To hip contemporary audiences to Shakespeare, directors and adapters have tried any number of tricks and stratagems, most often recasting his plays in a modern setting. When the gambit works—as in Ian McKellen’s recent version of Richard III or in David Alford’s mass-media staging of Julius Caesar at Centennial Park—the canny updating uses the text to illuminate the time, and vice versa. When it doesn’t, the directorial cleverness obscures the play, and the production becomes a self-serving stunt.

The latter, sadly, is true of the new film version of Romeo and Juliet. It aims for a grandiose, operatic vision like nothing in recent movies, and for sheer cinematic audacity it deserves to be seen. What it achieves, however, is the most garish, outlandish collision of high and low culture imaginable. Picture a fusion of Peter Sellars’ Don Giovanni and a Robert Rodriguez production of Tommy—this Romeo and Juliet uses more neon and twice the bullets. The movie isn’t a desecration of the play, like Peter Greenaway’s literal paper-shredding of The Tempest a few years back. But it leaves Shakespeare’s language awash in bizarre affectations, no longer moored to time, place, or recognizable human behavior.

In this new Romeo + Juliet—that stodgy old conjunction is the first thing to go—16th-century Verona transforms into 20th-century Verona Beach, a grimy, sun-beaten metropolis made up of equal parts Miami and Mexico City. The feuding houses of Montague and Capulet have become enormous warring industrial concerns; their volatile kinsmen and underlings are now rival gangs outfitted with customized firepower. Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) pops pills and packs a pistol; Juliet (Claire Danes) is betrothed to a JFK Jr.-like Paris (Paul Rudd). Their star-cross’d romance is played out against a backdrop of gangsta chic, police crackdowns, tabloid media, and rain-soaked streets.

The dazzling credit sequence typifies the movie’s brazen ingenuity. A stamp-sized TV screen clicks on in the center of the dark frame; a newscaster appears and intones, in perfect CNN cadence, the stage-setting prologue of Shakespeare’s play. The montage that follows is a kinesthetic overture, a scatter-gun barrage of images punctuated by words as graphic elements. La Dolce Vita, Rumble Fish, Mean Streets, Diva, John Woo, Sergio Leone—no cinematic morsel escapes the omnivorous eye of cinematographer Donald M. McAlpine, production designer Catherine Martin, and editor Jill Bilcock. They envision Verona Beach as a candy-colored midnight-movie theme park.

But with Verona Beach now an eye-popping fantasyland, the story actually loses its ties to the real world. At least in West Side Story the locations and distinct ethnic boundaries reminded audiences of real people and problems. Here, Romeo and Juliet no longer appear bound to a world without options: There are cars everywhere, and escape from an arranged marriage isn’t that unlikely. “Why couldn’t they change the story?” wailed the two girls sitting next to me after Juliet put Romeo’s clip-loaded 9mm dagger to her head, and the truth is there’s not any reason—not on these terms. (Curiously, though, the movie omits the final union of the Montagues and Capulets in grief—the play’s sole note of hope.) The modern-day stylization, though ingenious, makes everything seem artificial—and that includes the dialogue, which has been left mostly intact but not unscathed.

The director, Baz Luhrmann, must’ve hoped the visual showboating would make Shakespeare’s exquisite, measured rhetoric seem naturalistic. In a touch that would’ve tickled the prankish Godard of La Chinoise, he lines the streets of Verona Beach with billboards that transform Shakespearean epigrams into advertising slogans. Hey, if we get our language from ad copy, why wouldn’t the citizens of Verona? But the overripe, overactive design backfires: It makes Shakespeare’s verse sound affected and purple, as though the characters and not the actors were playacting onscreen.

