Baz Luhrmann's imprint is stamped all over Romeo + Juliet, a showcase feature for the Australian director's signature aesthetic of bombast and excess. The film is the second in what Luhrmann calls his "Red Curtain Trilogy"—Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Moulin Rouge! (2001). Like all of these films, and especially so given its dramaturgical origins, Romeo + Juliet is a sumptuous exploration of theatricality and spectacle. Luhrmann had honed his highly mannered, stylistic approach to film-making with Strictly Ballroom, a film about aspiring ballroom dancers in Australia. With Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann offered an even more ambitious, developed example of his cinematic vision—a stylistic grab-bag that plunders from genres as disparate as the music video, the soap opera, and the coming-of-age narrative, in a way that is designed to entertain and exhilarate the viewer. Fireworks, explosions, extreme close-ups, ostentatious transitions, slow-motion, fast-motion, and dramatic color blocking are all stylistic cornerstones of Luhrmann's maximalist aesthetic.
Luhrmann spends much of his directorial energy revamping the play in a contemporary cultural and technological environment. Every scene and shot strives to couch the archaic in the familiar—for example, the opening prologue is read like a nightly newscast, and the line "Civil blood makes civil hands unclean," blares at the viewer from the headline of a newspaper. Luhrmann re-signifies references to swords in the text with a close-up of the names of the revolver models the Montagues and Capulets wield: "Sword 9mm." The Capulets and Montagues are not merely families but corporations—their names are emblazoned on billboards throughout Verona Beach like commercial brands. All of these directorial choices affirm Luhrmann's commitment to creating a relentlessly postmodern Romeo + Juliet, one that is informed by stylistic pastiche and late-capitalist alienation. This prolific inventiveness caused Janet Maslin to wonder in her review of the film for The New York Times, "Where is the audience willing to watch a classic play thrown in the path of a subway train?"
Critics have remarked upon the way in which Luhrmann's camera tracks DiCaprio's Romeo like a hawk, and the director has commented that he would not have been interested in making the film without DiCaprio as the lead. Romeo's introduction, smoking a cigarette in the twilight as "Talk Show Host" by Radiohead plays on the soundtrack, is perhaps one of the most indelible images of popular cinema in the 1990s, delivering an avatar of rebellious-yet-sensitive, "bad boy" male desirability that hearkens back to matinee idols like James Dean and Marlon Brando. Luhrmann was also unafraid to insert contemporary political, racial, and sexual themes in the work— the pious, Latino/-a Capulets seem to despise the Caucasian Montagues and African-American Mercutio, and the film implies Tybalt impugns Mercutio's queerness. One could argue the film constitutes a political comment on American corporate greed and gun control as well, given that the warring family empires are locked in a battle for influence and power, and willingly allow that their younger kin must carry around firearms, which are completely integrated into the cultural fabric of Verona Beach.
