Making the Connection

trials and tribulations: Shylock (Al Pacino, right) gets his day in court.

A new Merchant of Venice links anti-Semitism to a long list of social ills.

The Merchant of Venice

by Cindy Fuchs

Michael Radford's version of The Merchant of Venice closes with Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson) looking out at the canals that crisscross her hometown. Surrounded throughout the piece by the emotions stirred up by her moneylender father, Shylock (Al Pacino), and his client, the titular merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons), not to mention the rowdy romance between Portia (Lynn Collins) and Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes), Jessica is at last alone, and distressed. In her choice to run off with a Christian boy, the Jewish girl has abandoned her father and her culture and is thus unable to return.

Many takes on Merchant leave Jessica on the sidelines. But Radford makes her a focus on the basis of this very point, that she feels and looks cast off, powerless and frustrated. Her battles with her conservative father increase his own sense of outrage and resistance, such that his usurious deal with Antonio leads to communal and personal crisis. When Jessica abandons Shylock for pretty (and here, rather vacant) Lorenzo (Charlie Cox), the old man is enraged and confirmed in his belief that the gentiles mean to take away all — his sense of tradition, his wealth, his family. So he seeks vengeance on Antonio, demanding literal payment for his forfeit of his loan, the notorious "pound of flesh."

Jessica's time on screen is brief compared to Radford's star players. In a Venice that fairly shimmers with natural-seeming light (shots beautifully composed by cinematographer Benoît Delhomme), the leads embody the play's driving contradictions, tilting from ambition to generosity, frailty to grit. In the play's more famous roles, the filmmaker sorts out compelling emotional details, including Bassanio's carelessness, Antonio's yearning, Portia's cutting insight, Shylock's loss and bitterness.

So you can't mistake Shylock's motivation, the film opens by explaining the abuse of Jews in 16th-century Venice. In Shylock's first appearance, he is spit on by the arrogant Antonio, exposing the latter's vulgarity in contrast to his self-satisfied sense of refinement. By contrast, Shylock appears hoary and stooped, and righteously incensed. Pacino (thankfully) backs off, containing Shylock's temper, simultaneously vile and vulnerable, hardly a simple balance in a play that has been accused of reinforcing anti-Semitism as often as exposing it.

The film takes another controversial tack in revealing a nuanced erotic tension between Antonio and Bassanio. This is reflected first in the effort Antonio makes to borrow 3,000 ducats so his dear friend might court the wealthy Portia. But it is also made visible in their exchanged glances, in Antonio's bedroom (where he hears of Bassanio's new devotion to Portia and Irons' face caves in on the news), and in the courtroom, where Shylock endeavors to argue his case, his right to Antonio's frankly meager flesh. In a climactic moment, Antonio's shirt is ripped open, to expose Irons' thin chest, his body suddenly a map of his sorrow, his suffering and his desire for the young man for whom he is about to sacrifice his very life.

In the courtroom, Bassanio is pushed aside when his new wife, Portia, takes over the proceedings. Disguising herself as a male lawyer, she enters this masculine forum to discover what disaster has drawn her husband from their first night's bed. Here she sees it: This is the space for men's business, the trading of ideas and possessions, the decision-making that puts value and cost on feelings. Portia is a clever, educated woman, and has little trouble outthinking the men around her, but in so doing, she is also left to wonder at their presumed entitlement. Her reaction to Antonio's bare, bony chest is telling; she's startled by the weakness of his flesh, even as she has previously understood him as a rival for her husband's attention.

Typical of Shakespeare's gender-switching plays, the conflicts, like the eventual revelations, emerge through a mix of witty banter and metaphor, comedy that speaks to pain. Though Portia-in-disguise pronounces the "mercy" that ideally governs Christian law, it's clear that she will have to educate Bassanio, whose cavalier attitude toward money and marriage has led to the central discords.

In the end, it is Jessica's silent appearance that brings order and a sort of meaning to all this cacophony. A close-up reveals that she has in fact retained the family heirloom — a ring — that her father thinks she has given away. In this instant, the film's interests become beautifully clear: her loss, Shylock's defeat, and the wealthy folks' willful ignorance are all part of the same social design.

The Merchant of Venice Directed by Michael Radford A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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