Full spoilers for Romeo + Juliet. In fact, full spoilers for the story of Romeo and Juliet in general right here and now. They’re both stupid and they both die. What, you’re upset? You’ve had 430 years to read the damn thing or watch any of the versions. I’m disappointed in you.

Romeo + Juliet(1996) stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, John Leguizamo, Harold Perrineau, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino, Brian Dennehy, Paul Rudd, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Miriam Margolyes, Jesse Bradford, M. Emmet Walsh, Zak Orth, and Jamie Kennedy. It was directed by Baz Luhrmann, and written by Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann, and based allegedly on the works of William Shakespeare. I say allegedly to ingratiate to those who assume he was so prolific he must be fictional.

This is an interesting endeavor for me, as I’ve only seen one other Baz Luhrmann movie, which was Elvis. It came out two years ago. I believe I talked about it in my end of year blog post, and I talk about it often with my friend Zach. I despise that movie. I understand he’s a director that makes everything extra insane and chaotic, I don’t think it worked for that movie, nor do I like Elvis as a human being or believe he deserves any kind of celebration. I’m still haunted by the frighteningly disgusting ways Elvis’s mother talks to him in that movie. I’m also not the world’s biggest fan of Romeo and Juliet as a story, I think it gets told way too much in a variety of uninteresting ways. For instance, when I was a child I saw a particularly bizarre version of Romeo and Juliet in Space done at Theater in the Round. Though I do enjoy the sort of not-adaptation that came out in 2022, Rosaline. But if I were to watch a movie interpretation of a Shakespeare story, it definitely wouldn’t be any version of Romeo and Juliet, I would turn as I often have to the teen rom com remixes of Shakespeare like the wonderful 10 Things I Hate About You and the not as good but still fun She’s The Man, or the surprisingly fairly solid and recent quasi-revival of the genre, Anyone But You. I also don’t know how I feel about 90’s gangster Americana being mixed with old-fashioned prose. I’ve somehow never seen this, beyond a few scenes in 9th grade English class. So I guess we’re all learning more about me today through this movie. Let’s dive in!

