Director: Carlo Carlei.
Starring: Hailee Steinfeld, Douglas Booth, Ed Westwick, Christian Cooke, Paul Giamatti, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tom Wisdom, Natascha McElhone, Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard.
Running Time: 118 minutes.
Certificate: PG.
Synopsis: Romeo (Douglas Booth) and Juliet (Hailee Steinfeld) secretly wed despite the sworn contempt their families hold for each another. A chain of fateful events soon change the lives of both families forever.
“To see the original in its absolutely unchanged form, you require a kind of Shakespearian scholarship and you need to understand the language and analyse it and so on,” claimed screenwriter Julian Fellowes in defence of his rewrite of the Bard’s most famous tragedy. “I can do that,” he continued, “because I had a very expensive education, I went to Cambridge.” The message is this: the poor proles not blessed with Fellowes’ formidable understanding can only struggle through confusion and bafflement when watching proper Shakespeare, so the kind man has changed the language, adapted the metre and simplified the plot so that the state school types and those who only went to humbler Universities might have a chance at enjoying it. What a generous thing to do, Jules. Dave from Grimsby, Little Timmy at his local primary school and all of Durham University can now begin to grasp the magnificence of your writing, and maybe enjoy some Shakespeare in the process.
It may seem unfair to pick on something the writer said before addressing the film he was discussing, but this attitude (once again, thanks old chap, couldn’t have understood the story without you) pretty much summarises everything that is wrong with this new adaptation of Romeo and Juliet; namely, don’t dumb down Shakespeare. In order for people to understand the often dense and intricate writing of Britain’s greatest playwright, you don’t need to change the language or rewrite the more problematic sentences, you simply need to perform it well.
To suggest that Julian Fellowes – the writer of the trite, bafflingly popular soap Downton Abbey – has a better chance of making Romeo and Juliet appeal to a larger audience than Shakespeare shows no faith in your source material. If you strip away the language but maintain the plot, you are left with a largely nonsensical story where people fall in love, get married and commit suicide within the space of a week; the appeal of this most famous tragedy is not in the events of the narrative but in the way the language expresses this story. If you get actors and a director who grasp the complexity and nuance in the Bard’s writing and can convey that in their performances, then you have something that maintains the chief appeal of the play – namely, the language – but that can still be accessed by wide audiences.
As it is, Fellowes’ version, directed with all the subtlety of a brick to the face by Carlo Carlei, tramps over Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter in favour of some garish, obvious, almost metre-less prose that captures the essential plot beats of the story but none of the passion or wit. It’s very easy to get agitated about altering the original text, and such an argument can come across as snobby purism, but the problem is that the dumbing down extends to the score, editing and direction to the extent that the play is, at times, reduced to a series of soulful gazes set to an overenthusiastic orchestra. Slo-mo is gratuitously abused, as is soft lighting and 90s era CGI. All of this ‘re-imagining’ is then performed by a cast who wouldn’t be out of place in an am-dram production at your local town hall.
It’s a bad, bad sign when a film leaves you longing for the nuance of Baz Luhrmann.
ROMEO AND JULIET was released in UK cinemas on Friday 11th October.
