25 Years of Distorting Shakespeare: Baz Luhrmann's Directorial Infidelity in "Romeo + Juliet"
It’s been 25 years since the release of Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-style?Romeo + Juliet, the highest grossing Shakespeare film ever. This is Part 2 in a series on the movie’s many distortions of the text—distortions that haven’t gotten nearly the attention they deserve.
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Argument
In Luhrmann’s film, the lovers take their lives in a big, beautiful, candlelit church. Where do they actually kill themselves, according to the text? In a dark, underground, corpse and worm-filled burial chamber.
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In Part 1, we saw how?Luhrmann transformed the wedding venue, making it far more attractive than it is in Shakespeare’s text. How he took a space that was barren and made it beautiful, a space that was cramped and made it capacious, and more than a little.
Here, I want to look at the director’s transformation of a still more important setting, that of the lovers’ suicides.?
In commentary, this is often called the “tomb scene,” since it takes place at the Capulet family tomb.?
What does Luhrmann do? I’ll tell you upfront.?
Gets rid of the tomb part.
The Film
Do you recall how the wedding scene began? With a vertical panoramic, with a long-angle, ceiling-to-floor shot of the inside of the church.
The death scene begins the exact same way.?
In the exact same place.
Romeo, having survived his shoot-out with the cops, opens the inner doors of the church. Looks up. And what does he see? The main body of the church in all its awe-inspiring immensity.
It was well-lit before. And it’s well-lit again. This time with hundreds of candles.
It’s spectacular. It’s beautiful. And that’s not just my word for it. As Luhrmann’s own screenplay reads,?
As the door opens, it reveals an image of unexpected beauty. The velvety black cavern of the church is glowing warm with hundreds of lit candles (133).
A place that’s “velvety,” that’s “glowing,” that’s “warm.” An image of—“beauty.”