Zeffirelli Film

[Meri Thilmony]

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I think I'm a bit younger than Keith. I watched both this and Polanski's "Macbeth" in high school, and thought both were great, though my mind is a little blown at the knowledge that the generic old British dude at the start is not someone I would then have recognized as The Greatest Actor Of All Time.

I do remember being shown an exceptionally campy program about the Roman empire in high school Latin class. Oh, and a life-skills class in the last year of high school, meant to prepare us for what college would really be like, showed us "Higher Learning"---that was certainly a choice.

Released 55 years ago, Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s Romeo and Juliet became a zeitgeist-capturing hit. Later generations almost invariably first encountered it in English class, where it would become a supplemental staple to units covering Romeo and Juliet, the first Shakespeare play most people encounter as high school students. That\u2019s where I first watched it and, having not revisited it since, I decided to watch it again after receiving the new Criterion Blu-ray, which the company released on Valentine\u2019s Day. What follows are some thoughts on the film.

1. Has anyone ever had a good experience watching a movie in a classroom? Often they\u2019re crutches for lazy teachers. I remember a history teacher who showed us the entirety of the 3+ hour 1988 miniseries Gore Vidal\u2019s Lincoln (starring Sam Waterston and Mary Tyler Moore as Abe and Mary Todd, respectively). The class was right after lunch. I think I was awake for about 20 minutes. But even when they were appropriate, as with Romeo and Juliet, in my day it was usually a case of 25 students squinting, if they\u2019re paying attention at all, to watch a 20-inch screen. Televisions have gotten better and VHS has been supplanted, but I can\u2019t imagine the experience has been improved that much. I feel like there\u2019s a whole class of movies that have left muddled first impressions because of this. Maybe it\u2019s time to rewatch To Kill a Mockingbird, too.

2. That said, while I recall liking the film, I certainly misremembered it. Maybe it\u2019s because Baz Luhrmann\u2019s 1996 adaptation, stylized as Romeo + Juliet, is so stylistically audacious that any other take kind of looks staid by comparison, but my memory was of Zeffirelli\u2019s being the safe, traditional take on Shakespeare. And in some respects it is. Zeffirelli stages his Romeo and Juliet in Verona, Italy (though he shot the exteriors in other Italian cities), the setting of the play, and the film\u2019s costumes and set design are contemporaneous with Shakespeare.* The bold interpretive choices can be found elsewhere.

One of the boldest arrives early. An uncredited Laurence Olivier delivers the words of the chorus in a weary voiceover and the action immediately makes pungent the irony of the opening line referencing \u201CTwo households, both alike in dignity.\u201D The representatives of said houses behave like delinquent toughs, filling Verona\u2019s streets with violence in the name of some \u201Cancient grudge\u201D never revealed (and perhaps unknown even to those shedding blood in its name). One generation\u2019s conflict will exact a toll on the next.

\u201CIn contrast to Shakespeare\u2019s evenhanded apportioning of blame,\u201D Shakespearan scholar Ramona Wray writes in the essay accompanying the disc, \u201CZeffirelli\u2019s interpretation places the guilt solely on the shoulders of the adults.\u201D That sense pervades the film, in part thanks to Zeffirelli\u2019s decision to hire young actors \u2014 in the case of its leads, very young actors \u2014 in the parts of youthful characters. Romeo and Juliet\u2019s parents are distant, disconnected, and distracted. The film emphasizes the foolishness of Juliet\u2019s nurse (beautifully played by Pat Heywood), whose romantic notion pushes Juliet into a relationship with tragic consequences she should have foreseen. Friar Lawrence (Milo O\u2019Shea) lauds a cooler sort of love he ought to know the hotblooded Romeo can\u2019t heed. \u201CThese violent delights have violent ends.\u201D He\u2019s right about that. But when the violent ends arrive, he flees the scene.

3. Those choices go a long way toward explaining why Romeo and Juliet became a generational touchstone. The young heroes don\u2019t have much in common with, say, The Graduate\u2019s Benjamin Braddock ,but they\u2019re similarly depicted as kids looking for happiness in a world that\u2019s closed off one option after another before they\u2019ve had a chance to choose. Juliet\u2019s parents are trying to marry her off at 14, the same age her mother was married off before her. (There might be a whole Graduate-like story to be told with Lady Capulet (Esmeralda Ruspol) in the Mrs. Robinson role, particularly since Zeffirelli suggests she\u2019s having a quasi-incestuous affair with Tybalt (Michael York), a suggestion Luhrmann would later run with.)