In his first film, Strictly Ballroom, Baz Luhrmann got laughs by treating absurd events with melodramatic solemnity: People wept, finagled, schemed, and nearly killed over something as silly as a dance contest. Here, Luhrmann somehow manages the opposite—he makes the tragic events of Shakespeare’s play seem utterly frivolous. It’s one thing to stage the famous balcony scene in a swimming pool; it’s quite another to have Romeo doing slapstick pratfalls with pool furniture. Much worse are the embarrassing scenes with Juliet’s mother, which are shot in speeded-up motion with cartoon sound effects. The movie alternates smirky camp—e.g., a production number at the Capulet manse—with authentic kitsch, such as a church filled with neon crosses. In the space of one movie, Luhrmann’s gone from strictly ballroom to mostly baloney.

Under these circumstances, the actors give predictably uneven performances—not just uneven, but unsubtle. Good actors such as Paul Sorvino (as Capulet) and Miriam Margoyles (as the Nurse) are encouraged to bellow into the camera; John Leguizamo’s Tybalt hisses and sneers like an Hispanic Snidely Whiplash. There’s a germ of promise in making Juliet’s mother a faded Southern belle, but not as played by the normally excellent Diane Venora; instead, she comes off like a flouncy parody of Jessica Lange as Blanche DuBois with a wobbly Rue McClanahan accent. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, a fine actor, poses too much as Romeo and gives excessively nasal line readings.

Claire Danes as Juliet is another matter. In just a couple of isolated moments, this splendid young actress seems merely petulant instead of tragic. But when she delivers Juliet’s response to Romeo’s vow—“O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon/That monthly changes in her circled orb....[I]f thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self/Which is the god of my idolatry”—she embodies Juliet more perfectly than any previous screen incarnation: She’s girlish and yet believably blessed with ageless wisdom and eloquence. Equally fine are Pete Postlethwaite, who gives Father Laurence a striking urgency, and Harold Perrineau as a drag-queen Mercutio.

Technically, the film is astonishing, even when the effects it achieves are colossally wrongheaded. After a year of lifeless, dully competent movies without a spark of creativity, it’s a pleasure to see a filmmaker engaged by the tools of his craft, even if he ultimately falls on his face. Big gambles run the risk of big losses, and too many hacks are willing to fold at the first sign of danger. For taking the risk, Baz Luhrmann deserves our respect and our gratitude.

His Romeo and Juliet, however, shows once again what calamities befall filmmakers who attempt Shakespeare’s plays. Anytime someone talks about making one of his works “relevant” or praises them strictly for the playwright’s storytelling ability, a red flag should go up. The stories remain as involving as ever, but it’s the language—the delight in words, their multiple meanings, and their ability to reveal as well as conceal—that keeps these works alive.

Have ever teenaged lovers given so marvelous and precise a voice to their unspoken yearnings as they do in Romeo and Juliet? That’s the discovery worth making: that the murmurs of Shakespeare’s young lovers have lost neither their luster nor their insight after four centuries. But so much energy is expended here on the production design and the flourishes of directorial ingenuity that the language seems oddly out of place. The ultimate irony is that, in attempting to make Shakespeare relevant to contemporary audiences, the filmmakers have made a Romeo and Juliet to which Shakespeare is ultimately irrelevant.—Jim Ridley

Revolting developments

Perhaps because we’re Americans, movies about revolutions seem to get our blood racing. Acts of terrorism, sadistic violence, lies and betrayals—incidents that sicken us in the daily news—become reasonable, even inspirational, when a clever filmmaker depicts them as blows against an evil empire. It’s not even important that we understand the specifics of the struggle, so long as we know the good guys from the bad guys.

Neil Jordan grasps this concept and uses it mostly to his advantage in Michael Collins. The man who wrote and directed Mona Lisa and The Crying Game—two films that peeled back criminal and political intrigue to find poignant stories beneath the posturing—turns his keen eye to a biography of the man who essentially founded the Irish Republican Army. Through Collins’ story, he attempts to humanize and glamorize an organization that’s often vilified.

