MURKY MERCHANT

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S MERCHANT OF VENICE

Directed by Michael Radford; screenplay by Michael Radford, based on the play The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare; designed by Bruno Rubeo; cinematography by Benoît Delhomme With: Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins, Zuleikha Robinson, Kris Marshall, Charlie Cox, Heather Goldenhersh, and Mackenzie Crook. Rated R. Running time: 138 minutes

Reviewed by H. R. Coursen

Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice has evoked a division of opinion. David Kaplan claims that it “moves briskly” (Kaplan v. Kaplan). Liz Braun also finds it “brisk” (Jam!). Movie House praises its “clarity.” Peter Bradshaw also finds it “lucid” (Guardian). A. O. Scott remarks on the “radiant authority” of Lynn Collins’s Portia (New York Times). James Christopher, however, compares the lovers, Portia and Bassanio, to “actors trying to sprint under water” (The Times). Jeremiah Kipp finds the film “a morass of paralyzing drudgery” (Slant). David Edelstein calls it “deeply boring” (Slate). Neil Smith describes it as a “gloomy, long and slightly draining haul” (BBC). Steve Rhodes finds it “dry and disappointing” (Internet Review).

I come down in the latter camp. This is an often-incoherent film, undermined by shadowy production values, shaky characterizations, and a dubious editing of the inherited text.

Venice is a night-shrouded swamp, except during the day, when, for some reason, the only business being conducted is at the brothels. And where is Belmont? At one point it seems to be within an easy swim of the city, but at other moments it lives across a wide expanse of water. We needed an establishing shot of St. Marks for Venice and a map to show us how far away Belmont may be. If Portia is a version of the Golden Fleece, she exists in the imagination of that sea-faring adventurer who was an Elizabethan hero. Bassanio describes her as having “sunny locks [that] Hang on her temples like a golden fleece….And many Jasons come in quest of her.” These references—which I did not hear in this film—take us back to that fabulous epoch when the Greeks were discovering the rich world around them. Belmont, it follows, is a disappointment in this film. We see Portia’s palace on a hillside—hardly a beautiful mountain—under the moon and a few stars, a version of Gatsby’s estate. We watch as identical galleys pull toward the Portian lottery. The fabulous is reduced to the mundane. The film does create a contrast between an obscure City and the bright mosaics of Portia’s place, but soon the locations become generic not dynamic, and the montage becomes merely a convention of this dull production. Contrast Zeffirelli’s brilliant camera in his movie Romeo and Juliet.

The film opens with an account of how Jews were treated in Venice in the sixteenth century. We hear the gate to their ghetto locked at night with a decisive clang, as books—the Torah presumably—burn below the title cards. This description allows the spectator to distance him/herself from what is to follow. Thank heavens we are not like that! But why this frame? Why not let the narrative find its contemporary resonance—or not—as it may? The play itself makes clear enough the status of Jews in Venice. Here, what follows is reduced to a very limiting “once upon a time” format. In his book Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt supposes that Shakespeare might have attended the execution of Lopez, a Jew, in 1594 and derived his concept for the play from that grisly event. Perhaps so, but like Radford’s opening exposition, that possibility is irrelevant to the way the play reaches forward to speak to the living. It is not that we should ignore Elizabethan “meanings,” insofar as we can recover them, but that we cannot permit them to substitute for our own response to the plays as performed in media undreamed of in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.

The chief victim of the editing is Portia. Much of her excited greeting of Bassanio is given as soliloquy, and it is inaudible. She is robbed of her most significant early line. Nerissa reminds her of a Venetian who had visited once upon a time. Portia replies, “Yes, yes, it was Bassanio—as I think he was called.” It is a very funny line because it captures her excitement at the memory and her immediate recognition that she has betrayed that excitement. For this Portia to lose the line is for the production to lose the fairytale quality of the beautiful princess waiting on her mountain for her prince to come. While we know that Bassanio is on his way, we do not know that Portia is hoping he will come and that she is likely to be given away before he gets there.

