visually captivating...........but

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2006)

I can't help but love this film. Maybe because i'm a huge luhrmann fan, i love hes red curtain movies and the distinctive and lavish cinematography of them.
The only negative aspect to me in this adaption of the worlds most famous love story was the casting of claire danes and leo DiCaprio. They were good but not brilliant. Shakespeare is about the language and there's no point in portraying a Shakespeare play if you do not deliver the dialoge properly. Claire tended to rush the lines and not let her mouth open up to get it around the words. It sometimes felt like she fully didn't understand the text of what she was saying. I can really see that should would have needed strong direction as some of her gestures, they way she moved and spoke seemed forced. Physically she looked every inch like a juliet with her curious eyes and young features.
Leo i think did a better job than danes in the fact that he had a lot of passion but with his characterization, his actions spoke louder than words. The scene where we are introduced to romeo with his voice over made me cringe and because this was the first time in the film we were hearing him speak Shakespeare, it left me in a lot of doubt having to hear him in the rest of the film, not a good start. However the scene where he watches juliet dance with Paris made up for it. In some scenes he over acted in other's not enough. I personally think the love scenes should have been A lot more intense, it was to tender. Romeo and juliet is not suppose to be all prettied-up but brutal and powerful both in violence and romance.
I can now sit back and look past those glitches and take in the film because i don't think baz would have been able to find 2 other actors to portray those roles any better than leo and claire. If anything other young actors would have probably given the same performance.Leo and claire do NOT make me dislike the film in the slightest though. I was driven to near tears during the beautiful fish tank scene it was like a fantasy, the whole Capulet ball sequence was like a fantasy. The way they suddenly jumped up and began searching each other with there eyes made you really believe that it was love at first site. That has got to be one of the most stunning pieces on film. Of course the death scene. I liked they they twisted it a bit so that instead of juliet waking to find romeo dead she watches him and looks into his eyes alive for the last time before reuniting in death. For those teenagers that were saying 'why didn't she say something to stop him from killing himself' it's this simple..............you can't re-write history. We all know how it ends but it still manages to keep you on the edge of your seat while watching it unfold.
I could go on and on about the film in a lot of ways but at the end of the day, it's entertaining and beautiful and tragic, and thats what romeo and juliet, the story is about. Baz has not let anyone down, he has not killed the play, he ha re-invented it for today's generation.