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msn.com - Nov. 5, 1996
Leonardo and Juliet
Hollywood's sultriest young actor,
In the old days, when the studios ran
Hollywood, a young actor with the unwieldy name
Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn't have gotten very far
without renaming himself Lee or Lance. Now, of
course, actors run Hollywood, and Leonardo remains
Leonardo. He is the feline young man who occupies
the covers of magazines without having ever had a
certified commercial hit. William Shakespeare's
Romeo & Juliet, his new movie with Claire Danes
and the Australian director Baz Luhrmann, goes
some way toward fulfilling the hopes and hype
invested in him. At first glance, the movie itself is the
more arresting phenomenon; it may be the most
visually imaginative Shakespeare film since Akira
Kurosawa's Ran, and certainly one of the more
operatic Hollywood creations of recent years. But it's
DiCaprio who supplies the intensity needed to thread
Luhrmann's images together. He can't be said to
have matured as an actor, but he is swiftly
advancing.
In his early 20s, DiCaprio is a strange, wiry presence, tall
but very skinny, sometimes looking
much younger than his age, sometimes
like a starving older self. He seems
nervous, unsettled, fragile, but also
ruthless. In the industry parlance, he is
"not commercially proven," which means
that he has specialized in small
independent films: What's Eating
Gilbert Grape, This Boy's Life, The
Basketball Diaries, Total Eclipse. His
career really began when River Phoenix
died of an overdose; those last two
roles, as Jim Carroll's teen-age junkie and as Arthur Rimbaud,
were ones Phoenix intended to take. As it happens, both
movies were thoroughly awful, with DiCaprio running amok in
exhibitions of self-conscious bratty behavior. He doesn't have
any of Phoenix's eerie, shifty calm; instead, his talent is for
expressive fidgeting.
Until this Romeo, DiCaprio hadn't actually amounted to
much. His work could be praised as refreshingly
offbeat, although, in all honesty, American independent film
is currently drowning in the offbeat. The aimless agonies of
the young are no longer refreshing. River Phoenix, who had
as much natural talent for acting as anyone, spent too much
of his short life pursuing offbeat roles. It's worth noting that
his drug-fueled decline was the result of an unduly earnest
Method-style immersion in the offbeat lives of junkie
hustlers, required as research for My Own Private Idaho.
The news that DiCaprio was going to star in his own hip,
youthful version of Shakespeare added to a sense of déjà
vu. For My Own Private Idaho was, among other things, a
grotesque attempt at a grunge translation of Henry IV, Part
1.
But Romeo is a different proposition. All the dialogue is
taken directly from Shakespeare; the actors speak their lines
with a quasi-Elizabethan staginess, mixing in contemporary
urban accents only for passing effect. The elegant and
imperturbable Claire Danes goes through the whole film with
a mildly Anglicized, theatrically poised delivery--"Wherefore
art thou Romeo?" rising and falling, making clear she's
asking "why" rather than "where," all by the book. This is a
"modern dress" production in the same sense that Peter
Sellers produces modern-dress Mozart or Wagner: the text
is the same, the setting is different. (Baz Luhrmann has in
fact directed opera, most recently Benjamin Britten's A
Midsummer Night's Dream at the Edinburgh Festival.)
DiCaprio doesn't try to lose his flat Los Angeles accent, and
some of his dialogue comes out like iambic gibberish. But
his dire enthusiasm keeps you engaged even when he fails to
make sense.
To say that the setting is different is to understate the case
severely. The play has been moved to a nonexistent place
called Verona Beach, Fla.: It resembles Miami at times, Los
Angeles at others, even though the filming took place in
Mexico City. Much of the wonder of this movie comes from
the landscapes Luhrmann creates with his camera: a smoggy,
glowing city at night; sun-blasted beaches strewn with
wreckage; a vast ruined arch by the ocean, with a fantastically
touched-up thunderstorm looming overhead. The feud
between the Montagues and the Capulets has become
something like a gang war, which means a certain debt is
owed to West Side Story; but their interior decor is far too
opulent and phantasmagoric to suggest any plausible parallel in
gang culture. These criminal families are still medieval,
feudalistic at heart: Paul Sorvino, playing Capulet, carries
himself like a freebasing Medici.
It seems at first that the movie is going to pursue a gaudy,
irreverent approach to Shakespeare. The prologue is spoken
by a well-groomed anchorwoman on the Verona Beach 11
o'clock news; the opening skirmish of Montagues and
Capulets takes place as a gun battle in a gas station, filmed in
insanely rapid Tarantino style; Mercutio appears at the
Capulet ball in RuPaul-like drag, presiding over a
hallucinogenic rave party. Luhrmann seems to encourage
Harold Perrineau's Mercutio, John Leguizamo's Tybalt, and
DiCaprio himself to swagger about as sexily as possible, in a
way that reviewers will no doubt describe as "campy" or
"homoerotic" (though it's nothing more than men swaggering
sexily). Throughout, Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig
Pearce find jokey modern analogues for events in the play:
For instance, when Friar Lawrence's letters explaining the fake
suicide of Juliet tragically fail to reach Romeo, it's because an
overnight delivery operation called Post Haste finds him "not
at home" in his desert hideaway.
One of this begins to convey the lurid bustle on the surface of
this film: Luhrmann has created a completely distinctive
movie world. But he wisely slows the pace when the lovers begin
their major scenes together. Danes has abbreviated monologues
in which to establish her character, but she easily communicates a
particular kind of knowing sweetness, reflective passion, and
other shadings between innocence and experience. DiCaprio
begins as a pretentious, moping fop, as the play demands; is
boyishly playful on meeting Juliet; and becomes progressively
more antic as circumstances block his path. He finds the right
moments to unleash the high-pitched fury that seems so frightening
coming from such a thin form. The movie's potentially jarring
switch from high jinks to tragedy comes off only through the
pressure of his performance. The two young actors are not
always perfectly comfortable together, but they deliver their own
slackerish semblance of grand passion. They could hardly go
wrong with Luhrmann's unashamedly melodramatic, split-second
staging of Romeo's suicide. Danes has a brief but great moment
of agony before blowing herself away with Romeo's silver gun.
The picture has talent to burn. Luhrmann has a visionary
touch you may not have expected on the basis of his debut film,
Strictly Ballroom. Donald McAlpine's cinematography and
Catherine Martin's production design generate continually dizzying
images. Leguizamo and Sorvino are giddily over the top in their
supporting roles, along with Pete Postlethwaite as a hip-priest
Friar Lawrence. Nellee Hooper's score allows some delicate,
Mascagni-like intermezzos in and among the pounding dance
music and alternative-rock anthems. The movie has a huge sense
of style; the performances are all over the top, but consistently,
ardently so. If I've singled out DiCaprio, it's because the film
seems more or less an extravagantly well-appointed vehicle for
him. His Romeo is something more than the familiar sad victim of
fate, something more like the furious cipher of Hamlet. But for
God's sake, keep him away from Kenneth Branagh.
Thanks a lot to Gabi ! *
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