The New Yorker, November 25, 1996 P. 65
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about Shakespeare on film. From the very beginning, stars and directors have tried to convince the masses that Shakespeare is ready for immediate consumption. In "Reinventing Shakespeare," Gary Taylor says, "in 1908 American studios alone produced ten Shakespeare films." Hollywood may break that record yet. This past year has seen a new "Richard III" and a flabby "Othello"; last month saw Trevor Nunn's disastrous "Twelfth Night," Al Pacino's provocative "Looking for Richard," and "Romeo and Juliet." Still to come are Adrian Noble's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Kenneth Branagh's four-hour "Hamlet." Why this sudden gush of interest? The most depressing answer, overheard in line outside a movie theater: "Shakespeare is this season's Jane Austen." Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" strains to prove that Shakespeare consists of more than John Gielgud filling up the aisle with noises, but the actors end up twice as stylized, and a tenth as intelligible, as the loftiest Gielgud performance. Moviemakers revere Shakespeare, but don't trust him; men like Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles know from long experience that Shakespeare is far stronger than anything they can inflict on him; Olivier took liberties with his "Richard III." In converting the plays to movies, some of the archaism drops away; the aside can really be spoken out of earshot. Soliloquys can be voice-overs. Movies return you sharply and unerringly to the text. Olivier's "Hamlet" presses you hard against the swords and stones of Hamlet's world. It is film noir. Pacino's "Looking for Richard" is split between excerpts from "Richard III" and a documentary about the problems in getting people to watch Shakespeare al all. Lane loathes Zeffirelli's "Taming of the Shrew," which exploited the real-life courtship of Elizabeth taylor and Richard Burton.. However, he admires Marlon Brando's performance in "Julius Caesar." Orson Welles's messy "Othello" delves more cleanly and swiftly into the essence of its original than any other Shakespeare movie. You can't tell what is or isn't Shakespeare. It is as if the story were driven by a spell, or a premonition -- "Othello" as a midsummer night's bad dream. Films of Shakespeare's comedies are less common and less successful. The attempts at farce in "Twelfth Night" and Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing" are unwatchable. Max Reinhardt's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was sent over the edge by Mickey Rooney's overacting. As a tragedy, the new "Romeo and Juliet" is nothing. Its one dab of brilliance is having Romeo write his monologues, your basic horny teenager prettifying his thoughts on paper. This suits the play's (and author's) youthfulness. In fact, Shakespeare movies frequently turn to the earliest works. Maybe directors warm to the green unsubtlety of the period, as to the big-name heroics of the major tragedies. Welles's "Chimes at Midnight" is a stew of several plays which conjures up a sense that the Complete Works of Shakespeare constitute one vast poem. Lane's pet idea is a film of "Troilus and Cressida." It is love story, epic and comedy, swerving back and forth between long, tortuous talk and sudden violence. No other writer has been so thoroughly filtered through other eyes; he comes out differently each time, although it is we who are transformed as he passes through. Movies cannot put Shakespeare on a pedestal or a stage, but they are sometimes plucky enough to put him on hold; they plunge him into the dark, and a few of them haul something rich and strange back into the light.