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Romeo and Juliet is rarely lauded as the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, an honor that usually goes to Hamlet or Macbeth or King Lear. Yet Romeo and Juliet might be the most important Shakespeare: It’s the one almost everybody reads first, the one that entices our young, unformed selves to struggle with its language, initially so strange to modern ears. It’s a story of gang wars fueled by testosterone, love at first sight, and melodramatic, I-can’t-live-without-you double suicide, but it’s also the gateway drug to one of the richest, most resonant bodies of work in the English language. Romeo and Juliet is a crazy-beautiful play, and although there are thousands of ways to adapt it, from staid to gonzo, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet—25 years old this week—is, among film versions, perhaps the most purely alive.
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Because actors ostensibly need training and skill to navigate Shakespeare’s words, most productions of Romeo and Juliet cast performers who are older than the characters as he wrote them: Juliet is 13 (“she hath not seen the change of fourteen years,” according to her father); Romeo’s age is unspecified, but he’s thought to be around 17. Luhrmann wasn’t the first filmmaker to cast age-appropriate actors: In his 1968 adaptation, Franco Zeffirelli cast Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, 17 and 15, as the star-crossed lovers. The film became a staple of junior-high literature classes for years. (If you came of age in that era, you and your classmates probably giggled over Leonard Whiting’s naked ass.)
But the actors in Luhrmann’s version, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, aged 21 and 17 at the time of filming, are even more luminous than Zeffirelli’s gorgeously youthful duo, and in today’s context, their performances are even more touching than they were 25 years ago. The film overall has aged better than you’d think—which is to say it has hardly aged at all. Although Luhrmann and co-writer Craig…
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Source : time
