His death at Tybalt’s hand-which occurs just as, in real life, a storm was brewing in Veracruz, where the scene was being shot-leaves a hole in the film. The song that heralds his arrival is Kym Mazelle’s version of the Candi Staton hit “Young Hearts Run Free.” He’s here, he’s queer, get used to it: Perrineau’s Mercutio is a bold pirouette of freedom. Luhrmann’s film is a dizzying assemblage of fast cutting and mad camera swirls scenes sometimes chop off abruptly, leaving you reaching out, longing for more-but even that is part of the movie’s brash, prismatic lyricism, and because of it, Perrineau’s entrance is one of the most memorable in all of 1990s cinema: He arrives on the scene-a crumbling seaside amusement park-leaping out of a convertible in a two-piece silver mini-shorts outfit and heels, wearing a white candy-floss wig, his lips a smear of red lipstick. In Luhrmann’s vision, the most affecting casualty of the gang wars between the two is Romeo’s bestie Mercutio-a loyal companion who is possibly in love with his friend-played by Harold Perrineau as a glittery-gorgeous heir to disco legend Sylvester.
That’s the essential tragedy of the Capulets and the Montagues: They have no idea why they’re fighting, but their warring ways mean that the union of the Montague Romeo and the Capulet Juliet is hopeless.
Watching Romeo + Juliet today is to be reminded of the wonder of Shakespeare, a writer whose work is so capacious and elastic that it can enfold countless interpretations and reinventions, winning over one generation after another with ease.
Although Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce had to trim the play to fit into a reasonable two-hour runtime, their script largely preserves the original language. The film overall has aged better than you’d think-which is to say it has hardly aged at all. (If you came of age in that era, you and your classmates probably giggled over Leonard Whiting’s naked ass.)īut 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 became a staple of junior-high literature classes for years. 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. 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.
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