Movie Review! The Merchant of Venice
While watching this movie, a thought came to my mind, and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I'm on to something:
Over the course of centuries, a couple of William Shakespeare's plays have been lost, possibly forever. The Merchant of Venice is one of these lost plays.
I don't mean that the script has been lost, of course. The Merchant of Venice is probably one of Shakespeare's best-known works, performed often, taught in high schools around the country, sometimes as a model comedy (which I think is stupid, but we'll let that slide), and most recently made into a movie in 2004, directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Joseph Fiennes. So, no, it's not "lost" in the sense that, say, Cardenio is a "lost play."
But I do think that the particular story that William Shakespeare set out to tell around 1597, a comedy of love, chance, and an exotic villain, is something that modern audiences can never see. Too much has happened since Shakespeare wrote the play. It's not funny any more. It's become bothersome, a "problem play," because we know things about the world that Shakespeare and his contemporaries could never have imagined. The Holocaust happened, and we now know the logical end result of the Christian characters' treatment of Shylock. We can't erase that imagery from our minds -- nor should we, I think. We can't allow ourselves to laugh and jeer at Shylock any more. We're not Elizabethans, and the only way for The Merchant of Venice to survive at all is for us to acknowledge that we can no longer see the "original" play, but must do some hard thinking to come up with a version that we can see.
The director's first task, I suppose, is to ask the question, "What is The Merchant of Venice about?" There's no single correct answer to this question, but Michael Radford's answer is eminently workable. In his movie, The Merchant of Venice is about power and promises. There are those people who have power, and there are those people who have promises, and the two groups are almost entirely mutually exclusive. White Christian men have the power. Everyone else -- women, Jews, blacks -- all they have are promises made to them by the white Christian men. They take these promises very seriously, as well they should. If the white Christian men break their promises, then the women and Jews and blacks have nothing. And everyone knows it.
The theme of promises runs throughout the film. Bassanio woos Portia for her money so that he can pay off a promised debt to Antonio. Antonio promises a pound of flesh to Shylock, and Shylock demands that he keep that promise, his line of "I will have my bond!" becoming a mantra in the second half of the film. Portia and Nerissa's game with the rings leads up to a scene in which both women scold their husbands for the speed with which they broke their promises to keep their rings. It's no accident that Nerissa scolds harder than Portia, to the point of throwing fruit at Gratiano; she's a lady's maid who's married a gentleman. She has no bargaining power other than her body, and no financial hold on her husband the way Portia has on Bassanio. Gratiano's ability to keep a promise is everything to her. Even Jessica, in a lovely, almost silent performance by Zuleikha Robinson, has a storyline involving a promise. She goes with Lorenzo, forsaking her entire world, solely on the promise that he will love her and accept her. She is barely spoken to for the rest of the film -- Radford cut much of the play's final scene to make this point -- and the last shot of the movie shows Jessica isolated and lonely, with neither the Jewish community that she gave up nor the Christian husband she chose at her side.
I've been talking as if you know all the characters. Probably you do. The Merchant of Venice is a pretty well-known play, and the movie version was fairly popular back in its day. They're an interesting bunch of folks, to be sure. They're not very nice people, and all of them prove to be dishonorable in their own ways by the end. They never seem to learn much about life, but they do learn about each other. What they learn owes as much to The Great Gatsby as to Shakespeare:
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back
into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made…"
This quote could easily describe most of the characters in The Merchant of Venice -- not Launcelot Gobbo, for he's too ineffectual; not Tubal, for he's just a glorified sounding post; and not Shylock, for he's the one who gets smashed up at the end. But all the rest of them are indeed Fitzgerald's "careless people." They spit on Jews and then destroy them, make rash promises and then break them, fritter away their money on games, abandon and rob their families, force people who love them to contribute to their own downfall . . . the list goes on.
There's love here, but not quite the way you'd expect in a romantic comedy. Antonio is pretty clearly in love with Bassanio; this is a modern interpretation of the play, and it's not unique to Radford, but it's all over his movie. You see it in Jeremy Irons's long, lingering, sad glances at Joseph Fiennes, the only thing that can pierce the cloud of gloom that hangs over Irons. All that Irons's Antonio wants is for his beloved Bassanio to be happy. He can't have Bassanio in the way that he wants Bassanio, but by God, he can sacrifice all he has to give Bassanio what he wants, up to and including his own life. His reward? Well, the last we see of him, he's just watched the alpha and beta couples, Portia&Bassanio and Nerissa&Gratiano, head off to their bedrooms to dance the horizontal tango. Antonio is left alone in the dining room, and we see no more of him.
