William Shakespeare is not usually considered the god- father of pulp fiction.
But the Bard's richly textured characters and high-octane plots become the ingredients of a gangland thriller in Cymbeline, which sets the action of the play of the same name in an anonymous American city in which outlaw bikers battle police.
Michael Almereyda's movie adaptation takes a troupe of rising stars and familiar faces – including Ed Harris, Ethan Hawke, Milla Jovovich, John Leguizamo and Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson – and puts them in black leather for a saga full of love, violence and revenge.
But the American director says any resemblance to a certain biker TV show is pure coincidence.
"I've had people wagging their finger and saying, 'It's from Sons of Anarchy' because that's based on Hamlet," Almereyda says, with a touch of weariness. "And it may be, but that's a natural conceit," he adds, given that Shakespeare is an inexhaustible source of material for movies and TV.
“He’s got more than 1,000 credits on IMDB, so he must be doing something that people find is rewarding.”
The director says the biker genre seemed to be a natural fit for the tribal relationships and “mythic, almost comic-book archetypes” in Shakespeare’s play about an ancient British king and his clashes with the Roman occupiers.
The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September last year, stars Harris as the head of the Britons motorcycle gang, fighting with police while juggling a complex family life.
Cymbeline's virtuous daughter (Johnson) is in love with a penniless gentleman (Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley), while his scheming second wife (Jovovich) and her rapacious son (Anton Yelchin) are embroiled in evil conspiracies.
The script trims but stays faithful to the twists and turns of the play, a mash-up of romance, humour and tragedy that is one of Shakespeare’s less-often performed works. Almereyda concedes that it is wild, messy and complicated.
“The core of it to me is about men and women relating to each other and mistrusting each other,” he says.
“The strands of jealousy and misdirected love and lust and the resulting confusion – that feels modern.”
This is hardly the first time Shakespeare has been given an American twist. After all, West Side Story is just Romeo and Juliet with singing street gangs. And Almereyda himself transplanted Hamlet to modern-day New York in a 2000 movie, also starring Hawke.
With Cymbeline, the director returns to what he calls "American Shakespeare", an approach he contrasts with the more formal rhythms of traditional English performance.
“It’s about being unapologetic about, if not our ignorance, our rawness,” he says. “It has to do with a more natural approach, not being bombastic, not being declamatory.”
For the actors, that meant some intense preparation and work to absorb Shakespeare’s verse.
“I’d be showering and saying my lines, brushing my teeth, going to the toilet – just constantly, constantly saying it and putting it in my mouth so it becomes really conversational,” said Leguizamo, who plays put-upon biker foot-soldier Pisanio.
The result – coming in at a little over 90 minutes – is vivid and pacey. Trade magazine Variety says the film "dazzles with its colours and textures" although The Hollywood Reporter felt nothing could disguise the play's underlying status "as a second-rate Romeo and Juliet".
Leguizamo – who played Tybalt in Baz Lurhmann's teen-friendly 1996 movie version of Romeo and Juliet – said he knew from experience how a film can hook younger viewers and "sucker them to like Shakespeare".
He says that as a teenager he thought Shakespeare "wasn't for me", until he saw Franco Zeffirelli's sensuous 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet.
“All of a sudden I was like, ‘This stuff is so beautiful’,” he says.
For Almereyda, comic books were the key to unlocking the works of the Bard.
"Marvel comics referenced Shakespeare, funnily enough," he says. "I was a pre-teen reading Shakespearean dialogue in Thor.
“It was a sort of midway drug to Shakespeare.”
artslife@thenational.ae