The attempts of the two early suitors, then, acquire only local tension. Morocco is a caricature, a Muhammad Ali whose followers murmur in appreciation of everything he says. Arragon is disgusting and should have hit the cutting-room floor. In the Peter Hall production of the late 1980s (with Dustin Hoffman as Shylock) the suitors arrived flamboyantly, as if versions of the ultimate Mulberry Street parade. After their wrong choices, they huddled out under dim blue lighting, as if they and their entourages had been stricken by some fatal thunderbolt and were being driven to a negative afterlife. Here, the scenes are merely obligatory preludes to Bassanio’s correct choice. In a production I saw in Valencia in 1999, the Bassanio doubled in disguise as Morocco and Arragon—a tour de force that made his deliberation as the “real” Bassanio very amusing. In the Jonathan Miller production (aired on ABC in 1974), Charles Kay’s Arragon is a senile old man—no doubt politically incorrect enough to elicit the ire of the AARP. As he opens the silver casket, however, he pulls out a mirror and looks at himself. “What’s here? The portrait of a blinking idiot!” In the Radford film, Joseph Fiennes’s Bassanio is not even cued by the song Portia has arranged. His disquisition on appearance vs. reality is apparently a response to the inscription on the golden casket. And, while the caskets sit impressively under a portrait of Portia’s father, the production does not respond to that controlling presence, particularly after Bassanio’s correct choice. It is time for a changing of the guard, time to put that portrait in the attic, but that opportunity is ignored here.

Portia is denied her racist “Let all of his completion chose me so” after Morocco exits. The edge that the line can give to a Geraldine James (in the Hall production) or to a Deborah Findley (in Bill Alexander’s 1987 RSC production with Anthony Sher) can combine with her resentment of her father’s control even after death to send a convincing Portia off to the trial at Venice. Lynn Collins is very good in the trial scene, but we have not been prepared for her sudden emergence. When Portia is a mature woman, as is Joan Plowright in the Miller production, a lot of her motivation can be taken for granted. She has been waiting a long time for someone to release her from the magic spell of the caskets.

Gabriel Shanks complains of the film’s “incomprehensible moments of feigned levity” (Mixed Review). Why does Radford retain old Gobbo’s malapropisms? They are certainly not funny here. Radford cuts young Gobbo’s satire of Dr. Faustus (“‘Budge not,’ says my conscience”) and Lorenzo’s suggestion that Gobbo has impregnated a “moor.” Had all of Gobbo's material been excised, the film would have been strengthened. Radford also cuts the discussion between Lorenzo and Jessica of all those ill-fated lovers (Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido, Medea, et al.) probably because he realizes somewhat too late that lights, camera, and action command in film, not language. To his credit, Radford does cut Shylock’s long and incomprehensible disquisition on Laban’s sheep.

Pacino pulls his Shylock down from a Roy Cohn or a Herod, and his rasping complaint contrasts effectively with Jeremy Irons’s aristocratic rumble of a voice. Pacino delivers the “Hath not a Jew eyes” powerfully. He is angry all the way, and revenge is the culmination of a diatribe. Warren Mitchell in the credible BBC TV version (Directed by Jack Gold, 1980) reads the speech as a running joke and then turns on his listeners as he says, “And if you wrong us—will we not revenge?” The speech does not reflect shared humanity. It argues shared inhumanity. Pacino, however, does nothing with “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys,” after he learns that Jessica has traded away the ring Leah had given him when he was a bachelor. Radford adds “her mother” here. In the Miller production, set in Victorian England, Olivier’s Shylock has a photo of Leah on his desk, and the implication is that she had died in delivering Jessica to the world. Shylock’s greatest speech, before the Venetian Senate as the trial begins, is, as Pacino handles it, merely a monotonous explanation. It is actually at once very amusing and macabre, a justification of actions emerging from irrationality that demands some awareness on Shylock’s part of the darkness he is articulating.

Radford misses another opportunity as the trial begins. “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” Portia asks. She has never seen either man. Antonio and Shylock step forward. “Is your name Shylock?” Portia asks. Suppose that is directed to Antonio? “My name is Shylock,” Shylock says, insisting on the identity that has so often been undercut, and will be again. As rendered in Radford’s film, Shylock merely says, in effect, “Yes, I am Shylock.” And so a potentially exciting moment becomes merely dull.

