This year I celebrated Byron's birthday (1/22) by going to see William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio), and Lynn Collins as Portia. I was really looking forward to seeing this film. Unfortunately, I cannot say it is an unqualified success.
First the good stuff: Michael Radford, the director, did a good job of keeping this a Shakespeare play — i.e., he did not "reinterpret" it to reflect modern sensibilities. This is probably as good a treatment of The Bard as you are ever likely to see on film from a visual and atmospheric perspective. Much of the film was shot in Venice, but despite the locale the camera is kept almost exclusively in tight shots that give the feeling of a proscenium, so that there is always the feeling of characters closed in by their circumstances. This was a technical choice by the director that I didn't even appreciate until I sat down to write this. It works. I did most certainly feel transported to the Venice of the late 1500s, and to the dark and seamy aspects of human nature. Also, the choice of music as background and interlude between acts is a divine blend of lutes and flutes that is a feast for the ears, and contributes to the sense of an authentic Shakespearean experience.
On the other hand, Shakespeare was first, last and always a poet. Even in his plays, his use of poetic meter serves to advance the dramatic tension, and absent competency by the actors with the language, the climax is lost. It is here that this film breaks down, and ultimately I think, fails. None of the actors, with the notable exception of Jeremy Irons, is up to the complicated language of the play, and the director's intent seems to be to have his actors speak s-l-o-w-l-y to overcome the deficit. Both Shylock's "I am a Jew" soliloquy and Portia's "The quality of mercy" soliloquy (maybe the most beautiful speech in the English language) are badly mangled in terms of beats, rhyme and emphasis, so that they are hardly recognizable. In the case of the Shylock speech, Pacino delivers it so poorly that any chance of understanding the character's motives, never mind any larger social commentary within it, are lost. The result is that all the dramatic energy gushes out, like air from a balloon, and the film never really recovers.
This brings me to the crux of my complaint about this film: Al Pacino is badly miscast as Shylock. I know that seems almost impossible to say, he is such a revered actor. I looked forward to this movie because I believed Pacino would be the perfect choice for Shylock, but I was stunned by what a bad job he did in this role. The truth is, he was completely out of his depth in this milieu. He looked the part, and he brought his usual intensity to the role, but he simply could not handle the language. Sadly, when I mention his usual intensity, I mean by that that Shylock's soliloquy seemed delivered more by Michael Corleone than by a Venetian Jew of 1596. And he uses this irritating faux-yiddish accent, on and off, that made me cringe! Apparently, the director lacked the stones to direct him, or enough command of the project to realize his big-name actor was a mistake.
Equally so, Portia's rendering of "The quality of mercy" is, in Shakespeare's original, the prelude to defeating Shylock in his attempt to use the law to obtain not justice but revenge. Lynn Collins, previously unknown to me, looks exactly as you would imagine Portia, a Renaissance beauty of almost ethereal quality. But her delivery of the entire courtroom scene, and especially her soliloquy, is botched. She hits the beats wrong, in an effort, I believe, to avoid falling into the natural cadences of the poetic meter. Thus, the climax to the whole play loses its intensity, and we don't really feel the tragedy of Shylock's ruin as we should.
As I mentioned earlier, everyone seemed to operate under the assumption that speaking the lines slowly was sufficient to convey their meaning, so the director must be faulted for this. (I would think that given how much this film must've cost to make, especially with Pacino's salary, it would've been worth it to hire a real, English, Royal Academy dialogue coach!) It's really a shame, because there is much about the feeling of this movie that is true to Shakespeare's intent. But without command of his poetry, no camera work or sound track can overcome that central, essential failing.
My friend who saw the movie with me was not nearly as offended by the mangled language as I was, and enjoyed the film without qualification. I admit that my prejudice here is a longstanding, dearly held one — my dad used to read me Shakespeare as bedtime stories, and I was a drama/film major for two years before I finished my degree in creative writing. To me, since we all live in an age when English grammar is hardly known, for anyone to get anything from the plays of the man who was master of the written word when English was at its pinnacle, the effort must be grounded in the language.
However, given all of my critical comments above, I still urge you to see this movie and judge for yourselves. I always believe that movies like this should be seen because it encourages more to be made, perhaps better ones. I made the same recommendation last year about Troy, and that flick wasn't as true to Homer as this film is to Shakespeare. So depending upon your appetite for Shakespearean drama, The Merchant of Venice will edify or frustrate you, but please do see it. As always, I welcome your response to my review when you have.
Copyright © 1/27/05, Erin Iris Earth-child