'Merchant' falls just a bit short

The play's anti-Semitic slant can't be whitewashed.
By PHIL VILLARREAL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Shakespeare's most controversial work is probably "The Merchant of Venice," which has been cinematically adapted for the first time in the sound era.
The play is a comedy that courses with the anti-Semitism of the playwright's day and place. Blithe romantic misunderstandings intercut with the through line of an over-the-top Jewish villain setting up for a disastrous fall. The racism of the source material can be excused as ignorance -- Shakespeare lived in an England in which Jews were banned, and historians speculate he never met a Jew. Still, his Shylock is instilled with the pan-Shakespearean blessing of being drawn as wholly human, with motivations and inner conflicts well explored, and evil deeds, if not justified, at least explained.
Screenwriter-director Michael Radford ("Il Postino") took on the daunting task of re-interpreting the text with modern enlightenment. While maintaining Shakespeare's plot outline and golden dialogue -- there's no discarding "all that glitters isn't gold" or "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"-- Radford reshapes the comedy into a tragedy broken up by light, silly moments.
Entertaining and flawed
The experiment mostly succeeds, although the film, bejeweled with an A-list cast and a late-December New York-Los Angeles release, fell short of its Oscar aspirations. What resulted is not one of the best of the year, or even one of the canonical Shakespeare movie adaptations, such as Laurence Olivier's 1948 "Hamlet" and Kenneth Branagh's 1989 "Henry V," but an entertaining, imaginative, yet flawed repertory.
The setting is 16th-century Venice, in which Jews are forced to live in a ghetto, permitted to travel through the city only while wearing red hats and despised because they lend money for interest, a practice that Christianity forbade, yet which was necessary to keep the economy running.
Radford sets the stage with copious titles that run down societal norms of the era, meant almost as a preliminary apology for the indecency to follow.
The words are rendered moot by a jarring scene, referred to but not spelled out in Shakespeare's text, of Antonio (Jeremy Irons), the Christian merchant of the title, spitting in the face of Jewish moneylender Shylock, played by Al Pacino with implosive restraint.
The conflict
Antonio is mired in gloom because of his not-so-subtle attraction to his younger friend, Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes), who is madly in love with the unattainable Portia (Lynn Collins). Bassanio says he needs 3,000 ducats to court Portia in style. Such is Antonio's devotion that he crawls to Shylock, his enemy, to secure a loan that will help ensure that the object of his desire can never be his. Bassanio gets money he probably doesn't even really need, at risk of a pound of Antonio's very flesh as bond.
Shylock's disturbing request for the loan term doesn't fit the dramatic motivations of Radford's version as well as it would an outlandishly comedic act by an over-the-top villain/racist caricature. Sympathy is granted to the character via Pacino's quiet confidence and a twist involving a betrayal by Shylock's daughter, Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson).
Subtle humor flickers throughout, especially in the twisting, double-meaning verbiage and a few instances of deceptive cross-dressing. There's also a fun, gimmicky plot construct in which Portia's father's will states that potential suitors must choose between three chests, with one holding the prize, sort of a former-day "Let's Make a Deal." Radford soft-pedals into the climactic tear-jerking scene, a court case in which Shylock can taste demented victory in the fulfillment of his contract with Antonio, but faces the loss of his fortune, family and religion.
An ending likely originally written to be hilariously triumphant now plays as an equally devastating sad and miserable downfall.
Shakespeare's dense talents continue to endure and, with the help of modern artists, evolve through the eons.