Jordan succeeds largely by appealing to the senses. In tracing the history of the I.R.A. from its first flirtations with terrorism through the negotiation of an uneasy truce with Great Britain, he tells a story of epic scope with an epic’s production values. Cinematographer Chris Menges catches light off rainy Irish streets and shadows in the Celtic mist, while Elliot Goldenthal’s anthemic score stirs up feelings of patriotism for a forsaken land. Jordan applies their contributions to his action-oriented script, and in Michael Collins’ most captivating moments, the combination makes for animated, haunting cinema. The film as a whole is slick and exciting, a garrulous revolution-minded entertainment in the spirit of Braveheart—or Star Wars, for that matter.

But Michael Collins often feels as far, far away as those films. For a movie set in the 20th century about a conflict that continues to this day, Michael Collins is surprisingly remote. Jordan’s film concerns the conflict of three men: Collins, a bearish figure with a shrewd tactician’s mind, played by Liam Neeson; Eamon De Valera, the president of the outlaw Irish republic, played with suitably cloudy motivation by Alan Rickman; and Harry Doyle, Collins’ closest friend and De Valera’s closest lackey, played by Aidan Quinn. The interplay of the trio’s ideals and aspirations is fascinating but too limiting—the hopes of the Irish people certainly cannot be so easily divided by three.

This simplification is hardly Michael Collins’ most glaring flaw, though it is the most persistent. A more obvious misstep involves Julia Roberts—not her acting, which is fine, but her character, Kitty Kelly. Jordan at first develops a mildly charming Jules and Jim-ish love triangle between Kitty, Michael, and Harry, which he then deepens into a male ego clash—suggesting that Kitty Kelly is responsible for driving a wedge between Michael and Harry and therefore at least partly responsible for the irreconcilable differences that would lead to Irish civil war. Frankly, that’s too heavy a burden to put on a minor character and too facile an explanation for decades of bloodshed.

But what to put in its place? What other historical forces does Jordan have lined up to explicate Ireland’s grim destiny? Not many, and it is here that Michael Collins is found especially wanting. Save for a few explanatory captions at the beginning and end, Michael Collins is weak on historical context for its scintillating action. The fight becomes more important to Jordan than the cause.

Jordan does a fine job of sketching the escalation of terror between the I.R.A. and the British. Each Irish victory is answered by even bloodier force, until finally the British army crawls into tank armor and depersonalizes the conflict to the extreme. But it’s never quite clear why the British would subsequently seek a truce, particularly since Jordan omits what could’ve been the movie’s centerpiece scene: a meeting between Collins and Churchill.

Michael Collins is full of could’ve-beens, none bigger than what Jordan could have accomplished had he focused more on the human cost of terrorism for both victims and victimizer. The film that sets the standard for dissecting a climate of terror remains Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, a violent picture in which every death has impact because the killers’ alternatives are difficult to imagine. In Michael Collins, Jordan recapitulates the blindly nationalistic themes of Braveheart, but without really updating them or questioning their value.

The real question—the one that Battle of Algiers tackled but that Jordan seems too queasy to answer—is why do these men fight? This fullness of character and scope of vision is missing from Michael Collins. The only character who comes through clearly is Collins himself, because Neeson plays him exuberantly and with commitment; he cuts a profile worthy of the nickname “big fella.” Only Neeson, with his narrow eyes, quick moves, and incisive speech, could ride a bicycle to a bombing and look dashing rather than foolish. He gives Collins dignity, passion, clarity, and the warmth of a flawed man. Without these qualities in the lead, the film would be naught but attractive settings and empty gunplay.

Although he can’t transform this shallow biopic into an insightful work of art, Neeson at least assures that it becomes a good shallow biopic. So does Neil Jordan, who distills the thorny history of his troublesome hero into a briskly paced, pleasing entertainment. But he goes a shade too far in reducing Collins’ story to a tale of good guys versus bad guys. In Michael Collins, Jordan renders a revolution that is too reasoned, too mannered—and too bloodless.—Noel Murray