It’s a small point, but one of the more bizarre oddities – among many – in this hopeless musical variation on Shakespeare’s most kissy play is the stubborn visibility of the actors’ breath, even when indoors. The original work is set in balmy Verona towards the end of July. Could someone not have bunged an auld Superser into the shooting space? Jason Isaacs, Rupert Everett and (god bless him) Derek Jacobi deserve better.
Anyway, one needs something to divert oneself when sitting through two hours of dreary sub-boyband ballads sung in unending transatlantic warble. What we have here, courtesy of the brothers Timothy Scott Bogart and Evan Kidd Bogart, is the alleged opening third of a trilogy based around “the real-life [sic] 1301 story that inspired Shakespeare’s greatest tale”.
Trilogy? No reader of The Irish Times will need to be told that the title characters died at the end of Shakey’s version. Are they really going to spend 122 minutes on the first act and a half? Will parts two and three work as prequels? For fear of spoilers, we’ll deliver the answer parenthetically at the end of the review.
To be fair, the Bogarts – sons of Neil Bogart, late founder of renowned disco label Casablanca Records – are not without ambition. Juliet & Romeo makes some attempt to address Verona’s complex relations with Rome in the early 14th century. There is an admirable aside about the pressures then put on the Jewish communities.
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Otherwise the story, delivered in flat modern vernacular, sticks reasonably closely to the familiar text. The Danish actor Clara Rugaard is rather good as Juliet. The Australian Jamie Ward doesn’t fall over as Romeo. They become entangled despite being from warring families. They flirt on balconies. “What’s a name, really?” one actually says.
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The thing is unremittingly dull and bland (not to mention cold, apparently). If it is good for anything it is good for providing deserved paid holidays to venerable older actors and their long johns. Jacobi is a wonder. Not only, at 86, is he leaping around like a young thing, but, in the role of Friar Lawrence, he manages to make the dialogue sound like something other than spiritless pabulum. Whatever they paid him it was not nearly half enough.
(Parenthetical spoiler: the lovers don’t die at the end any longer. The friar had a plan all along.)
In cinemas from Friday, June 11th
