William Shakespeare reviews Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet — and has notes. Gunfights, invisible orchestras, and a DiCaprio who broods just well enough.

The Coffee Chat

THE CINE SAGE: (sliding a lavender latte across the table with the confidence of someone who has done this a thousand times) Ah, and here he is. The man who made the English language flinch, then beg for more. William Shakespeare — playwright, poet, putative inventor of the word “bedroom,” and the single most assigned author in the history of reluctant teenagers worldwide. Welcome to the coffee chat, Will. I have been waiting for this one with indecent enthusiasm.

SHAKESPEARE: (regarding the latte with the measured suspicion of a man who has survived the plague twice) Thou hast given me flowers steeped in hot water and called it refreshment. I have known apothecaries with more ambition. Still — (takes a sip, does not hate it) — ’tis not without… a strange grace.

THE CINE SAGE: High praise from the Bard. Now — before we begin — I must tell you what film we are discussing today. A little 1996 production. Baz Luhrmann. You may recognize the source material rather intimately. It is called Romeo + Juliet.

SHAKESPEARE: (going very still) …My Romeo. My Juliet. Given to a Luhrmann. (a beat) I have questions. I have many questions. I have, in fact, more questions than the Globe had groundlings on a Thursday.

THE CINE SAGE: Oh, there are guns, Will. And Hawaiian shirts.

SHAKESPEARE: (standing half out of his chair) I was promised royalties in gold.

THE CINE SAGE: (serenely) You were promised nothing. Sit down. (to the reader, with a gracious sweep of the hand) Ladies and gentlemen — the curtain rises. Mr. Shakespeare has the floor.

William Shakespeare Narrates Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Marry, what’s this? My star-cross’d youths reborn in fair Hollywood — a DiCaprio to woo, a Danes to swoon? If they speak my verse and keep the kisses chaste enough for mine own quill, I’ll not protest. But if Romeo broods like Hamlet and Juliet outshines the sun with gunfire — then verily, I shall demand royalties… in gold, not gratitude.

And so we begin.

Verona Beach. A city of gasoline and grievance, where the Montagues and Capulets have traded rapiers for pistols — the barrels of which, I note with some satisfaction, are still branded with names. Sword, reads one. Dagger, reads another. Luhrmann, thou devious flatterer — thou hast kept my metaphors and merely changed the metal. I approve of this. A grudge dressed in chrome is still a grudge. Human nature, as I observed from the pit of the Globe to the boardrooms of the Elizabethan wool trade my own father navigated in Stratford-upon-Avon, has not the wit to change its essential costume.

Romeo enters. Young, beautiful, melancholy to the point of personal inconvenience. He loves Rosaline, which is to say he loves the idea of loving, which is to say he loves himself in the agreeable mirror of another’s face. I wrote this deliberately, that the audience might recognize their own calf-love reflected back at them and laugh — and also weep — for one often follows the other in the same breath. DiCaprio understands this. He sulks with a poet’s self-awareness. I find him almost forgivable.

Then the party. The Capulet feast. And here I must pause to address something that has vexed me throughout this entire picture — who is playing the music?

At every moment of consequence, great swelling sound arises from no visible source. When Romeo first spies Juliet through the glass of an aquarium — an aquarium, mind thee, which I did not write but which I confess is visually not without its merits — a vast invisible orchestra erupts as though summoned by Providence itself. I looked to the left of the frame. I looked to the right. No lutes. No consort of viols. Not a single musician. In my theatre, you could always see the musicians. They sat above the stage in the heavens gallery and they were real men who expected to be paid. This sourceless music unsettles me. It feels like God has taken up conducting, and nobody has thought to ask His fee.

But I digress. Juliet. She is luminous, because she is always lit as though the sun itself has arranged a private appointment with her face. I note, not without professional admiration, that even in the night scenes — scenes of darkness, of secrecy, of a world in which, in my own era, one could barely see one’s hand before one’s face without a farthing candle — Juliet’s cheekbones catch perfect light. In truth, darkness in this picture is merely a rumour. It is darkness as a feeling, not a fact. When I wrote the balcony scene, I imagined genuine night: cold, uncertain, alive with danger. Luhrmann has given us night as atmosphere — which is theatrical, yes, but let us call it what it is. It is theatre pretending to be truth while being prettier than either.

