Click here for info on the Print Journal (and to purchase your copy)!

Movie Review: The Merchant of Venice

By William Sternman

-------------------------------------

The Merchant of Venice
Starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, and Lynn Collins
Directed by Michael Radford

In strictly Elizabethan terms, Shakespeare’s play is a comedy, since the hero (Antonio), the merchant in question, accomplishes what he sets out to do. In actuality, the play is a crypto-tragedy, since the real hero, Shylock, is prevented from doing what he sets out to do and, like Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, is destroyed in the attempt.

Because Shylock is not the politically correct, scrubbed and sanitized Jew that John Garfield portrayed in Gentleman’s Agreement (no hooked nose, no repulsive nostril hair, no Middle European accent), the play has often been labeled anti-Semitic. It is not anti-Semitic, but it is about anti-Semitism and how the prejudice withers its perpetrators as well as their victims.

Of all the characters in the play, only Shylock has a reason, if not a justification, for his malice. Like all the Jews in the movie, who are forced to live in a ghetto and wear identifying red hats (like the Nazis’ yellow Star of David insignias) when they leave it, he is despised by the Christians simply because he is a Jew. In the opening scene of the movie, when he greets Antonio, the so-called Christian spits in his face. (Nietzsche put it best when he pointed out that “The last Christian died on the cross.”)  Paradoxical as it may seem, Shylock suffers this indignity with almost Christ-like forbearance.

Like a certain modern-day political leader who goes bleeding heart in hand to the Old Europe he scorned when he needs its help, Antonio turns to Shylock when he needs money to help his friend Bassanio woo Portia.

Of all the characters in the movie, Shylock is also the most human. In one of Shakespeare’s most moving soliloquies, Shylock lets us see into his all-too-human heart:

He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? 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. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

Antonio (Jeremy Irons), on the other hand, can only maunder about his ships at sea. Although, compared to the other bubble-headed Christians, he at least has a certain gravitas.

The Merchant of Venice is also about hypocrisy. Since Christians are forbidden by the Bible to practice usury (lending money at interest), they practice it by proxy, using Jews to outflank the law. This lets them practice what they preach against. It reminds me of a high-minded statesman in our own time who manages to practice torture, which he deplores, by proxy, using “extraordinary rendition.” (You would think that the very Orwellian sound of this euphemism would warn politicians away from it, but, alas, they all have tin ears as well as stone hearts.)

Shylock himself points out another kind of Christian hypocrisy:

You have among you many a purchased slave
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts
Because you bought them.
Shall I say to you
’Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.
Why sweat they under burdens?. . . . . .
You will answer ’The slaves are ours.’

Does this represent the mercy that Portia prattles on about in the trial scene?

This much-quoted and lauded oration is so hypocritical that it could just as easily have come out of the smirking mouth of that unabashed arch-hypocrite Richard III. Portia not only shows Shylock no mercy, but she torments her own husband about the ring that she herself took from him under false pretenses. Why? So she could torment him about it.

This leads us to another subject of the play that you almost never hear about, what the Germans call schadenfreude—the malicious gloating over someone else’s misfortune. Although Shylock is the putative villain of the play, he is not the only object of this variety of sadism. Bassanio and Gratiano are set up by their wives to be victims too.

Another reason that Shylock may be considered the true hero of Merchant is that when he isn’t onstage or onscreen, the play descends into a kind of Renaissance reality show. Who will pick the right casket and win the beauteous, not to mention wealthy, bachelorette of Belmont for his bride? Will Bassanio be able to convince Portia of the legitimacy of his giving away her ring…or will he hear the dreaded, “You’re fired!”

There’s even a suggestion by the disguised Portia that Bassanio is going to have a lot of explaining to do when he gets home about this deep and abiding love that he and the older Antonio feel for each other. Stay tuned!

Shylock is like the Downs-syndrome child at a kid’s birthday party. You go through all the motions of making him feel welcome while silently praying that he will be gone before the normal guests arrive.

He is the roach on the exquisite wedding cake that adapter-director Michael Radford has made of Sixteenth Century Venice. He is the unsightly dwarf who stands out among the lovely guests (chief among them, Joseph Fiennes as the beauteous Bassanio and Lynn Collins as the almost-as-beauteous Portia.)

He is the part that every great actor should aspire to. Al Pacino is certainly up to it, but here he is so lost in the red-carpet crowd of infantile glams (the nose and the accent don’t help) that you find yourself looking over his shoulder to see what new celeb has just arrived. Is that Jessica in a hotter-than-hot gold-embroidered off-the-shoulder gown with a tiered skirt by Tommy Hilfiger? Or could it be Lorenzo, looking every bit as lovely? OMG, that really is Brad! Be still, my heart!

If only Shakespeare had been able to bring Shylock full front and center and give him the empathic and compassionate treatment he gives his other great, flawed heroes—Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Brutus—there would be a Shylock to ruffle up your spirits.

-------------------------------------

William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

© 2005 Me Three