Everything seems to unfold in a clumsy swirl of motion, sometimes even slow-motion: Juliet (Steinfeld) gets a particularly silly first scene, tilting her beaming, beatific face toward the viewer in a shot whose shampoo-commercial aesthetics are mercifully not a recurring thing. The camera darts to keep up with the characters as they race through the gardens and hallways of fair Verona (handsomely rendered by production designer Tonino Zera and lensed in widescreen by d.p. Yet those qualities are little in evidence in a picture that staggers under the weight of its 18 producers and exec producers, all but ensuring a tepid outcome.įrom the opening frames, there’s a clear sense of action muscling poetry to the side, as a gravelly voiceover introducing “two houses, both alike in dignity” is lost amid the noisy hoofbeats of a jousting tournament pitting the Capulets against the Montagues. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with a straightforward, traditional attempt to revive one of the Bard’s most enduring works for a fresh generation of moviegoers unfamiliar with the earlier versions, or even with “West Side Story.” In the absence of a novel or imaginative take on the material, a skillful director can invest a well-worn text - or in this case, a slightly dumbed-down abridgment of a well-worn text - with vividness, spontaneity and emotional authenticity. Nor, for that matter, are they likely to captivate teenage audiences as Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes did in Baz Luhrmann’s boldly contemporary 1996 update, whose passion and stylistic chutzpah can’t help but inspire renewed appreciation by comparison. Still, while Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth have their virtues as the star-cross’d lovers of the tale, they don’t come close to achieving the incandescence of Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in the emotionally, dramatically and above all musically superior Zeffirelli version.
11 Stateside through Relativity Media, this first high-profile Hollywood stab at the material in nearly two decades could court an appreciative global audience on the basis of its solid international cast.
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