It grows on you

Rating: 9/10 (19 April 2007)

I'll admit that I avoided seeing this movie in the theater because it was modernized. When the movie appeared on the premium movie channels, I watched the first 10 minutes and switched channels, turned off by the guns and the "too modern" aspects of the film.
Then, the next time I saw it on the movie channels, I'd watch a little bit more. Pretty soon I had watched the whole thing, and I came to appreciate it the ways the director had attempted to stay true to Shakespeare while making it more accessible to today's generation.
Leonardo seems like an okay choice, although he brings a wimp factor to Romeo's character. Then again, wasn't Romeo kind of a whipped puppy? Although I appreciate the adherence to the original language, sometimes having Romeo speak it with little or no emotion (or what seemed like the way a high school actor would read the lines) lessened the efficacy of the scene. Claire Danes is quite gifted, in my opinion, and I think she played the part well. When she pulls a gun on Friar Laurence and screams, "Be not long to speak -- I long to die!", we can feel her anguish. Sometimes she, like Leonardo, would read her lines with little or no emotion, and it cheapened the scene. THen again, this may have been the inevitable of effect of trying to read Shakespeare's lines in a n "everyday" situation. There's no crying, no anger, no anything ... therefore, how would you read the lines? Mercutio was brilliantly cast, for this actor seems to reveal the outlandish nature of the Mercutio's character.
I like the small details that the director put in there to refer to the original script or to show the division between the two families. The two buildings named after the families, the difference in dress and appearance, and the billboards around town -- the film is full of subtle (and not-so-subtle) allusions. I loved how they named the guns as to stay true to the original text.
The director heightened the death scene by having Juliet wake up and touch Romeo's cheek just after he downed the poison, rather than waking up seconds after he died. Same scene, just a minor time difference here.
The only thing I greatly disliked about the movie was how the party was turned into drug-fueled chaos. Was that necessary? Couldn't there have been a huge party without Juliet's mom sucking face with every available male, and Romeo acting loopy from whatever pill Mercutio had given him earlier? I show this movie to my high school students to provide a modernized view of the play. I can say that my students seem to "get" this version. The 1968 version? Not so much.