https://www.jstor.org/stable/23414522?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Arlen Lee
EN 102
Dr. Helms
27 Feb 2019
Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet
Most people start reading the ever so famous play written by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in or around their middle school age and all the way through high school and even college. The original playwright is hard for these students to read and interpret due to its old English language and ancient Verona setting. This holds true until a director by the name of Baz Luhrmann released his hit film, Romeo + Juliet. Luhrmann’s version of Shakespeare’s original play entices the youth and makes it a far more relatable story to a modern audience as well as much easier to understand specifically for a youthful audience.
Luhrmann did a brilliant thing with his film. He used it to attempt to really showcase and adapt Shakespeare’s rambunctious storytelling through his richly invented language. The film itself maintains many of the original lines and language used in the original story of Romeo and Juliet however the way it is filmed and the story is played out makes it much easier for an audience to understand compared to the original playwright. By doing this Luhrmann manages to help the audience be able to appreciate Shakespeare’s language and the roots of the story while also having a greater appreciation for the story that the original play is telling.
In order to make this film more relatable to a modern audience and a bit more entertaining Luhrmann set it in a much more modern setting. The movie takes place in Verona Beach, California. Ironically, the city that Romeo and Juliet was set in in the original story was Verona, Italy. Instead of using two feuding families that each have children who fall in love with each other to tell the story of two “star-crossed lovers”, the film uses two feuding gangs to represent the tension and conflict that gives the story so much of its drama (Jennifer Martin). Today’s day in age there isn’t really such a thing as two families that have an ancient and deep-rooted feud between them, so by using gangs to represent this the film makes the conflict much more applicable and enticing to its audience.
Along with these two elements that Romeo + Juliet uses to adapt to the play it also uses two young actors to help tell the story. The most important one is who Luhrmann chooses to play Romeo, the young Leonardo DiCaprio. In using DiCaprio, he is able to show the true sense of young love that is ever-present yet harder to find in the text of Shakespeare’s version. Also, having this young male actor play Romeo helped the film in showing how he is the main trailblazer and the most emotional one in the two young lovers romance as he “bears the brunt of feeling” (Lindsey Scott p. 61). In doing this the film appeals to the young male audience that is watching and allows them to relate to Romeo’s head-over-heels attitude towards Juliet as many of them are most likely going through the same type of feelings with relationships in their lives.
One of the most in your face differences between these two pieces of literature is the use of guns and other modern weaponry in the fighting versus the original shields and swords. Portraying the use of guns in the film seems to “glamourize” it as all of the characters weaponry is decorated with precious metals and custom work which in turn also showcases the two families, or gangs, financial status in the story. In addition, using guns and knives the movie gives off a much more violent tone which therefore adds drama to the film. In a sense it intensifies the drama between the two gangs and also provides a more direct tie to the death of Romeo and Juliet that is foreshadowed throughout the play. This also makes the feud seem slightly more serious in the film compared to the almost humorous feeling of the feud in the play. Luhrmann uses this certainty of death specifically at the end of the film when it is abruptly over directly following Romeo’s death compared to Shakespeare where after his death there is a scene involving the two feuding families where some answers on if their love ended the feud or not are answered.
Many movie reviewers have criticized Baz Lurhmann’s film Romeo + Juliet for its modern and overdramatized plot, however many give it where credit is due for his use of Shakespeare’s language and other elements of his original story. The way that he incorporated these things into the film to stay true to the play’s roots while still making the film his own and making it very unique in its own right shows Luhrmann’s brilliance as a film director. I believe fi Shakespeare was alive today he would be able to appreciate Luhrmann’s work and maybe even be honored by it. I for one certainly appreciate this film’s work in helping me, as well as students across the nation who study Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the fact that it helps us to gain a better understanding for what is going on in the play that our grades depend on.
Works Cited
Martin, Jennifer L. “Tights vs. Tattoos: Filmic Interpretations of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” The
English Journal, vol. 92, no. 1, 2002, pp. 41–46. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/821945.
Scott, Lindsey. “‘Closed in a Dead Man’s Tomb’: Juliet, Space, and the Body in Franco
Zeffirelli’s and Baz Luhrmann’s Films of Romeo and Juliet.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 137–146. EBSCOhost, libdata.lib.ua.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=2008441357&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Peter Brook, et al. “Shakespeare in the Cinema: A Film Directors’ Symposium with Peter Brook,
Sir Peter Hall, Richard Loncraine, Baz Luhrmann, Oliver Parker, Roman Polanski and Franco Zeffirelli.” Cinéaste, vol. 24, no. 1, 1998, p. 48. EBSCOhost, libdata.lib.ua.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.41689108&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Menzer, Paul. Anecdotal Shakespeare : A New Performance History. The Arden Shakespeare,
2015. EBSCOhost, libdata.lib.ua.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1004946&site=eds-live&scope=site.
EN 102 ePortfolio 