The rabid flamboyance of Luhrmann’s vision, remarkably accented by Kym Barrett’s costumes and Catherine Martin’s production design, is meant to make Romeo and Juliet accessible to the elusive Gen X audience without leaving the play bowdlerized and broken.
If your head isn’t spinning yet, it will. Their gang favors shorts and Hawaiian shirts, though Romeo’s best bud, Mercutio (Harold Perrineau, from Smoke), is a black cross-dresser whose murder by Tybalt sparks Romeo to take lethal vengeance. Romeo’s clan is led by Dad (Brian Dennehy) and Mom (Christina Pickles) Montague. The excellent John Leguizamo is Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, a volatile Latino who’s in a gang that likes to dude up and then accessorize with pearl-handle guns and silver boot heels. Juliet’s bawdy nurse is played by the British actress Miriam Margolyes with a broad Hispanic accent (she calls her mistress Wholiette). Her mother, Gloria (Diane Venora), is a Southern belle out to marry off her daughter to Paris (Paul Rudd, from Clueless), a wealthy square who comes dressed as an astronaut to a costume ball. Juliet’s papa Capulet is robustly played by Paul Sorvino as a John Gotti-like godfather.
Shot in Mexico in a style that might be called retrofuturistic, since it encompasses castles and armor, as well as bulletproof vests and boomboxes, the film reworks Shakespeare in a frenzy of jump cuts that makes most rock videos look like MTV on Midol. Welcome to mythical Verona Beach, where the gangs fire on each other, and soldiers in choppers fire on them. No dialogue, just gunshots, as two gang families - the Montagues and the Capulets (each has its name in lights on the roof of a high-rise) - go to war. It’s a good thing that Shakespeare gets his name in the title, or you might mistake the opening scenes for Quentin Tarantino’s Romeo and Juliet. These babes from the TV woods - he started in Growing Pains she emerged in My So–Called Life - fill their classic roles with vital passion, speak the Elizabethan verse with unforced grace, find the spirited comedy of the play without losing its tragic fervor and keep their balance when the audacious Australian director Baz Luhrmann ( Strictly Ballroom) hurls them into a whirlwind of hardball action, rowdy humor and rapturous romance. The laughter comes from delight and awe at how well DiCaprio and Danes pull off the trick. You almost laugh watching them put a hip, hotblooded spin on the Bard’s star-crossed lovers. Leonardo Dicaprio is 21, Claire Danes is 17, and, yes, class, they do get naked in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
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