Portia is also pretty clearly in love with Bassanio. We don't know where or how she first laid eyes on him, but it's pretty clear that she knows who he is, and that he's the one she wants to marry. When he shows up to play the casket game, Lynn Collins's face lights up like a little girl's, and she spouts poetry. Portia can't take her eyes off of Bassanio. Her face flushes, her bosom heaves, and she does everything but point to the right casket. When he picks it, she's so relieved, she nearly has a stroke. Unlike Antonio, Portia does get to marry Bassanio. But what has she married? There are some nice reaction shots during the courtroom scene that tell this story. In the Duke's court, the seat of justice and truth, Portia gets to watch in disguise as Bassanio reveals his true feelings about her. He would happily repudiate her or see her dead, if only Antonio could be saved. Watch Lynn Collins's eyes during those speeches. There's a world of shock, hurt, and disappointment there, and you know immediately why she pulls the trick with the rings. When they kiss and make up at the end, it's with the understanding that things can never be the same between them. Portia still loves Bassanio -- he's handsome, makes nice conversation, and is probably a good lay -- but she will never again give him all her heart, for she can never trust that she has all of his.
All of which makes Bassanio an interesting character. Lots of people love him. Who does he love? Well, Bassanio seems like a go-along kind of guy, and I think he goes along with the crowd in this, too. Bassanio loves Bassanio as much as Antonio and Portia love Bassanio. He likes his friends for the entertainment they provide him. He seems to like being the object of Antonio's adoration and the recipient of his gifts. Let Antonio make a foolish promise to Shylock on Bassanio's behalf! The risks to Antonio don't matter, so long as Bassanio gets his cash. He's not especially interested in Portia except for the use she can be to him. He wants her money first, and the pretty girl is a nice bonus, an afterthought. Everything that Bassanio wants, Bassanio gets; is it any wonder that he comes to believe that the world exists only to provide him with pleasure? The courtroom scene is interesting for Bassanio. When the officers start to strap Antonio down for his execution, you see the horror in Bassanio's face. This may well be the first time in his life that his actions have led to consequences. The Onion totally has his number. Fortunately, Portia is there to save him from the consequences, and he ends the play much the same way he began: careless, solipsistic, living a life of pleasure and damn the consequences.
With all these fools running Venice, what's a Jew like Shylock to do? Well, first of all, become the star of the show. Radford signals pretty clearly that the love story in Belmont is the B plot -- this is fine, since it's so stupid (see Roger Ebert's comment on elementary gamesmanship) that it doesn't deserve much more -- and that the A plot is the story of how the city deals with Shylock, and by extension, all of its Jewish community. The prologue shows Jewish holy books being burned, friars gondola-ing up and down the canals spouting their hatred of the Jews, and finally, a crowd of Christian Venetians assaulting Jews on the Rialto, hurling one man off the bridge (he seems to be okay, though). Antonio spits right in Shylock's face, and it's a sign of his own "vast carelessness" that, after doing that, he cannot seem to fathom why Shylock doesn't like him. Spit in a man's face one day, ask him for money the next; this seems perfectly okay, as long as the man is a Jew.
In this context, Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech becomes a tragic masterpiece. A masterpiece because Shylock finally comes out and says point blank what we, the post-Holocaust viewers, have been wondering for an hour: Do the Christian Venetians truly not see another human being standing in front of them when they talk to a Jew? What the hell do they expect from someone that they systematically abuse in a way that they wouldn't do to their horses or dogs? And it's tragic because, for all the power and pain in Al Pacino's delivery, this speech falls (as it must) on totally deaf ears. He finishes speaking, and the fine gentlemen of Venice simply stare at him, puzzled, as if he's been speaking Chinese. To their careless minds, he has been speaking Chinese.
