Shakespeare’S Plays Good Fit For Contemporary Movies

I apologize in advance to the few high-school kids who prove the exception, but facts are facts: It’s rare for anyone, much less anyone born earlier than 1981, actually to want to watch a movie version of any Shakespeare play.

This probably always was the case. When I attended high school in the early 1960s (no, not the 1860s), teachers would show movie scenes of Marlon Brando playing Marc Antony or Dame Judith Anderson playing Lady Macbeth and expect us to fawn over every passage.

We didn’t. Sure, we were told it was great. And we probably even recognized that it was something special. But so what? These were old people talking in what amounted to a foreign language. Where was the relevance?

All that changed in 1968 when Franco Zeffirelli directed the first really popular movie version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Starring 16-year-old Leonard Whiting as Romeo and 14-year-old Olivia Hussey as Juliet, Zeffirelli’s film captured all the emotional angst that adolescence lends to matters of the heart.

This wasn’t 40-year-old British thespians speaking Shakespeare’s lines with all due reverence. This was kids, and not particularly talented ones (though obviously photogenic), speaking the lines with honest feeling. Relevance, for once, wasn’t merely an abstract notion.

More recently, Shakespeare has gone through another of his periodic renaissances (see capsule review of “10 Things I Hate About You” below). Five hundred years and counting, the great English playwright still is the reigning expert on all the great questions of life. And relevance, these days, is the rule. Not merely an occasional exception.

Following are my favorites of the Shakespearean adaptations of late, most of them — strangely enough - dating back to 1996:

* “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet” (1996) - Directed by Baz Luhrman (“Strictly Ballroom”), this is rock ‘n’ roll Shakespeare, done MTV style, complete with inventive music, flashy movie stars (Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes) and an updated homeboy, street-gang setting. While not something that’s likely to play anytime soon at the Old Globe, Luhrman’s film is close to the kind of film that you have to think that Shakespeare himself might be making were he a contemporary filmmaker.

* “Hamlet” (1996) - No one has worked harder, or been more successful, at bringing Shakespeare into the modern era than Kenneth Branagh. Though a little old to be playing the melancholy Dane, as he does here, Branagh still manages to make this greatest of all teen-angst dramas seem contemporary. Of course, not all teen angst comes from the knowledge that your uncle killed your dad, married your mother and is trying to ace you out of your patrimony. It just feels like it.

* “Looking for Richard” (1996) - For years, Al Pacino tried to make a film version of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” He ended up making a documentary about his struggles, complementing it with scenes of actors and writers debating the meaning of various lines. Ultimately, this is a good look at the pros trying to find their own way with difficult material.

* “Twelfth Night” (1996) - Directed by Trevor Nunn, this adaptation of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedy is contemporary for a couple of reasons. One, it IS about cross-dressing (a young woman adopts the garb of her brother, who she thinks is deceased, to survive on the island upon which she is shipwrecked). Two, it stars Helena Bonham Carter (as the woman who falls for our passing-for-a-male protagonist).

* “Richard III” (1995) - Richard Loncraine directed this version of the historical drama something in the style of Monty Python - without, of course, the obvious humor. Buoyed by Ian McKellan, who, aside from Branagh, is today’s most revered Shakespearean actor, this is another of the Bard’s works brought brilliantly into the now. Only problem: The two Americans in the cast, normally reliable Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr., are humbled by the mostly English cast around them.

* “Henry V” (1989) - While not exactly “American Pie,” this first of Branagh’s successful movie adaptations does speak to the young in one major way: More than anyone else, Branagh speaks Shakespeare as if it were everyday language. He manages to make the lines sound both poetic and intelligible, no easy feat.

The week’s major release on video:

10 Things I Hate About You ***

When a high-school girl is told she can’t date until her older sister does, she tries to match her temperamental sibling with just the right guy (if this sounds familiar, it’s a variation on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”). Julia Stiles (“Wicked”) plays the older sister with just the right combination of feminist rage and broken heart. But the real key to this film’s success is director Gil Junger’s ability to ride herd on an Elizabethan update that is both faithful to the original story and true to the feel for life in the late ‘90s. Rated PG-13.