Filmmaker Michael Radford is learning firsthand what a slew of theater directors could have told him.
Staging “The Merchant of Venice,” even in a prestigious big-screen adaptation with Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino, is a no-win proposition.
On one side are scholars such as Ron Rosenbaum, author of “Explaining Hitler.” In his column in the New York Observer, Rosenbaum lambasted Radford’s “misguided” film — the first-ever screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s bitter brew of romance, farce and tragedy — for “sanitizing” the play of its anti-Semitism.
But a moviegoer at the Q&A after a New York screening expressed the opposite view. “I love this film, but it’s too painful for me,” she told Radford. “I’m a survivor, and it is anti-Semitic and you can’t get away from it.”
In a recent interview at a San Francisco hotel, the British director was friendly but a tad defensive about “Merchant,” which opens Jan. 14 in the Bay Area. He seemed surprised by some of the criticism aimed at the film, which takes a sympathetic view of the Jewish “villain” Shylock.
“Many great Jewish actors have taken the role of Shylock, from Jacob Adler in 1903 through to Dustin Hoffman,” Radford notes. “It’s not a part that Jewish actors avoid. [But] it is controversial, because when you first read it there’s so much anti-Semitic language in it that it just sticks in your throat. And I have to say, I think it’s anachronistic. I think that a lot of it is just the way that people talked [back then].”
Radford trimmed many of those lines as he devised the screenplay. But there’s no getting around the discrimination and loathing that Shylock endures, both as a Jew and as a moneylender.
“I had to be specific because otherwise most of the people out there have no idea what the concept of usury is,” Radford explains. “You go to a bank, you borrow money, you pay interest. The thought that it was forbidden is a concept you have to get across. Otherwise the play makes no sense.”
As a result of being true to Shakespeare’s text, Radford frets that audiences will see “Merchant” solely as a Christian-Jewish tale.
“It’s about the way we live in a multicultural society, and the way that we treat each other,” he declares. “We’re no longer in the 20th century and the world has changed. Yes, there are anti-Semitic movements still and we have to beware of those, but we have to beware of them in the way we have to beware of all racial intolerance, not just specifically Jewish history.”
Radford was the toast of the film world a decade ago for “Il Postino” (“The Postman”), the Italian film that garnered him an Oscar nomination for best director and countless other prizes. So he likely expected to get the benefit of any doubts about a “Merchant” film.
He’s also an internationalist, with homes in Los Angeles and London, whose life transcends borders. His father was a British officer based in India, descended from a long line of military men. Radford’s mother was an Austrian Jew on course to swim in the 1940 Olympics, until the Anschluss precipitated her dismissal from the team in 1936 and convinced her father to move the family to Bombay.
“I have to say I didn’t grow up with any Jewish culture,” says Radford, who was born in New Delhi. “Once I asked my mother why, and she just said, ‘I’ve seen so much done in the name of religion, I’m not interested.'”
Shylock has seen more than his share, also, and has endured the burden of living in a ghetto.
“I see Shylock as a man whose dignity is constantly affronted in his life,” Radford asserts. “He can take it, and all the other [Jews] can, too. That’s how you tolerate this stuff, because you have your own community. When he sees his daughter run off, that’s when it all breaks down for him. He experiences a rage, which is uncontrollable. It’s not Jewish, it’s human.”
“William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice” opens Jan. 14 throughout the Bay Area.