Finally, Shylock has had enough, and he loses it. His friend Tubal tries to stop him, but it's too late. He's going to go to the letter of the law -- and believe you me, Jews are good at this -- and he's going to use the exact wording of the law to take revenge. He's mad as hell, and he's not gonna take it any more! If Antonio is callous enough to ask for money and insult him in the same breath, if he's so cocksure of himself to bet on wooden ships far at sea, if the notary is stupid enough to make this cockamamie deal official, then Shylock will use that all to his own advantage. It'll cost him 3,000 ducats, but it's not about the money. It really isn't. Shylock says this, over and over again. It's Not About The Money. No one listens, because who listens to a Jew, and they keep offering him more money, but they don't Get It. It's Not About The Money.
Shylock's tragedy is this: His anger makes him stupid. It makes him forget two vital pieces of information. The first is that the Jews are not the only people who are good at nit-picking the law when a life is on the line. He really should have specified a pound of flesh and blood in his bond. I think there's a reason that he didn't, but I won't go into that now. But it's certainly his first mistake. His second mistake is one that Jews have made for thousands of years -- it's the mistake that the German Jews made in the 1930s, for instance. Shylock believes himself to be a citizen of Venice. He lives there, he pays his taxes there, he does business with the people there, he presumably got married there, his daughter was presumably born there, he might even have been born there. But Shylock is not a citizen of Venice. He's an alien, and therefore subject to a special law regarding attempted murder against a citizen. It's this law that brings down the penalty that destroys him in the end, leaving him alone and destitute, no longer part of the Jewish community, but certainly not accepted into the Christian one even at his conversion, for, while the Venetians are blind in many ways, they are smart enough to know that a forced convert is often not a convert at all.
This is an excellent movie, though it's not a comedy. It isn't even very funny, though there are one or two moments that evoke mild giggles. It's a drama about ugly, nasty people doing ugly, nasty things to each other. Some people pay consequences and some people don't, and that distribution is manifestly unfair. Radford's genius is that he shows us this story beautifully and eloquently, sparing no one. You see every last bit of ugliness and every last bit of pain that this ugliness causes, and you see the beautiful, careless people walking away from their messes without a backward glance. And you see the chain at work. You see people who can be both sinners and sinned against, and how both affect their actions.
The Merchant of Venice isn't a comedy. It hasn't been a comedy for many years. Instead, it's a powerful, affecting drama about real people and the compromises they make in life. Go see it, if you haven't already.
Over the course of centuries, a couple of William Shakespeare's plays have been lost, possibly forever. The Merchant of Venice is one of these lost plays.
I don't mean that the script has been lost, of course. The Merchant of Venice is probably one of Shakespeare's best-known works, performed often, taught in high schools around the country, sometimes as a model comedy (which I think is stupid, but we'll let that slide), and most recently made into a movie in 2004, directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Joseph Fiennes. So, no, it's not "lost" in the sense that, say, Cardenio is a "lost play."
But I do think that the particular story that William Shakespeare set out to tell around 1597, a comedy of love, chance, and an exotic villain, is something that modern audiences can never see. Too much has happened since Shakespeare wrote the play. It's not funny any more. It's become bothersome, a "problem play," because we know things about the world that Shakespeare and his contemporaries could never have imagined. The Holocaust happened, and we now know the logical end result of the Christian characters' treatment of Shylock. We can't erase that imagery from our minds -- nor should we, I think. We can't allow ourselves to laugh and jeer at Shylock any more. We're not Elizabethans, and the only way for The Merchant of Venice to survive at all is for us to acknowledge that we can no longer see the "original" play, but must do some hard thinking to come up with a version that we can see.
The director's first task, I suppose, is to ask the question, "What is The Merchant of Venice about?" There's no single correct answer to this question, but Michael Radford's answer is eminently workable. In his movie, The Merchant of Venice is about power and promises. There are those people who have power, and there are those people who have promises, and the two groups are almost entirely mutually exclusive. White Christian men have the power. Everyone else -- women, Jews, blacks -- all they have are promises made to them by the white Christian men. They take these promises very seriously, as well they should. If the white Christian men break their promises, then the women and Jews and blacks have nothing. And everyone knows it.
