Romeo + Juliet at 30: how Baz Luhrmann made teens fall in love with Shakespeare

The maximalist, heart over head adaptation of the romantic tragedy made stars of its leads and became an English teacher’s most trusted weapon for Bard-averse students

Romeo + Juliet is not the most renowned or beloved of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is perhaps the most foundational. The 16th-century tragedy, a story of love-addled teenagers and white-hot resentment, is often an English student’s first introduction to the bard’s oeuvre – more accessible and relatable to teens, with its plaintive lust and histrionic mood swings, than the more austere machinations in, say, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. And if Romeo + Juliet is the young person’s entry to Elizabethan English, perhaps no version of it is more worthy of the term “gateway drug” than Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version, which reimagined Verona’s family feud as a tropical gang war and launched an army of teenage crushes with the faces of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

The maximalist interpretation of Shakespeare’s most lovelorn work, released 30 years ago this week (!), retains Elizabethan verse but announces its divergence from rigid classicism from the jump. Our scene is set in fair Verona beach by a news anchor via TV set, relaying the woe of two star-cross’d lovers before clips of civil strife. Fresh off his breakout success in 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, the Australian director boldly mapped the medieval story on to 90s tabloid fixations – grainy footage of violence in the streets, magazine headlines of capos and criminals, helicopter views of car chases and riots that recalled the media circus around the OJ Simpson chase two years prior. It is a movie that could have only been made in the 90s; Luhrmann’s vision of two warring families as rival gangs, replete with their own economic operations and marked territory, tapped into the era’s preoccupation with gangland as a source of transportive art, from movies to hip-hop, and as a conservative fixation for ideas on intrinsic criminality.

Luhrmann and his wife, costume designer Catherine Martin, reimagined Verona as a sun-scorched beach city, incorporating real locations – Mexico City’s famed Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and Chapultepec Palace, Veracruz’s Boca del Río – to convey an urban den of simultaneous reverence and decay. The Montagues, with their heedless hollering and open Hawaiian shirts, and the Capulets, urban cowboys in Cuban-heeled boots, nearly vibrate with loathing and brandish guns marked by Catholic iconography. Perhaps compensating for the at times impenetrable verse, Luhrmann cut and spliced and twirled the camera in a frenetic, at times literal firework display of manic energy. The film’s raucous shootouts and parties now read as an obvious precursor to Euphoria high school – these kids dressed up and showed out, popped ecstasy and ripped around town in souped-up cars. Watching a single scene, even the lovers’ infamous fish tank meet-cute, has the feel of chugging an energy drink.

As such, the blatantly youth-aimed film had plenty of detractors in its time. Critics dismissed it as vulgar and garish, but audiences turned out en masse; Romeo + Juliet made over $147m against a $14.5m budget, boosted in part by a period-defining soundtrack with needle drops from The Cardigans, Everclear, Radiohead and Garbage. (And of course, the song from that oft-replayed fish tank scene, Des’ree’s I’m Kissing You, became the ubiquitous soundtrack for couple-shipping montage videos on 2000s YouTube). By the time I first viewed the film in 2009 – like many, in high school English class, as part of my teacher’s bid to get us invested in Shakespeare – it was already considered a classic.

That my teacher’s bid worked is largely due to the performances of the film’s two luminous stars, both brimming with the type of uncut, untameable desire known only to youth. Romeo + Juliet, of course, was a movie about teenage obsession that sparked a million teenage obsessions with DiCaprio (including from yours truly, who cried in English class not over the lovers’ double suicide – soooo melodramatic of them! – but over the realization that youth is fleeting and I would never be with anyone so beautiful. Devastating!) But it is a 17-year-old Danes, in a role originally intended for a text-accurate 13-year-old Natalie Portman (correctly deemed too childlike next to a 21-year-old DiCaprio), that shines on a rewatch. Her beauty is wide-open and uncomplicated, her face shaded with feelings as fresh and fleeting as morning dew. When her face falls, upon realizing her lover’s suicide, you feel, too, the ear-ringing fall of one’s first galling disappointment, the lurch of a sickening comedown.

That is the genius of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet: it is a feelings-first movie, a portrait of teenage melodrama where all emotions exist only at full volume. That’s true for the highs – when the lip-locked lovers careen across a pool, or when Harold Perrineau’s Mercutio enters the scene with a high-kick in full silver drag to Kym Mazelle’s Young Hearts Run Free – as with the lows. In Luhrmann’s vision, Mercutio’s death at the hands of John Leguizamo’s Tybalt, a devilish sharpshooter with a soul patch, lands as equally tragic and torturous as the lovers. Perrineau stumbles, processes and curses both houses with such fervor as a real hurricane swept into Veracruz, that the rest of the film feels muted without him. And still, Romeo’s agonized poisoning, which frankly puts DiCaprio’s more famous death in the North Atlantic to shame, lands as a timeless gut-punch. So much youthful idealism and beauty, wasted on such petty grievances.

Luhrmann’s masterpiece more than transcended the more straightforward Shakespeare adaptations of the era, such as Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996), Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996) and Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999). It arguably inspired the many modernizations kicked off by the runaway success of 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You and continued by Easy A and She’s the Man. It quite evidently inspired a recent Broadway revival, starring Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, that borrowed the Romeo + Juliet styling and the film’s stir-crazy bombast. But nothing has quite captured the imagination, or imparted the hot blood coursing in Shakespeare’s literary characters, like those two cursed houses in Verona beach. Thirty years on, we are still waiting for the next truly great, pop culture-shifting Shakespeare moment.

Romeo + Juliet is available to watch on Hulu and HBO Max in the US, and on Disney+ in the UK and Australia