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The Pacino Richard places its director-star front and center, performing scenes from the play, quizzing Brit theater luminaries and Manhattan street dwellers on the relevance of Shakespeare's poetry and the ability of American actors to speak it--trying to get a handle on the murderous Godfather of the House of York. In a way, the film is a high-minded remake of Pacino's Heat: he's the sleuth chasing down a charismatic killer. It's also naive, wildly self-indulgent and weirdly mesmerizing. While Pacino wrangles the text with such fellow seekers as Alec Baldwin and Winona Ryder, you get a clearer feel for the star than for the author. You come looking for Richard and find Al. "I don't like the word teach applied to this because I'm not a teacher," Pacino says. "But we hope to guide audiences into it without their even knowing how they got there." The quest took four years for Pacino: "I made four movies and did two plays during the time I was filming this." He hopes his celebrity will attract new audiences to Shakespeare. "He speaks to all of us about everything that's inside us," Pacino says. "That's the thing."
The thing for studio bosses, who will never replace the NEA as arts benefactors, is to make a profit. And that can happen when it's the directors and stars, eager to do good works and glean Oscar nods, who subsidize the projects by working for next to nothing. Branagh's sumptuous-looking Hamlet was shot for a mere $18 million. In its domestic release, the film need gross only about $12 million to break even. Why, Robin Williams, one of Hamlet's A-list co-stars, could earn that much on a single Jumanji-size movie.
And what of those British who weren't in Hamlet? Nunn corralled most of them--Ben Kingsley, Helena Bonham Carter, Nigel Hawthorne--for his Twelfth Night. A comedy of Eros about loving twins separated in a shipwreck and embroiled in a game of mistaken sexual identity, the piece now begins as an upmarket Blue Lagoon, veers into elaborate farce, then darkens till it seems a lost work of Chekhov's. It's a handsome artifact, though, on its $5 million budget, and gives star treatment to Imogen Stubbs, who is Nunn's wife. "It's a welcome break from the American kind of film realism," she says of Twelfth Night. "When acting onscreen, you're often asked not to act; you're exploited for some quality the director sees in you. But in Shakespeare, you are forced to act--to tell the audience, 'This is a character. This is a play.'"
Twelfth Night is a play transferred to film. Romeo and Juliet is, defiantly, a movie--an assault on Hollywood's conservative film language that might have come from a more playful Oliver Stone; call it Natural Born Lovers. Director Baz Luhrmann envelops Romeo and his goodfellas in portentous slo-mo for the shoot-outs, giddy fast-mo for comedy scenes. The camera literally runs circles around the lovers. When Romeo sees Juliet, his eye explodes in fireworks. The sound track pulses with rap and rock and sound effects that you'd expect in a Hong Kong melodrama; they shoot forth thunder. The style is studiously kicky, less RSC than MTV.