Richard III is a great play, even judged purely within Shakespeare’s canon. One of his greatest tragedies, and almost indisputably the finest of his historical pieces, with all sorts of quotable bits. It mutilates the actual events of Richard of Gloucester’s accession and reign, but who cares? Be honest.

Al Pacino certainly doesn’t care. And in the carefree mid-90s, he set out to show the world how his favourite play should be performed. Looking for Richard is essentially a documentary based around Pacino’s attempts to stage the ultimate production of Richard III. Apparently Pacino’s directorial debut, critics cooed over the heavyweight cast and ponderings on the contemporary relevance of the Bard, and awards were duly showered over the film.

Pacino presents himself as a literary psychopath here, stalking around US streets to find the one man IN THE WORLD he hasn’t already asked about Shakespeare’s plays. His cast and crew occasionally joke about his obsessive perfectionism as big Al pontificates about making Shakespeare modern and things.

The film’s form alternates between Pacino finding pedestrians to assault, Pacino grilling actors and academics about the play so that he can ignore or sneer at their advice, Pacino upsetting the all star cast of his Richard III production and, increasingly as the film lurches to its muddled final reel, scenes from the production itself. All in an effort to find the ‘heart’ of the play. The viewer gets the sense that there’s some kind of botched metaphor in play, that Pacino’s obsession with the play is somehow a reflection of Gloucester’s obsession with the crown. It doesn’t work.

Looking for Richard’s faults range from the trifling to the outright unforgivable. Pacino’s trip to Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford is a petty crime. He and his producer pretend they have ‘stumbled’ upon the birthplace house via the back garden, when in fact entry to the garden is only possible through the house. Permissible artistic license, I don’t have any issue with it.

The trouble is that the Birthplace is a deeply boring tourist trap. As Pacino wanders around it pretending to be inspired, the film misses one of many opportunities to be interesting. In the bedroom where the Poet was actually born lies the only interesting feature of the house. Great poets and writers have long made a habit of etching their names into the glass of the window. Pacino is clearly staring straight at Oscar Wilde’s piece of vandalism for several moments, but makes no attempt to include the ONLY notable feature in his film, settling instead for a boring shot of two men in an unremarkable low-ceilinged room. Still, I suppose this is still fairly small beer.

Of much greater worry to me, as soon as the subject was raised, was Pacino’s repeated insistence that Shakespeare is really relevant to modern life, and his promise that he will bring this out in the production. Bringing Shakespeare up to date is an old promise, which really just means that the director intends to use people who can’t act, or ethnic minorities, or lesbians, or a dance soundtrack, or any other gimmick to avoid engaging with the text. Sure enough, he’s soon stalking the streets looking for poor people to molest on the subject. I go to the theatre a lot, but if I was hijacked by a rampaging Pacino on the way to HMV, I think the best I could do would be, ‘Shakespeare who? Look, take what you want but don’t hit my face.’

So, the star of the Godfather, Carlito’s Way and Devil’s Advocate wants to make a wild and relevant Richard III? Sounds good, doesn’t it? He’s got advice on the play from such heavyweights as Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi and some academics who you’ve never heard of (so they MUST be good), not to mention an all-star cast with Kevin Spacey and Winona Ryder and EVERYTHING. This is going to be good, I thought as the first of the scenes from the actual play began. This is going to be even better than when I saw David Troughton do it really well, or when Robert Lindsay did it quite well but kept forgetting his lines.

And then there’s Al Pacino in a big crown and cape with a hunchback and a stupid screeching voice.

No, really.

After several ranting minutes of self-aggrandisement, Michael Corleone presents the fruits of his researches, and his portrayal of the tyrant King is simply a shallow parody of Larry Olivier’s hunchbacked monster, complete with a wicked laugh straight from Wizard of Oz.

‘I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long,’ he sneers, and you’re reminded of a pantomime villain, the sort who comes on at the start of the second act and tells the children he’s poisoned their ice cream.

But that, even that, pales into insignificance next to the towering ineptitude of Kevin Spacey’s ‘performance’ as Buckingham. It’s just dreadful, with less plausibility than his cameo as Dr Evil in the third Austin Powers film. And many of the others are about as bad. Winona Ryder is more Alien Resurrection than Edward Scissorhands, and none of them can quite decide whether they’re supposed to be doing a British accent or not.

Other disgusting moments include the debate on why Richard needs to marry Elizabeth. The cast don’t understand the dramatic or political necessity, and the producer starts screaming that Al knows more about the play than any stiff-arsed Brit. There’s a carefully-scripted piece of spontaneous banter as Pacino knights him and then we cut to an academic claiming he doesn’t know why Richard needs this second marriage. Pacino invents some spurious motivation for his character and everyone is happy.

Everyone except any history students, literature students, actors or anyone else who’s READ THE PLAY, that is.

Basically, I suppose the sections of the play succeed in that the subtext is clear and renders the commentaries superfluous (for all that Spacey is rubbish in this, we can see his Buckingham is reluctant to kill two children in cold blood for no good reason without him spending three minutes telling us so behind the scenes). Also, the documentary scenes succeed in that they tell a scary story about what can happen when a star starts to believe their own publicity. Many of the talking heads interviewed are terribly witty and charming and offer some interesting personal views on Shakespeare, acting and Richard III. It’s just a shame Al didn’t pay more attention to them before embarking on a production so old-fashioned that even the Globe Theatre would shudder. And if he was determined to pursue such a pointless vanity project, he could at least have got some decent money behind him. His vision of Bosworth Field is just embarrassing. A grassy hill with him, a man in a silly hat, taking ten minutes to get shot full of arrows. It’s like Boromir’s heroic death at the end of Fellowship of the Ring only, let’s be blunt, without Sean Bean.

Essentially, the moral of the film is that Shakespeare is indeed shockingly relevant to our modern world, but that you don’t need Al Pacino to tell you so.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above