Virtual Grub Street: A Review of Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet (2013).

While the YouTube video has been taken down, the review, of course, still applies.

Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet (2013) is throughout a fine piece of film making. The movie was shot on location in medieval sections and villas of various Italian towns, and Rome, arrayed with a minimum of historical inaccuracies.

The acting of all the characters is superb. Douglas Booth manages to be every girl’s dream, as Romeo, and every guy's favorite friend at the same time. Hailee Steinfeld reminds us powerfully that Shakespeare’s Juliet was a mere woman-child by modern standards, not a woman. Damian Lewis is the epitome of a stern Lord Capulet and Lesley Manville of a dedicated nurse naïve in matters of love.

The film has wisely done Shakespeare the honor of liberally adapting the original play to a modern audience — predominantly a young audience. The first two scenes are not in the original at all. The first is inspired by a line from the brief prologue. A colorful square in Verona is the scene of a medieval Quintana — a competition in horsemanship — and brings the excitement level immediately to modern pitch.

It must be admitted that the square is a palace courtyard rather than the piazza of the city. Quintana’s were fought within the city between family factions of the city before pretty much the entire populace. Armor was not worn as the rule and certainly not the heavy older style of armor here. The pageantry, on the other hand, was perfect in spirit. To the target audience — fans of The Tudors television series — it would seem expansive.

The second scene shows us a girlish, laughing Juliet in a fine gown (her day-wear) running up a spiral staircase, her nurse trailing behind, calling out “slow down!” Her appearance waits until later in the original but Carlei has moved that scene further back still and must introduce his main character somehow. Equally to the point, the interior of the villa with the staircase is itself arresting. It is the first sign that The Tudors will be seriously outdone. This is going to be a gorgeous large format movie.

A few scenes are rearranged in order to give the plot better flow for a modern audience. Details are tweaked and lines excised to maintain the frenzied emotional level the modern audience requires. Historical references that don’t need to be in the play tend to be removed or replaced with visual props.

When Friar Lawrence sends his message to Romeo, the delivery doesn’t fail because the city guard won’t allow the messenger to depart the city due to the plague. In 2013, audiences did not yet understand the structure of plagues and quarantines sufficiently to comprehend the reference without considerable foundation earlier in the movie. A chief logistical demand on the film makers was not to lengthen the play but to shorten it as close as possible to the hour and a half most popular to those audiences.

What is especially amusing in this instance, however, is that the writers seem to have come dangerously close to plagiarizing an episode of the exceptional old Cadfael television series. The letter is given to a novice who helps Friar Lawrence (Brother Cadfael?) in his office as herbalist. The novice is stopped along his journey to deliver it by a desperate peasant father whose daughter will die without medicine that he knows how to make. The medicine slowly simmers. The girl is saved. The letter does not get delivered. The novice is torn knowing he has done God’s work at the price of failing to do the duty Lawrence impressed upon him was vitally important. The writers of Cadfael would presumably be flattered to be thought worthy of insertion into Shakespeare’s great play.

The fifth act receives the greatest makeover of all. Benvolio, who in Shakespeare, is no longer an active character, replaces Romeo’s servant Balthazar. Surely because a servant appearing out of nowhere — with no backstory — would be confusing. Especially as the logistics of master-servant relationships are foreign to a modern audience to begin with.

The storyline remains the same. But Romeo and Juliet share a last living kiss as she wakes just after he has taken the poison. This because all of the young women in the audience will cry their eyes out and report how great the movie was to their friends. Surely, box-office was doubled by this moment alone, as well as Kleenex stock experiencing a massive up-move.

Of course, Shakespeare greatly rewrote his play over more than a decade until it became the play we know now. The purists of his time might well have been aghast. Or they might have if those days were anything like these — and they weren’t.

I actually believe that he would have been delighted to escape the amber-imprisonment of most period productions and to be brilliantly adapted. This much or in this way I cannot say. What I can say, is that this became my favorite film version of the play from the moment the final credits rolled.