Any critique of this play should be rendered with the awareness of what it was intended to do. True interpretation has given way to a stylized artist's rendition that is highly effective in its deliberate purpose of widening Shakespeare’s audience to include young people. As Pete Travers writes for Rolling Stone Magazine, it is “meant to make Romeo and Juliet accessible to the elusive Gen X audience”. To do this Baz Luhrmann paints a picture of artistically stylized urban sprawl. He creates characters more suited to today’s society than in Shakespeare’s time; a police chief named “Prince” who calls his orders to desist from a hovering helicopter, teenage villains and heroes with guns “named” sword, and Capulet and Montague parents who run high profile Corporations. Underscore that picture with a soundtrack pulsing with music popular with today’s youth. A thoroughly dramatic set of images that persist throughout the film.
The fictional city of “Verona Beach” is highly stylized w
ith no specific time setting or location other than certainly NOT Elizabethan Italy. Mick LaSalle wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle “The world of ‘Verona Beach’ is conveyed entirely in sardonic terms”. I disagree with this opinion. I found this setting quite apt in conveying a startling dramatic backdrop with castles and religious icons paired with modern day images like helicopters and limousines providing a mood of sensationalized news introduced in the opening credits. The opening sequence with the credits being played out as a series of stylized news clips sets the mood as a tabloid news program so popular with that targeted younger audience. The squealing tires, flashy cars, “sword” fights and the gas station scene with Tybalt dropping a lit cigar into a pool of spilling gasoline are familiar modern action film images. They effectively convey a gang war type edge that a younger generation can understand more readily than historically feuding families. The ball, with its lavish costum
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