The theme of promises runs throughout the film. Bassanio woos Portia for her money so that he can pay off a promised debt to Antonio. Antonio promises a pound of flesh to Shylock, and Shylock demands that he keep that promise, his line of "I will have my bond!" becoming a mantra in the second half of the film. Portia and Nerissa's game with the rings leads up to a scene in which both women scold their husbands for the speed with which they broke their promises to keep their rings. It's no accident that Nerissa scolds harder than Portia, to the point of throwing fruit at Gratiano; she's a lady's maid who's married a gentleman. She has no bargaining power other than her body, and no financial hold on her husband the way Portia has on Bassanio. Gratiano's ability to keep a promise is everything to her. Even Jessica, in a lovely, almost silent performance by Zuleikha Robinson, has a storyline involving a promise. She goes with Lorenzo, forsaking her entire world, solely on the promise that he will love her and accept her. She is barely spoken to for the rest of the film -- Radford cut much of the play's final scene to make this point -- and the last shot of the movie shows Jessica isolated and lonely, with neither the Jewish community that she gave up nor the Christian husband she chose at her side.
I've been talking as if you know all the characters. Probably you do. The Merchant of Venice is a pretty well-known play, and the movie version was fairly popular back in its day. They're an interesting bunch of folks, to be sure. They're not very nice people, and all of them prove to be dishonorable in their own ways by the end. They never seem to learn much about life, but they do learn about each other. What they learn owes as much to The Great Gatsby as to Shakespeare:
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back
into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made…"
This quote could easily describe most of the characters in The Merchant of Venice -- not Launcelot Gobbo, for he's too ineffectual; not Tubal, for he's just a glorified sounding post; and not Shylock, for he's the one who gets smashed up at the end. But all the rest of them are indeed Fitzgerald's "careless people." They spit on Jews and then destroy them, make rash promises and then break them, fritter away their money on games, abandon and rob their families, force people who love them to contribute to their own downfall . . . the list goes on.
There's love here, but not quite the way you'd expect in a romantic comedy. Antonio is pretty clearly in love with Bassanio; this is a modern interpretation of the play, and it's not unique to Radford, but it's all over his movie. You see it in Jeremy Irons's long, lingering, sad glances at Joseph Fiennes, the only thing that can pierce the cloud of gloom that hangs over Irons. All that Irons's Antonio wants is for his beloved Bassanio to be happy. He can't have Bassanio in the way that he wants Bassanio, but by God, he can sacrifice all he has to give Bassanio what he wants, up to and including his own life. His reward? Well, the last we see of him, he's just watched the alpha and beta couples, Portia&Bassanio and Nerissa&Gratiano, head off to their bedrooms to dance the horizontal tango. Antonio is left alone in the dining room, and we see no more of him.
Portia is also pretty clearly in love with Bassanio. We don't know where or how she first laid eyes on him, but it's pretty clear that she knows who he is, and that he's the one she wants to marry. When he shows up to play the casket game, Lynn Collins's face lights up like a little girl's, and she spouts poetry. Portia can't take her eyes off of Bassanio. Her face flushes, her bosom heaves, and she does everything but point to the right casket. When he picks it, she's so relieved, she nearly has a stroke. Unlike Antonio, Portia does get to marry Bassanio. But what has she married? There are some nice reaction shots during the courtroom scene that tell this story. In the Duke's court, the seat of justice and truth, Portia gets to watch in disguise as Bassanio reveals his true feelings about her. He would happily repudiate her or see her dead, if only Antonio could be saved. Watch Lynn Collins's eyes during those speeches. There's a world of shock, hurt, and disappointment there, and you know immediately why she pulls the trick with the rings. When they kiss and make up at the end, it's with the understanding that things can never be the same between them. Portia still loves Bassanio -- he's handsome, makes nice conversation, and is probably a good lay -- but she will never again give him all her heart, for she can never trust that she has all of his.
All of which makes Bassanio an interesting character. Lots of people love him. Who does he love? Well, Bassanio seems like a go-along kind of guy, and I think he goes along with the crowd in this, too. Bassanio loves Bassanio as much as Antonio and Portia love Bassanio. He likes his friends for the entertainment they provide him. He seems to like being the object of Antonio's adoration and the recipient of his gifts. Let Antonio make a foolish promise to Shylock on Bassanio's behalf! The risks to Antonio don't matter, so long as Bassanio gets his cash. He's not especially interested in Portia except for the use she can be to him. He wants her money first, and the pretty girl is a nice bonus, an afterthought. Everything that Bassanio wants, Bassanio gets; is it any wonder that he comes to believe that the world exists only to provide him with pleasure? The courtroom scene is interesting for Bassanio. When the officers start to strap Antonio down for his execution, you see the horror in Bassanio's face. This may well be the first time in his life that his actions have led to consequences. The Onion totally has his number. Fortunately, Portia is there to save him from the consequences, and he ends the play much the same way he began: careless, solipsistic, living a life of pleasure and damn the consequences.
