‘The Merchant of Venice’

The first movie ever made of this play, it remains faithful to its source, barely altering a word except to trim scenes for length.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

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Al Pacino (right) plays the persecuted Shylock, while Allan Corduner (left) is Tubal in The Merchant of Venice.


   If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d probably be writing for TV. Theater was a mass medium in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare was one of its most popular playwrights, delighting the working stiffs in the cheap seats as well as the toffs in the upper tiers.
   In the centuries since, a fate worse than obscurity has befallen the Bard: He’s become required reading, the bane of bored sophomores everywhere. The scores of movies that have been made of his plays generally fall into one of three camps: noisy modernizations trying to be "relevant"; works of art, like Kurosawa’s Ran and Throne of Blood, which riff on Shakespearean plays rather than performing them straight; and earnest, often stagebound performances whose sole aim is fidelity to the text. The last kind are weighed down by the long speeches that nourish a play but gag a movie — and by actors acting, as Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian used to say on Saturday Night Live.
   Director/screenwriter Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice is one of those, though it’s considerably better than average. The first movie ever made of this play, it remains faithful to its source, barely altering a word except to trim scenes for length, and for the most part, it uses the new medium well to tell the old story. But, despite all its efforts to "open up" the play, it keeps coming to life only to sputter out again.
   The filmmakers shot on location in Venice, where the mayor’s regard for Al Pacino, who plays Shylock (Pacino is "kind of a god in Italy," one of the producers explains), gained them access even to off-limits sites like the Doge’s Palace. That makes the story seem less allegorical and more rooted in history, while the city’s battered gray elegance, thick stone walls and iron gates underscore the melancholy and the sense of entrapment that plague both Antonio (Jeremy Irons), the Christian merchant of the title, and Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh when he reneges on a debt. Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme amplifies the claustrophobia by shooting almost everything either at night or indoors, and heightens the realism by often using handheld cameras.
   Some people may still think Merchant is more of an incitement to anti-Semitism than an indictment of it, but Radford’s telling of the tale makes it seem blindingly clear that, while Shylock was wrong to have grown so bitter and vengeful, the real culprit is the Christian society that treats him as less than human, labeling him "alien" in the country of his birth. An opening crawl describes the prejudice against Jews that ran rampant in Venice in 1596, curdling Shylock’s soul. Radford also adds a few brief scenes showing Shylock and other Jews being spat on or insulted by Christians and locked at night into the Jewish ghetto. He also shows the ghetto functioning as a sort of open-air brothel for Christian men.
   Of course, Pacino deserves some of the credit for our empathy for Shylock. At the trial where Shylock’s fate is decided, the actor makes his pain excruciatingly plangent: We feel for him even as we recoil from him as he writhes in an agony of humiliation. But he lost me when he declaimed Shylock’s speeches in his glaze-eyed, sing-song autopilot rant mode, launching glistening drops of saliva into his beard.
   Radford isn’t always successful, either. The ghetto life teeming in the background sometimes feels self-consciously sensationalized, like when two of Antonio’s friends perfunctorily nuzzle a pair of prostitutes while discussing their concern about his shipwrecked boats. The cuts made for length alter the tone of the play in a couple of minor but significant ways: Shylock’s daughter, Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson), is reduced to a sullen cipher, and most of the foolishness involving Launcelot, the servant who leaves Shylock for Antonio’s young friend Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes), is lost, depriving the story of some badly needed comic relief.
   The grand love between Bassanio and Portia (Lynn Collins) also falls flat. We take those pairings on faith in Shakespeare’s plays, accepting them as a convention along with the less exalted parallel romance that often mirrors the main one (this time, between Bassanio’s sidekick and Portia’s maidservant.) But by striving so hard to feel real, the film makes it hard to buy a love that consists only of exchanging significant looks and beautiful speeches. If Shakespeare had written this for the screen, you can bet he would have done it differently.
   Radford also adds a strongly sexual undertone to Antonio’s love for Bassanio that feels like a stretch. There’s room for that interpretation in the text, but what do we gain by wondering whether Antonio has an ulterior motive when he convinces Bassanio to give away his wedding ring?
   Despite that distraction, Irons is magnificent. His Antonio is creepily elegant, half dead of melancholy yet imperious enough to revile Shylock whenever they meet. Collins is equally impressive as Portia — in part because, like Irons but unlike most of the other actors, she says her lines with a cadence so natural that you never feel as if she’s reciting poetry. If only Pacino sounded as natural.
   On balance, he’s good, and so is the movie. But good isn’t good enough. They should have been great.
Rated R. Contains some nudity.