Baz Luhrmann made an interesting choice when he transported the classic story of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to a modern setting yet kept the original language. I'm glad he stuck to the old script - reading the play has made me appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare's words so much more. I wasn't sure that it would work with a modern setting when I was first told about the movie, but walking away from it I realized that the themes of this story are still present and will always exist, and it turned out I had barely any trouble interpreting and understanding the story at all, regardless of the old-fashioned language. So was it necessary for Luhrmann to change put the story in a current setting? If I had seen this in its original state, time period and costumes intact, would I have understood it as well?
Baz Luhrmann's directing style is very distinct - you could watch two of his movies, Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, and immediately be able to identify the intense visual aspects that they have in common: fast, choppy cutting, overly-saturated colors, an overall energetic and dizzying way of presenting a story. Even without watching his film interpretation of R+J, by just reading the play you can see the importance of images, settings, and personalities and the way they add a subtle, deeper meaning to the story. Baz does something very smart by utilizing these powerful bits of the story and amplifying them by making them much more obvious to the viewer and putting a modern twist on them.
R+J is not only a play, it's a work of art - in the literal sense, too. It's not enough to just read about it, but you have to see the play to experience the subtle imagery of the two houses, the warlike allusions they sprinkle throughout the story, and just the all-powerful image of the two authoritative, violent, passionate houses. The entire story is based upon image: the beauty of Juliet, the grandeur of the lives they live, and the general basis of teenage love in this story, which "lies not in their hearts, but in their eyes". This story was written for the stage; it was written for people to look at and experience. Shakespeare's other plays seem to include this intense imagery as well: the powerful image of the African king Othello, the ghost of Hamlet's father and Ophelia's fateful beauty, the fanciful and imaginative characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's all visuals.
It's pretty clear why BL wanted to put this story in present time - to make it more appealing to the masses and give a classic story a new twist. But it's the images he uses that really set this movie apart from other film interpretations. The close-ups of the Montague's cowboy boots in the very first fight scene, the "Wherefore L'Amour" sign that he shows in several scenes, the costumes that R and J wear at the party (Juliet as an angel, Romeo as a knight. Could you make it any more obvious, Baz?) He takes Shakespeare's images and uses them to create a passionate, romantic film while still sticking to not only the script, but the way that Shakespeare writes. In his little behind-the-scenes sheet, he even says "Martin and costume designer Kym Barrett drew on all sorts of imagery, giving completely different looks to the Capulets and the Montagues. The Capulets became Hispanic, adorned with very Catholic cultural icons. For the Montagues they wanted something far more Anglo; hence the "GI Joe" imagery" of the Hawaiian shirts. With such distinctly different wardrobes the two opposing gangs become easy to understand and follow". Isn't this exactly what I was talking about?
Now, I'm not going to pretend that I know much about Shakespeare. I'm not a drama student, but I'm an art student, which gives me an eye for visual details in film like color or camera angles. And Baz Luhrmann's film gave me a whole new idea and perspective on this play - that just as much as clever and beautiful writing, the story contains subtle images that make it especially intense, and BL uses those images to create a movie that is truly a work of art which both gives credit to Shakespeare's gorgeous words and includes smart, thoughtful, and modern images that symbolize thought-provoking deeper meanings throughout the story.