The Jessica-Lorenzo subplot is incomprehensible here. Perhaps I was stumbling around in the Venetian shadows, but I missed Lorenzo’s explanation to Gratiano, “I must needs tell thee all…” (I did request a copy of the production from Sony so that I could confirm my initial impressions, but Sony did not respond). Part of the problem is that Jessica and Nerissa look like twins. Jessica’s later assertion that she had often heard Shylock vow revenge against Antonio is included, but what is she trying to do? Ingratiate herself with the Christians? Defend herself against the charge that it has been her defection that has incited Shylock’s revenge? I could not tell. Again, unless I was nodding, Antonio loses his “I am a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death”—a piece of self-pity that Irons would have delivered well. But perhaps we are supposed to sympathize with the self-selected martyr here? Portia is robbed of her “Your wife would give you little thanks for that, If she were by to hear you make the offer,” an aside she delivers in response to Bassanio’s protestations of love for Antonio. That aside helps to establish her subsequent nastiness about the ring. As the Movie House reviewer says, “Had I been Bassanio, I would have asked Portia whether her imaginary lawyer also handled divorces.”

At the end, three characters are excluded from the comedy. Antonio—who has not been told that all his ships have come in—is left alone in the moments just before dawn strikes the top of Belmont’s palace. Antonio can be incorporated, of course. At the conclusion of a 1970s production at The Other Place in Stratford, G. B. (with Patrick Stewart as Shylock), Antonio took Bassanio’s hand and placed it in Portia’s. He was “giving her away,” fulfilling the role of her absent father and also surrendering any claim to Bassanio’s absolute allegiance. In the Radford film, Shylock, now a reluctant Christian, is left on the street as his fellow Jews close the door of their temple upon him. Then we see Jessica run to the waterside to look across at Venice. She fingers the turquoise ring that she had supposedly traded for that monkey. We had seen the exchange in a flashback as Tubal described it. Had that been merely Shylock’s hallucination? Let Antonio and Shylock be excluded from the final harmonies. And make an exile of Jessica too, since she may be between two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born. But why confuse us by apparently refuting something we have already seen? How did she get that ring back? * The play suggests that, while Bassanio and Gratiano too easily surrender their rings, Shylock would never have parted with the turquoise. But what point is Radford making with Jessica here?

A good recent Merchant is Trevor Nunn’s Royal National Theatre version, remounted for television, with Henry Goodman and Derbhle Crotty, a production emerging from the ennui of Venice and the boredom of Belmont in the 1920s. Probably the best available Merchant, however, remains Miller’s 1974 television production with Laurence Olivier. The latter has not sufficiently toned down his stage performance for the cool medium, and the editing makes Shylock’s motive too clear: it is Jessica’s desertion. But Shylock’s effort at assimilation is powerfully suggested. Miller kept reducing the hook in Olivier’s nose in rehearsal. Shylock looks almost like the other Venetians, and mimics their aristocratic accents. At the end, Jessica is alone, listening to her father sing the Kaddish, the Yiddish prayer for the dead. That ending is as powerful for the play as a whole as Shylock’s off-stage howl of anguish had been for the trial scene.

Since the advent of sound, no full-length film has been made of Merchant. It is a difficult script —a “problem play” because it raises issues that cannot be resolved within the assumptions of comedy. Orson Welles started a version of Merchant, and fascinating snippets of that unfinished film appeared on a Bravo documentary in 2000. Radford’s entry is unlikely to encourage more Shakespeare to the screen. To make a great Shakespeare film, the director’s imagination must collide explosively with the inherited script, as Kozintsev’s did with Hamlet and King Lear, as Kurosawa’s did with Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, as Welles’s did with the Henry IV plays, as Olivier’s and Branagh’s did with Henry V, as Zefferilli’s and Luhrmann’s did with Romeo and Juliet, and as Taymor’s did with Titus. Radford does not come close to that fission.

* The eminent film critic, Samuel Crowl, informs me that the earlier vision of ring and monkey was, indeed, Shylock’s hallucination. The technique is similar to that used by Oliver Parker in this film of Othello, where Othello glimpses Desdemona’s infidelity on the basis of Iago’s insinuations. In Merchant, however, Tubal, Shylock’s confidant, claims actually to have seen a bartered ring: “One of them show’d me a ring he had of your daughter for a monkey.” We must surmise that, if Tubal is telling the truth, Shylock leaps to the conclusion that the ring was his turquoise. For me, the imposition of a flashback to something that is untrue represents another of Radford’s bad decisions.

Note: An “Official Teacher’s Guide” for this production is available on www.SonyStyle.com. It is full of good background material, but it cannot enhance the artistic product for which it is a guide.   

 

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