With all these fools running Venice, what's a Jew like Shylock to do? Well, first of all, become the star of the show. Radford signals pretty clearly that the love story in Belmont is the B plot -- this is fine, since it's so stupid (see Roger Ebert's comment on elementary gamesmanship) that it doesn't deserve much more -- and that the A plot is the story of how the city deals with Shylock, and by extension, all of its Jewish community. The prologue shows Jewish holy books being burned, friars gondola-ing up and down the canals spouting their hatred of the Jews, and finally, a crowd of Christian Venetians assaulting Jews on the Rialto, hurling one man off the bridge (he seems to be okay, though). Antonio spits right in Shylock's face, and it's a sign of his own "vast carelessness" that, after doing that, he cannot seem to fathom why Shylock doesn't like him. Spit in a man's face one day, ask him for money the next; this seems perfectly okay, as long as the man is a Jew.
In this context, Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech becomes a tragic masterpiece. A masterpiece because Shylock finally comes out and says point blank what we, the post-Holocaust viewers, have been wondering for an hour: Do the Christian Venetians truly not see another human being standing in front of them when they talk to a Jew? What the hell do they expect from someone that they systematically abuse in a way that they wouldn't do to their horses or dogs? And it's tragic because, for all the power and pain in Al Pacino's delivery, this speech falls (as it must) on totally deaf ears. He finishes speaking, and the fine gentlemen of Venice simply stare at him, puzzled, as if he's been speaking Chinese. To their careless minds, he has been speaking Chinese.
Finally, Shylock has had enough, and he loses it. His friend Tubal tries to stop him, but it's too late. He's going to go to the letter of the law -- and believe you me, Jews are good at this -- and he's going to use the exact wording of the law to take revenge. He's mad as hell, and he's not gonna take it any more! If Antonio is callous enough to ask for money and insult him in the same breath, if he's so cocksure of himself to bet on wooden ships far at sea, if the notary is stupid enough to make this cockamamie deal official, then Shylock will use that all to his own advantage. It'll cost him 3,000 ducats, but it's not about the money. It really isn't. Shylock says this, over and over again. It's Not About The Money. No one listens, because who listens to a Jew, and they keep offering him more money, but they don't Get It. It's Not About The Money.
Shylock's tragedy is this: His anger makes him stupid. It makes him forget two vital pieces of information. The first is that the Jews are not the only people who are good at nit-picking the law when a life is on the line. He really should have specified a pound of flesh and blood in his bond. I think there's a reason that he didn't, but I won't go into that now. But it's certainly his first mistake. His second mistake is one that Jews have made for thousands of years -- it's the mistake that the German Jews made in the 1930s, for instance. Shylock believes himself to be a citizen of Venice. He lives there, he pays his taxes there, he does business with the people there, he presumably got married there, his daughter was presumably born there, he might even have been born there. But Shylock is not a citizen of Venice. He's an alien, and therefore subject to a special law regarding attempted murder against a citizen. It's this law that brings down the penalty that destroys him in the end, leaving him alone and destitute, no longer part of the Jewish community, but certainly not accepted into the Christian one even at his conversion, for, while the Venetians are blind in many ways, they are smart enough to know that a forced convert is often not a convert at all.
This is an excellent movie, though it's not a comedy. It isn't even very funny, though there are one or two moments that evoke mild giggles. It's a drama about ugly, nasty people doing ugly, nasty things to each other. Some people pay consequences and some people don't, and that distribution is manifestly unfair. Radford's genius is that he shows us this story beautifully and eloquently, sparing no one. You see every last bit of ugliness and every last bit of pain that this ugliness causes, and you see the beautiful, careless people walking away from their messes without a backward glance. And you see the chain at work. You see people who can be both sinners and sinned against, and how both affect their actions.
The Merchant of Venice isn't a comedy. It hasn't been a comedy for many years. Instead, it's a powerful, affecting drama about real people and the compromises they make in life. Go see it, if you haven't already.