The love, however — that, I will defend. They meet. They speak. And in a span of time so compressed as to make a mayfly feel long-lived, they have married, consummated, mourned, and perished. I once wrote that the course of true love never did run smooth — a remark I stand behind absolutely — but even I did not intend it to run quite so fast. In my own day, to send a letter from Verona to Mantua required a rider, a road, and the goodwill of weather. Here, information travels in the time it takes to blink, yet the fatal letter still, magnificently, fails to arrive. Fate is punctual. The post is not. Some things, I observe, transcend the centuries.

Now — Mercutio. Played here with such mercurial, glorious chaos that I feel, not for the first time, that I may have accidentally written my best character into a story that could not contain him. His death is the hinge upon which this entire machine turns, and the film knows it. The film mourns him, as well it should. I wrote Mercutio to die because, had I let him live, he would have stolen every scene that followed and Romeo would have been relegated to a supporting role in his own tragedy. This is not conjecture. I knew it at the writing. Some characters arrive on the page already too alive for the story’s own good.

And so to the ending. Which I wrote, and which Luhrmann has kept, and for which I have been criticized by sentimentalists for four centuries now. They want the lovers to live. They always want the lovers to live. But here is what a conventional critic will miss and what I will say plainly: the tragedy is not that Romeo and Juliet die. The tragedy is that the adults — the feuding fathers, the well-meaning Friar, the hapless nurse — survive to stand in the rubble of their own making, blinking stupidly at the cost of their pettiness. The children pay for the sins of those who should have known better. That is not a love story. That is a political statement. It was in 1597. It remains one now.

The camera, throughout, watches everything — private chambers, confessions whispered in sacristies, the last breath in a sealed tomb. I have thought about this invisible witness at length. In my theatre, there was no such problem: the audience was visible, present, noisy, and occasionally throwing things. Here, the witness is everywhere and nowhere, a ghost with perfect sight. It would have struck my contemporaries as witchcraft. It strikes me as something older than witchcraft: the human desire to see what we are not supposed to see. I wrote to that desire every working day of my life. Luhrmann merely found a more efficient instrument for it.

I will say this for the picture: it takes my words — which were always meant to be spoken, always meant to land in a warm body in a wooden house with sawdust on the floor — and it finds in them something that four hundred years have not managed to exhaust. That a love so brief and so catastrophic can still fill a room with silence and the smell of popcorn is, if you will permit me a moment of unguarded sentiment, not nothing.

It is, in fact, rather something.

The Goodbye

THE CINE SAGE: Will — I owe you an apology. I told you there would be guns and Hawaiian shirts, and I failed to mention that Baz Luhrmann also put your words in the mouths of people riding horses on beaches and dueling at a gas station called Phoenix. I see now that you would have wanted more warning. Consider this my formal regret, delivered with warmth and insufficient guilt.

What strikes me most, having just watched William Shakespeare watch himself — which is a sentence I will never tire of writing — is that he spent four hundred years being taught and still managed to be surprised by what he found. The man invented words for feelings humans had never named, and he still could not have predicted that teenagers in 1996 would be undone by his verse set to a Garbage soundtrack.

And that, I think, is the point. We keep returning to these two dead children because we are still, stubbornly and embarrassingly, the feuding parents standing in the rubble. Shakespeare saw that. Shakespeare wrote that. Luhrmann just gave it a neon sign.

The Cine Sage’s Verdict: When the man who invented the word “bedroom” watches his star-cross’d lovers reborn in gunpowder and hairspray, the only surprise is how little he needs to revise his original notes on human foolishness.

Next up on the Illuminous Narrators couch: someone equally convinced they understood human nature completely, equally wrong in the most fascinating possible ways. Don’t you dare miss it.