoloft in the canals of Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice; everyone seems depressed. Al Pacino’s Shylock, his daughter having absconded with his ducats, is grimly, gutturally depressed. Jeremy Irons’s Antonio, sighing for Bassanio, is languidly depressed. Joseph Fiennes’s Bassanio seems positively weighed down by his profligate youth and reluctant indebtedness to Antonio. And having flown the coop with a Christian, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica (Zuleika Robinson), whenever caught by the camera, looks like the world’s most guilt-burdened honeymooner. Only Portia (Lynn Collins) and Nerissa (Heather Goldenhersh), making fun of the outlandish suitors at picture-book-palatial Belmont, seem to be plowing their gondola through other than the slough of despond. Probably to distance Shakespeare’s so-called problem comedy from contemporary anti-Semitism, Radford chooses to set his film — the first big-screen treatment of Merchant in decades — in late-16th-century Venice, where water laps against streets that team with crude activity and the interior scenes have a tint of Tintoretto. We learn in a scrolled prologue how the Jewish population is shut up in a ghetto at sunset while priests patrol the waterways. It is explained that because Jews are forbidden to own property, they resort to usury. And before we hear a word of Shakespeare, we see Irons’s unprovoked Antonio spit into the beard of Pacino’s passing Shylock. It’s clear that we’re meant to understand the polarized, prejudicial pot in which Shylock’s grievances simmer into the grotesque revenge that leads him to insist, as Antonio is bound to a mediæval-looking chair in the climactic courtroom scene, on his pound of flesh (but not, surprising for Pacino, his pound of flash). Indeed, the film presents Antonio as a noble but arrogant man and Bassanio as a weak one (and there is a definite homo-erotic charge to their tender friendship) but treats Shylock as tragic hero, twisted and flawed but pushed to ruthlessness. "The villainy you teach me I will execute," he famously concludes the "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech (plaintively rather than bombastically essayed by Pacino) before learning from fellow tribesman Tubal that his irretrievable burglar daughter has been spending his money like canal water in Genoa and appears to have traded the treasured turquoise his late wife had given him for a monkey. In Radford’s design, this scene, whisperingly played on the Rialto with a couple of whores looking on, is crucial to the hardening of Shylock. It’s also crucial to Radford’s twist on the play; at the end of the movie, shortly before we see the broken and forcibly Christianized Shylock barred from the ghetto, a melancholy Jessica wanders toward the shore at Belmont, the supposedly squandered jewel still on her finger. In other words, the leaped-to conclusion that sealed the anguished usurer’s intractable bitterness wasn’t even true. There are, however, few such interesting surprises in the film, which is for the most part straightforward, reasonably well-acted (Collins’s Portia is all arranged loveliness with little intellectual force, the "quality of mercy" speech a recitation), lushly turned out by designer Bruno Rubeo and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, and a little dreary. After their escape by night, with lover and chums masquerading as revelers, Radford ignores the romance of Jessica and Lorenzo (here a cipher) and curtails (wisely) the arcane comedy involving simple servant Launcelot Gobbo (The Office’s Mackenzie Crook). Portia’s pre-Bassanio suitors are overblown but not funny. So though the film spins back and forth between gritty Venice and romantic Belmont, the mood doesn’t change much. The focus remains the tragedy of Pacino’s Shylock as shadowed by the melancholy passion of Irons’s Antonio. Despite some cadences more suggestive of Eastern European Jewry than of Shakespeare, Pacino turns in a strong performance, moving from almost playful tolerance of abuse to a calm, very deliberate hard-heartedness that, thwarted in the courtroom, leaves him crushed and retching. Irons, too, makes the poignant most of his self-sacrificing character, whose singular, exquisitely lonely focus is Bassanio (a stubbly but suitably soulful Fiennes). The courtroom scene, complete with knife sharpening and crowd-control problems, is gripping, with Irons being trussed up and prepared for the full Mel Gibson treatment. This, however, does little for the play as potent metaphor rather than melodrama. A lavish, intelligent, star-powered film treatment of Shakespeare is always a thing — as Hamlet would say — "devoutly to be wished." But Radford’s Merchant of Venice is more respectable than powerful.
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