The other choice that undoubtedly resonated with younger viewers was the casting of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey\u2014who were seventeen and sixteen, respectively, when they made the film\u2014in the leads. Neither had much experience and Zeffirelli would later say he cast them for looks first, believing he could mold the performances later. The casting of age-appropriate leads was a big selling point for the film and one that didn\u2019t go over well in all quarters. (John Russell Taylor in the London Times: \u201COf course we all know what the trouble is with Romeo and Juliet in any production. It is half covered by the old crack about no actress being ready to play Juliet until she is too old for the role.\u201D)

Whiting and Hussey\u2019s guileless performances are much of the reason the movie works. These are inexperienced characters finding their way through overwhelming emotions for the first time. The lack of experience is a plus here. It turns the film into a mirror for those in the grips of the same feelings and unsure what to do about it. (Plus, in a foreshadowing of soundtrack synergy to come, Henry Mancini scored a chart-topping hit with his rendition of Nino Rota\u2019s love theme.)

4. It\u2019s a mirror for those who\u2019ve aged out of teen passions, too. Zeffirelli lays the blame at the feet of the older generation but, in any form, Romeo and Juliet remains a work that plays differently at different ages. Zeffirelli cuts short Friar Laurence\u2019s role and turns him into a coward in the process, but his speech on loving moderately, however antithetical to a teenager\u2019s interpretation of what love means, still rings true. But I also think those words resonate on a frequency that you can\u2019t hear at Romeo and Juliet\u2019s age.

5. About the nudity (which I think my freshman English teacher fast-forwarded past): Romeo and Juliet has been in the news lately because of a lawsuit brought by Whiting and Hussey alleging they were taken advantage of by Zeffirelli. I won\u2019t venture an opinion on that. (It\u2019s at least worth reading San Francisco Chronicle\u2019s Mick LaSalle on the curious details of the suit.) But the charge that, in the suit\u2019s words, the film is \u201Cessentially pornography\u201D doesn\u2019t ring true. It also feels appropriate to this version of Romeo and Juliet, accentuating the youth of these characters who\u2019ve made some very adult choices. (That said, Zeffirelli was a problematic character and more than one actor he worked with has alleged sexually inappropriate behavior.)

6. The central duel is appropriately brutal. I don\u2019t know to what degree Zeffirelli was influenced by West Side Story but the depiction of the Capulet\u2019s and Montague\u2019s followers as glorified street gangs is of a piece with that musical, particularly in the long, upsetting sequence in which Mercutio (John McEnery) dies at Tybalt\u2019s hands and Romeo slays Tybalt. The play hinges on the moment, which tips the love story of the first half toward the tragedy of the second. Zeffirelli lets the violence escalate slowly. A duel that begins with two opponents trying to humiliate, but not really hurt, each other just keeps intensifying until it reaches the point of no return. It\u2019s scary, and skillfully played by York and McEnery. Again: Violent delights. Violent ends.

7. Is this romantic? Again, this might be an effect of watching the film at my age rather than as a teenager, but the sadness of the film overwhelmed the romance for me on this viewing. Even the masked ball where Juliet and Romeo first meet has an air of menace to it. Like a less sexually explicit version of Eyes Wide Shut\u2019s orgy scene, it depicts a hero drawn by erotic curiosity to a place where he should not be. (Tom Cruise gets off easy by comparison.) And, in some ways, the most poignant moment isn\u2019t between Romeo and Juliet but between Romeo and Tybalt, whose corpse lies next to Juliet\u2019s presumed-dead body. In the text, Romeo addresses a few lines to the body of the man he\u2019s killed, saying \u201CO, what more favor can I do to thee / Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain / To sunder his that was thine enemy?\u201D On the page it can be read as an aside. Zeffirelli draws the moment out as Romeo interrupts his reverie with his beloved and mourns the loss of a boy his own age. He may have taken Tybalt\u2019s life, but in the moment he recognizes them as shared victims of circumstance brought to ruin by a world aligned against them and their youthful passions. He comes early to the conclusion Verona\u2019s Prince will reach in the film\u2019s final scene: All are punished.

* And Zeffirelli even took it on the chin for that choice in some corners. In The Guardian, critic Richard Roud complained about the choice to shoot on location in Italian cities, writing, \u201CYou simply cannot mix your conventions: Realistic filmmaking demands realistic dialogue.\u201D

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