My quick response to Looking for Richard turns into a full-blown essay.

Like Shakespeare himself, I learned of the video Looking for Richard before I saw it - much in the same way so many of us know of Shakespeare before I read or watched anything of his. we are told that the work is good until we want to like it, decide to see it for ourselves, and find whether or not we are satisfied. The difference is that at this point, Shakespeare has at least lived up to my expectations.

I thought the acting was top-notch and would have loved to have seen a full-length adaptation of Richard III. In fact, a proper adaptation of the play alone would have sufficed to accomplish Pacino's mission of accessibility - to make it accessible through the acting and directing, and otherwise let the play speak for itself. Of course, the insight of the British and some American actors was extremely good; they know their stuff well. I think this Richard III travelogue would have been outstanding if our tour guide had been Gielgud or Branagh or Redgrave (their being British would have downplayed the "American" aspect of the study, but would have enhanced the "Shakespeare" aspect).

Unfortunately, with all due respect to Al Pacino - I still consider him a skilled actor - he leads us with a ninth- or tenth-grade understanding of Shakespeare. It would be wronge to accuse Pacino of talking down to his viewers; this can't be helped if he himself needs to be talked down to. My qualms that Pacino does not do Shakespeare full justice are certainly not helped in the scene where, in trying to make the play accessible, he decides to change the line in the opening soliloquy from "G of Edward's heirs" to "C of Edward's heirs." This is no mere superficial bastardization; Shakespeare chose the letter G for a reason - a reason that comes about explicitly and almost immediately afterwards with Clarence's "Because my name is George....[King Edward] from the cross-row plucks the letter G,/And says a wizard told him that by G/His issue disinherited should be;/And for my name of George begins with G,/It follows in his thought that I am he." Even changing the aforementioned line to "George of Edward's heirs" would have clarified the line in and of itself, while still maintaining the connection to Clarence's spiel.

This film is, of course, not entirely without merit. While I find myself somewhat aligning with Sara on my verdict on this, I agree with Bahar's comparison to the film to the NEA video. Looking for Richard is an introduction to Shakespeare, rather than an intense study of Shakespeare. Many audiences - i.e. the high school students and "common folk" Pacino addresses throughout the film - demand a simple spoonfeeding like this, rather than, for instance, a nutcracker and snow crab legs. I would probably be praising Looking for Richard had I been viewing it in the eighth or ninth grade, when to hear something like an explanation of iambic pentameter would have been useful to me. In this context, it is a much better idea to introduce Shakespeare through something like Richard III, rather than a "greatest hit" like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet.

Apropos to this class: the film even serves a great purpose to the whole intellectual, college-educated, Shakespeare-scholar crowd many of us fall into. It is more of a record of the first, rather than the second, word in the phrase American Shakespeare. Whether Pacino ever knew it or not, his film serves as a document on how, in America, Shakespeare is deified, with little or no understanding of his works, to those who do not understand him, or could care less about him. It is a sketch on the almost inevitable and sometimes necessary condescension and hackneyed explanation involved with the teaching of Shakespeare. I couldn't help thinking of an old piece from The Onion that illustrates excactly this point, albeit in a far more intentional, exaggerated manner:

"Shakespeare Was, Like, The Ultimate Rapper." - from The Onion, August 24, 2005.


Trieste 1910
Brooklyn 2008