Is this a Glock I see before me?

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2002)

It seems so odd and yet so natural that so many people would return to "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and comment mightily in its favor only after seeing Baz Luhrmann's more recent masterpiece "Moulin Rouge." When I first saw this film as a teenager in 1996, having been raised on more "refined" versions of Shakespeare's plays, I remember being outraged at how Hollywood was raping the words of the immortal Bard, taking them out of context in order to make a buck. However, viewing this film under the lens of "Moulin Rouge," it all makes sense to me now.
Baz Luhrmann, like Shakespeare, is a man of the theater, very bombastic, intense, and infused with showmanship. The reviewers who panned "R + J" for its lack of period costume seem to forget that Shakespeare himself wasn't exactly a stickler for historical accuracy. Shakespeare's plays bridged the gap between the historical periods they purported to represent and the Elizabethan mores of his day. You will notice that while the plays are set in places like ancient Rome and medieval Scotland, the actors in Shakespeare's day didn't wear kilts or togas--they are wearing Renaissance-era jerkins and tights. Luhrmann recognizes this, and sets his "fair city of Verona" in a world both modern, ancient and fantastical, where street gangs with ultramodern convertibles wield ornately decorated guns (named "Sword" and "Rapier" to fit with the 17th-century lyrics) against a backdrop of towering skycrapers and Gothic cathedrals, where TV newscasters compete with numerous images of Mexican-Catholic iconography, and where knights and angels fall in love in a spectacular Victorian mansion complete with tap-dancing butlers and a cross-dressing Mercutio diva. The story itself is told as intensely as the intense love between the star-crossed duo, through a bright mix of radical cinematography, using a mix of rapid cuts, pans, wipes, fades, blurs, and hallucinogenic imagery in a kaleidoscopic style reminiscent of music videos. The film is also punctuated through a self-conscious choice of color. Each scene has its own color scheme: scenes between the lovers are shot in a faded pastel color scheme reminiscent of colorized 19th century photographs, the gang battles are displayed in a violent mix of yellows and reds, the death scene... oh, sorry...

*** SPOILER ***
yes, Romeo and Juliet both die, as if you didn't know
*** END SPOILER ***
fades from glorious color to a cinema-noir black and white. This panoply of architecture, costume design, and film style serve to highlight the timelessness and timeliness of the Shakespearean drama, bringing it down from the pedestal of elite literature and lavishing it onto the "penny-farthings," the ordinary folk, where it belongs. Baz Luhrmann brings theatrical art to a movie industry lost in its own sense of commercialism and self-importance, and to a genre (Shakespearean film) that often seems to be "more matter with less art".
In retrospect, it's obvious from the vivid display of the extremes of human emotion and the dramatic conflict between the Elizabethan dialogue and the modern setting that this movie knows that it is a movie, a self-conscious entertainment pop-culture product, rather than displaying the events with a false sense of truthfulness and subliminal emotional manipulation. This one fact makes "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" a lot more honest than most "realistic" movies today.