last night: william shakespeare’s “the merchant of venice”
this is a handsome production which will likely finally be remembered only for pacino’s against all odds, restrained performance as shylock, giving us a hint of what might have become of him had scarface never happened. the film, of course, has a higher ambition than that and that is to take the play and make it about anti-semitism rather than a play shot through with the racism of its time from which only its poetry somewhat ambivalently rescues it (which is how i read it when i read it last). this sort of shift of emphasis in production is, i suppose, par for the course in the theater and i don’t really have a huge objection to it. but there are specific things that happen at the very beginning of the film that are not in the play, and which, while not huge, make me question if this is william shakespeare’s the merchant of venice. (and there are larger problems too–of which, more below.)
Continue reading looking for shylock