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| One of Shakespeare’s finest plays is brought magically to life in this stunning adaptation starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes. Set in beautiful 16th Century Venice, The Merchant of Venice is an enthralling tale of greed, corruption, love and betrayal and is guaranteed to capture your imagination from beginning to end. “Pacino is extraordinary” (EMPIRE) in “One of the biggest British films of the decade” (THE TIMES).
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"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
Al Pacino delivers the performance of a lifetime in British director Mike Radford's masterful big screen interpretation of Shakespeare's most controversial play, The Merchant of Venice. Set in the picturesque Italian city some five hundred years ago, the story follows the hardships suffered by Jewish moneylender Shylock (Al Pacino), a man forced into his profession as a result of his faith, and despised because of it. Which hardly seems fair. So when a local merchant (Jeremy Irons) borrows a few quid and can't pay it back, who's to say that demanding a pound of his flesh instead is going too far?
"The Merchant of Venice is interesting because it is the most produced of all of Shakespeare's plays," says producer Cary Brokaw. Yet despite its many theatrical incarnations, it has rarely been filmed. "I think Shakespeare is sometimes perceived as a tough sell because there's a sanctimoniousness about his language and the words get in the way and eventually it just becomes verse."
That's exactly what director Michael Radford hoped to avoid, determined to shoot a cinematic version of the story that avoided the artificial theatricality of live performance. "Cinema demands a certain speed," he explains. "You get there faster not because the words are not beautiful in the cinema but because you see so much closer what people are feeling. They don't have to explain it to you. I just tried really to set it in as real a context as I possibly could, to make everyone feel as real as possible. I thought it might be rather fun to make a film of the play like a real movie, that affects you so that it actually grips you viscerally, so you care about the characters and you care about their dilemmas and all of those human flaws and weaknesses."
"I'm happy I didn't do the stage version of Shylock before I did this film," reveals Pacino, "because I think it helped me not to get into certain habits that the stage automatically leads you to because you have to project in theatre and it's a different style. So the Shylock I do is really a film performance. It's not a film Shylock but it's not the way, probably, I would do it on stage. It's just that with Shakespeare, there are times he gives you so much because he wrote for the theatre. I'm sure if he was alive today, and writing for films, a lot of these speeches would be different and they'd be cut down or sheered, turned into something else." Fellow thesp Joseph Fiennes agrees. "Michael's done a great adaptation and he's pared it right down. It's lean, it's fat free, it's to the point and it works beautifully with the camera. You can afford to cut a lot of those lines because that look can say so much between two people, and you don't get that on stage."
Hard though it is to overlook the anti-semitic overtones of this ancient play, Radford does at least focus as much on Shylock's grief as he does his brutality. Cleverly adapted for the big screen, beautifully shot with A-list leads (Pacino, Irons, Joseph Fiennes…) and a familiar supporting cast (Kris Marshall, Mackenzie Crook, John Sessions…), The Merchant of Venice is a skilled, rather than slavish adaptation of the Shakespeare story, told with great vigour and imagination. If you're new to Shakespeare, this is one of the most accessible of all his big-screen adaptations, a perfect introduction to the Bard's incredible works.
(C) MGM Home Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved
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