• Okay, I’m not even a minute in, but I feel like I’ll be on board with this. The music is super melodramatic and setting up all the players. The intro feels like an early 2000’s trailer for a bad John Woo movie.
• “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” Jamie Kennedy’s character is so profoundly unlikable, primarily because he has Jamie Kennedy’s face, and body language, and acting ability. I couldn’t tell if he died or not, but boy do I hope he did. Stop doing that, Jamie Kennedy of Son of the Mask.
• Okay, maybe I love this. I find it interesting that these are gunfights but they still call the guns swords. That’s cool. A few sidenotes. I’m already partial to this movie because the chief of police is played by Vondie Curtis-Hall, who played Ben Urich in Daredevil. Also, I’m definitely inclined to like the Capulets over the Montagues since the Montagues are a bunch of annoying rubber faced goons with open Hawaiian shirts and the Capulets are led in their gunfights by the charismatic and attractive Tybalt, played by the great John Leguizamo with metal heels and sexy outfits.
• I realize now a hard hurdle in this for me to overcome will be sympathizing with the moping Romeo. Sure, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio at his youngest and most attractive, but I can’t see any woman, even Claire Danes, picking Leo over Paul Rudd. Obviously this column brings with it a certain bias, but still. At least Leo wears nice suits and chastises his stupid cousins.
• In this universe, Time magazine is Timely magazine. Cute. And Dave Paris is Timely magazine’s bachelor of the year. Indeed.
• I forgot that Juliet’s father does not initially hasten Juliet to marry, that’s nice. There’s also a wonderful jump cut from Fulgencio Capulet and Dave Paris having a meeting in Capulet’s office to the two of them in a sauna together. This is a very funny movie, already.
• I think Miriam Margolyes is playing a Spanish nurse? An interesting choice, I suppose. I like Miriam Margolyes. I don’t think she’s Spanish. We read through the play in ninth grade like a table read and I played the Nurse. I enjoyed that role, a lot. I wish they’d cast me in this movie but I wasn’t alive yet. Alas.
• I see why we didn’t watch the full version in high school, the school district in my conservative neighborhood definitely wouldn’t have let us watch a cross-dressing Mercutio force Leo to go to a party by giving him drugs. And it’s a pity, really, it would have cracked 15 year old John’s brain in half. And quite possibly made him a more interesting person. I also like that before Romeo has his revelation and sees Juliet through a fish tank, he walks by a man pissing into a urinal wearing a full pirate costume.
• I know she just had a meet cute with 90’s Leonardo DiCaprio at the fish tank by the urinals and it was super dreamy but HOW COULD YOU BE SO RELUCTANT TO DANCE WITH PAUL RUDD IN A SPACE SUIT?! He’s a very good dancer, this Dave Paris, I can’t fathom why Romeo and Juliet keep looking at each other like he’s a dork. Also Juliet’s mom and dad, their marriage is clearly a farce. He threw this party to consort with other women, and her mom is only pushing her daughter to marry Dave because she’s so infatuated with him herself that she doesn’t notice her daughter making out in an elevator, twice.
• “Is she a Capulet?” Romeo, you idiot.
• I’m not 100% certain what message Shakespeare is trying to convey. Is he trying to say that bitter annoying old parents and prior generations constantly ruin the lives of their children by not letting go of past offenses and this is how mental health problems are passed down and lives are ruined when children aren’t allowed to live their lives for themselves? Nah, can’t be, if it were true surely generational trauma would have gone extinct centuries ago. Must be something else.
• Luhrmann uses the editing and the score to accentuate how melodramatic and stupid the fight scenes should seem when idiots try to kill one another yet allows the film to convince you that you should be rooting for these two idiotic children who fall in love and promise to marry after meeting once and nearly having sex in a pool. Yes, they have charisma together, but there are plenty of movies that make me believe in true love as a concept, so I don’t think it’s just my inherent cynicism that won’t let me buy it.
• The soundtrack for this movie is insane, I did not expect a group of children to sing “When Doves Cry”. Or “Lovefool” by The Cardigans to play over a shot of Miriam Margolyes’s backside.
• I don’t remember Mercutio being killed at a dilapidated theater in the sand and then causing a storm by putting half a plague on his best friend’s house. This is definitely the most exciting way to watch this story, but again my appreciation for Baz Luhrmann is hampered by the source material. I don’t care about the story of Elvis but can see when the interesting elements aren’t included. This one is harder, because of course I’m going to have to see lots of Romeo and Juliet, the story isn’t called Tybalt + Mercutio + Paris + All the other side characters that are more interesting to watch.
• Oh, and now Tybalt’s dead and there’s still 50 minutes left. What a bummer.
• I wonder if Romeo listened to his banishment and left Verona if he would just walk out into a real, regular world where people don’t talk like this or act like weirdos.
• Pete Postlethwaite is a great actor, isn’t he? Or was, rather, apparently he died in 2011. Bummer. He’s very good in this though.
• As inclined as I am to love Dave Paris, he’s not done much besides pine after a woman who clearly has no interest in him and smile hornily. Again, what I can’t comprehend is that she didn’t want him even before she met Romeo. Poor Dave.
• I forgot that Juliet’s Dad changes his mind and insists Juliet marry Paris and becomes an angry jerk in his grief for his cousin. What a bad father he is. The mom too. Isn’t she like 16 years old?
• We are getting some good Paul Rudd scenes toward the end, though Paris is still a little crummy, if unawa- AH, CLAIRE DANES IS HOLDING A GUN TO HER HEAD!
• I just realized Leo was 21 when he made this, that’s not depressing at all. I’m 21 and I look more like Juliet’s dad in my overweight and hairy disposition. Hell, I look more like Leonardo DiCaprio now. I already go to the gym to lose weight fairly regularly, but I’d have to go 24/7 if I wanted to look like Leonardo DiCaprio.
• I absolutely love that Leo’s just hiding outside of town in a dusty trailer park. And that he leads himself to his own death purely because he drives away just as the courier comes to his dusty trailer. And who better to give Leo life-ending poison than the late, great, M. Emmett Walsh?
• It feels like putting Juliet’s corpse at the center of all those candles is a massive fire hazard, unless this is the world’s most rudimentary crematorium.
• It is consistent with Romeo’s profound lack of intelligence that he wouldn’t notice the corpse he’s kissing is twitching of her own volition and opening her eyes, yet equally infuriating.
• I mean, I don’t know, it’s just Romeo and Juliet, isn’t it? It’s a story people refuse to stop telling, no matter how annoying it is to hear it be retold with gnomes or Tom Holland or Ansel Elgort (That’s what West Side Story is, yes?) and I’d rather different, less infuriatingly simple stories get retold. It’s like watching the first Shrek. I’ve seen it once, why would I ever want to watch it again? I get the point. And isn’t that also somehow a Romeo and Juliet story in its own way? Anyway, in this version Juliet shoots herself and manages to only leave a tiny droplet of blood on her skull rather than actually looking like someone who shot themselves point blank, and isn’t that something?
  

Overall Rating: 7/10(See now I just feel irritated with Baz for a completely different reason. He left most of his craziness at the door and for the most part past the drug trip at the party opted to tell the story straight. Where were the weird casino wheel turning into greedy eye transitions that you wasted on Elvis’s story, huh, Baz? I don’t know. It’s not inoffensive, but I think I need to watch Moulin Rouge! or Strictly Ballroom to garner a more cohesive opinion on his work rather than watch him adapt the stories of real and fictional people I actively dislike or am disinterested in.)
Rudd Rating: 7.5/10(He’s not in it nearly enough, so that’s a minus for me, but I have to appreciate his way with Shakespeare’s words. I get why he’s not Romeo, but I’d have liked to see his take. This was that era where he was being pitched as the sort of James Marsden type, the pretty guy who ends up ultimately being dumped for the leading man.)

I hope you enjoyed the trip to Fair Verona. Next time, we fall down the rabbit hole of obscure Paul performances and investigate some of his other theatrical exploits!