Romeo + Juliet at 20: Baz Luhrmann's adaptation refuses to age

The millennial division of the internet subsists on a fairly shallow pool of nostalgia: endless posts celebrating variously unremarkable anniversaries, all intended to make reasonably young people feel reasonably old. “Can you believe it’s been a decade since Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack came out?” Well, yes, I can. “You won’t believe what the cast of Dawson’s Creek looks like now!” Not so very different from before, it turns out – is this a trick question?

Yet the announcement that William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is officially 20 years old today pulled me up short. Of course, I’m not speaking of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at all (coming up to its 420th birthday next year, so save your candles), but Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, which is a very different thing entirely – beginning with that oh-so-formerly-hip plus sign, which no self-respecting fan of Luhrmann’s taffeta-and-polyester vision would drop for an ampersand even today. Why am I surprised, though? Because 20 years feels an entirely inappropriate anniversary for Luhrmann’s glitterbomb of sound and fury and neo-disco and inchoate yearning. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet was never meant to reach this age: it might be the single most teenaged film ever fashioned.

I say that with equal parts critical admiration and peer adoration. I was 13 years old when the film sashayed and spangled its way onto cinema screens in my neighborhood (on Valentine’s Day 1997, admittedly, rather than 1 November 1996 – you can’t accuse South African distributors of not choosing their moment), and it felt as new and as dizzy and as overwhelming as the advent of adolescence itself.

Romeo + Juliet sent an instant neon shockwave through my high school. Within days, it seemed, girls’ English binders were plastered in photos of Leonardo DiCaprio from the film, with his perfectly curved forelock and glinting rave armor – a classroom-suitable image of nascent erotic desire. (I’d like to say some boys’ were too, but in that sense, at least, 1997 was a very long time ago.) That still-immaculate, all-bases-covered soundtrack – Radiohead! The Cardigans! Er, Butthole Surfers! – was on permanent rotation at every hesitant co-ed house party, even if the sinuous Des’ree slow dance was awkwardly skipped nine times out of ten. Detachable angel wings became a default prom accessory; blue-tinted fairy lights were resourcefully draped over household fish tanks.

I had experienced blockbuster reverberations in my childhood before, of course – ubiquitous Jurassic Park T-shirts, Forrest Gump catchphrases – but this was new: my first palpable point of awareness that cinema and sex were essentially intertwined. Heterosexual sex, foremost, but I can’t be the only person my age for whom Luhrmann’s MTV fantasia raised early inklings of alternative sexual awareness: the image of Harold Perrineau’s athletic, exquisitely androgynous Mercutio, busting (and thrusting) moves to Young Hearts Run Free in a sequinned bra, suspenders and candyfloss fright wig, was almost certainly the queerest thing I’d hitherto seen at the movies. Yet he, too, was treated by film and audience alike as acceptably, desirably cool.

None of this would have seemed especially revolutionary to older viewers long accustomed to commodified adolescent hedonism, or indeed to Shakespeare being repurposed and restyled for the present day. To a 13-year-old, however, Luhrmann’s vision played as an exciting expansion of possibilities and pleasures: the shortest, most exhilarating cut on that gem-studded soundtrack, Quindon Tarver’s cover of Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good), was taken most literally.

So, yes, two decades on, stray sounds and images from Luhrmann’s film remain entirely vivid, if not entirely undated. (It’s hard to think of many symbols much more 1996 than the giant kinda-Celtic-Gothic crucifix tattoo adorning the back of Pete Postlethwaite’s Father Lawrence – what a mercy my classmates and I were too young to copy that.) But what of the film itself? Does it hold up as more than a whirling mood board of generationally evocative iconography? Did it ever? I’m almost afraid to revisit it, but minutes into Luhrmann’s headlong, tricked-out dive into the decayed bohemia of fair Verona Beach – where he and justly Oscar-nominated art director Catherine Martin don’t so much lay their scene as paint-blast it – the surprisingly elegant, elemental pull of its storytelling takes hold.

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It’s de rigueur for purists to complain about contemporary Shakespeare adaptations stripping back his language to the nub, but the kinetic visual translations the film makes for the missing text remain quite startling. We tend to remember the hyperactivity of any Luhrmann film foremost, yet so much narrative here is articulated through faces and gazes: I can’t think of any Romeo and Juliet production I’ve seen, on stage or screen, in which the attraction between its eponymous lovers is so viscerally, obsessively instant. Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version may have caused something of a youthquake with its ravishing adolescent casting, but it’s cautiously carnal at best: here, 17-year-old Claire Danes’ and 21-year-old DiCaprio’s eyes meet in an electric blue thunderbolt of sheer, woozy want.

DiCaprio’s career would go supernova a year later with Titanic, but I’m not sure he’s ever worn his alternately chippy and cherubic star quality quite this lightly or lithely, or – his recent Oscar for the pained jaw-clenching of The Revenant notwithstanding – emoted with quite such open, unstrained anguish. Danes’ film career would peak sharply here, of course, but what a summit: replacing Natalie Portman (who, at 14, was deemed to look too young opposite DiCaprio), she brings the very modern hormonal curiosity of a name-making role in TV’s My So-Called Life to Shakespeare’s vision of agitated youth in a way that feels quite apposite. (By this point, Shakespeare’s possessive credit in that full title no longer feels like a wry in-joke: give or take some tinsel and a swimming pool, this is still very much his Romeo and Juliet.)

Neither actor delivers the most mellifluous iambic pentameter you’ve ever heard, and nor should they: the lines roll eagerly, earnestly, blushingly off their tongues, like eighth-graders reading and writing poetry for the first time. (Compare it to the misbegotten Douglas Booth-Hailee Steinfeld update that Julian Fellowes attempted three years ago: that film’s leads sound like they’re being made to read the play aloud in class with surly reluctance.) The flushed sugar rush of Luhrmann’s film-making – not that we’d have believed it then, but a positively restrained dry run for the ecstatic excess of 2001’s marvelous Moulin Rouge! – worked to conjure the same air of reckless, uncalculated feeling. To look at its peach-skinned lovefools’ recent work – DiCaprio grimly chomping raw bison liver in Alaskan purgatory, Danes determinedly gurning away on TV’s Homeland – is to know that William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is indeed 20 years old. Like its doomed, bullet-bound lovers, however, the film refuses to age with us.