The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Dec 6th, 2009 by Debra Murphy
My two oldest and I drove fifty miles to an art house cinema several years ago to see the Michael Radford film adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s thorniest “Problem Plays”, The Merchant of Venice.
Fascinating how many of Shakespeare’s alleged Comedies–defined primarily by the fact that there’s a “happy ending” for the main characters–are actually Problem Plays, in which the happy endings begin to unravel on closer inspection. Merchant, as Problem Play, is of course made even more problematic by the the fact that, at its heart, it’s about a hard-hearted, miserly, and angry old Jewish money-lender who gets taught a merciless lesson in Mercy by a group of self-righteous Christians. The fact that we’re still producing and watching such a patently antisemitic bit of drama, when (say) Marlowe’s gross caricature The Jew of Malta has gone the way of the Dodo, is testament to Shakespeare’s genius as poet, dramatist, and all-around slippery fellow when it comes to trying to figure where he stands on, well, just about anything.
I don’t hesitate to say that as painful as this play is to watch at times, Michael Radford’s film is the best production I’ve yet seen of it. Except for a brief bit of historical scene-setting about antisemitism in the opening shots, Radford otherwise plays it straight and lets the characters speak for themselves, without the polemical apologetics one so frequently sees nowadays. Why do so many directors think the audience won’t “get it” unless he/she makes Shylock into some noble revolutionary hero, and Antonio a mustache-twirling villain?
The performances in this film are marvelous. Pacino plays a multilayered Shylock with great dignity, humanity, and surprising restraint, while Jeremy Irons gives us the first Antonio for whom I’ve been able to feel any significant sympathy. Yep, he’s a bigot down to his toenails when it comes to the despised Jews, but he’s also capable of true love and friendship, and sells the concept of Antonio’s many alleged virtues to an inherently skeptical audience. In the climactic trial scene, he plays the Merchant for what he is, in the flesh as it were: a terrified man about to have his heart cut out; I almost fainted with him.
So, yes, see this film. Just expect to come out more troubled than entertained, sympathetic to and repelled by every character, in equal measure…which is about the best one can expect from this ornery play.
