It is a mark of bravery, if not recklessness, for Michael Radford to bring Shakespeare's \The Merchant of Venice"" to the contemporary screen. Not only is the play's pivotal character, the infamous Shylock, infused with vicious anti-Semitism, the play's other tensions between romantic comedy and revenge drama, love and loyalty, justice and mercy, threaten to overwhelm its 138 minutes. Despite these obstacles, the film succeeds by embracing, rather than ignoring, these challenging inconsistencies.
""Merchant"" follows the young nobleman Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes), who seeks to woo the wealthy Portia (Lynn Collins). In order to do so, Bassanio obtains a loan from his mentor, Antonio (Jeremy Irons). Without any available capital, Antonio agrees to bond himself to revenge-minded moneylender, Shylock (Al Pacino). Shylock, seeking redress for real and imagined wrongs, grants the loan with a pound of Antonio's flesh as collateral.
Most of the film is spent moving between parallel plots-the polite comedy of Bassanio's courtship and the gritty drama of Shylock's descent into self-destruction. It often feels as if one is watching two different films. Antonio's default on the loan leads to a devastating courtroom climax where these two worlds collide in a tension-racked conclusion.
Radford refuses, either in language or setting, to make the play more accessible to modern audiences. Instead he emphasizes the exotic decadence of 16th century Venice, with the city's natural beauty accented by sets and costumes that echo the paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Retaining the deep shadows of a world without electric light serves admirably to create an atmosphere of intrigue and suspense.
The high production values of ""Merchant"" would be in vain, however, without actors both willing and able to breathe life into Shakespeare's 400-year-old dialogue. Jeremy Irons brings a suitably suffering gravitas to the role of the unfortunate Antonio while Joseph Fiennes further polishes his repertoire of ""sexy period men"" as Bassanio. Lynn Collins makes a spirited debut in a leading role as Portia, pulling off a thoroughly Shakespearian gender-bending sequence that harbingers great things to come.
None of these performances would matter, however, without Pacino's masterful handling of the delicate role of Shylock, refusing to descend to either the level of bigoted caricature or politically correct victimhood. Pacino instead uses his extensive experience playing ""men on the edge"" to emphasize his characters essential humanity, in both rage and suffering.
While unflinching in dealing with the play's anti-Semitism, Radford seems intimidated by its romantic and comedic elements, treating them as a necessary evil. The effect is to make a solid third of the film, feel vaguely tangential to the viewer.
Despite this awkwardness, it generally succeeds in bringing the Bard's timeless insights-not just on religious intolerance, but on gender, friendship, loyalty, and love-to a new generation of viewers. In an age of focus group-driven cinematic pandering, ""The Merchant of Venice"" is to be commended for bringing a well-told unsettling tale to the screen.
