It’s hard to read, let alone write, a piece of film criticism today that doesn’t talk about the lack of creativity in the industry. As we suffer through yet another Jurassic Park, watch Tom Cruise defy death in another Mission: Impossible, or, quite the opposite, endure another entry in the Final Destination franchise, it’s increasingly difficult to engage with content on any level beyond discussing the regurgitation machine that is Hollywood. But while it’s easy to walk out of the theater, dump your popcorn, and write off another lackluster entry into the endless iteration-of-the-same-idea canon as no real harm done, the trend represents a wider issue that’s increasingly prevalent in all forms of media. The publishing industry is riding a high, but the #BookTok machine is just churning out the same romantasy and New Adult (AKA YA garbage moonlighting as chick-lit garbage) over and over, all while Barnes and Noble takes this dictum of recycling to the next (il)logical step in printing endless “special” and “collector’s” editions seemingly weekly. Even theater is falling victim to the wave of escapism that is IP rehash — a quick survey of the top-performing Broadway shows are all long-running hits, revivals, or, imagine this, adaptations of TV shows (not to mention whatever Jonathan Groff is starring in, a sure way to a $500 ticket no matter the quality). It’s this constant need for comfort in the media we consume that is contributing to shortened attention spans and the loss of creative thinking and critical literacy. If we just read/watch/live the same events over and over again, what is there to engage with, to learn from?
The author perhaps most historically victimized by this phenomenon is William Shakespeare. In the 400 years since his death, his works have been rewritten, adapted, interpreted, and iterated on hundreds of times. Not all of these have been mindless duds — more recent literary reworks like All’s Well by Mona Awad or Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic acme with Romeo + Juliet were thoughtful, inventive, and, thus, successful. And while neither of those were necessarily subtle takes on the Bard, they proved that proper adaptations don’t necessarily need to be swing-for-the-fences rewrites, but rather that even small, savvy tweaks to the material can offer boldly new perspectives. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the latest cinematic foray into Shakespearean waters, Juliet & Romeo, while a true spectacle, simply isn’t very good.
Writer-director Timothy Scott Bogart has clearly never heard the phrase “less is more” or simply doesn’t subscribe, and he instead attempts to cram as many “updates” into Shakespeare’s classic tragedy as possible. The dumbest? Swapping name order in the title. The most egregious? Making it… not a tragedy. That’s right, in Bogart’s version, the star-crossed lovers live (and even in this gambit, the film was beaten by the Tony-nominated smash hit musical & Juliet). They also exist in a different time period, the narrative’s timeline is changed, and, oh yeah — they sing. A lot, and badly. The bones of the story do remain the same: Lord Montague (Jason Isaacs) and the Capulets (Rupert Everett and Rebel Wilson) are sworn enemies, but all of that changes when Juliet (Clara Rugaard) meets Romeo (Jamie Ward). With warring families dead set on keeping them apart, Friar Lawrence (a bumbling Derek Jacobi) and Apothecary (Dan Fogler, delivering the only song of any real note in the film) are the couple’s only hope at happiness. And that is where the Bardic similarities end.
Bogart’s Juliet & Romeo might well be the very definition of the dumbification of classic, dramatically compelling material. A — The? — famous story, one most of us read (or at least osmoted) in high school English, has in Juliet & Romeo been turned into amateur, wet dream fodder for understudy musical theater kids who spent too much time at Renaissance Faires on the weekends. The decision to turn the story into a musical isn’t even novel; two film versions of West Side Story have already delivered the goods, for starters, and then there’s the aforementioned & Juliet for those who want character names intact. While Bogart’s vision is technically more original — his brother, Evan Kidd Bogart, and Justin Gray wrote all the pop-infused songs for the film — than than latter jukebox musical, the execution is severely lacking; the lyrics are uninspired, on-the-nose, and predictable, and the instrumentation feels more high school band than movie musical bombast.
But the film’s second-class music is more than just a pain in the ear. The film’s description brags about removing the pesky iambic pentameter from Romeo & Juliet, implicitly validating the lazy perception that Shakespearean language is too complicated, and offering in its place a plague of poorly written songs to be consumed by an audience being condescended to. Add in the overly expository narration, the needly aggressive cutting and editing, the most awkwardly inauthentic period clothing, and performances that are somehow both superficially over-the-top and functionally underplayed, and Juliet & Romeo offers one of the truest insults to viewer intelligence that has been seen in a while. Of course, that’s not to say there should be no room made for fluffy, unserious art — willful idiocy and self-righteous pretension are two sides of the same coin, after all. But as we continue to see the global ramifications born from the marriage of a post-truth world with an Internet-aided decline in critical faculties, fair or not, art has a responsibility to at minimum not deliver rhetoric in favor of our collective stupidity. Sure, Marvel is dumb, but it at least doesn’t explicitly advocate for diminishing intelligence; it just provides the canvas for such things to play out. Juliet & Romeo commits the twinned sins of moral irresponsibility and artistic insufferability. It would have been better off exiled to Mantua.
DIRECTOR: Timothy Scott Bogart; CAST: Clara Rugaard, Jason Isaacs, Jamie Ward, Rebel Wilson, Rupert Everett; DISTRIBUTOR: Briarcliff Entertainment; IN THEATERS: May 9; STREAMING: May 27; RUNTIME: ddd
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