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| The Merchant of Venice | 
 enlarge | Director: Michael Radford
Actors: Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins
Studio: MGM Home Ent. (Europe) Ltd
Category: DVD
List Price: £15.99
Buy New: £2.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (19 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2433
Format: Anamorphic, Pal
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Parental Guidance
Media: DVD
Running Time: 127 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5050070027969
ASIN: B00075HULA
Release Date: April 11, 2005
Theatrical Release Date: 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Rarely has The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's most complex plays, looked as ravishingly sumptuous as in this adaptation, directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino). In a decadent version of renaissance Venice, a young nobleman named Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes, Shakespeare in Love) seeks to woo the lovely Portia (Lynn Collins), but lacks the money to travel to her estate. He seeks support from his friend, the merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons); Antonio's fortune is tied up in sea ventures, so the merchant offers to borrow money from a Jewish moneylender, Shylock (Al Pacino). But Shylock holds a grudge against Antonio, who has routinely treated the Jew with contempt, and demands that if the debt is not repaid in three months, the price will be a pound of Antonio's flesh. The Merchant of Venice is famous as a "problem play"--the gritty matters of moneylending and anti-Semitism sit uncomfortably beside the fairy tale elements of Portia and Bassanio's romance, and some twists of the plot can seem arbitrary or even cruel. The strength of Radford's intelligent and passionate interpretation is that he and the excellent cast invest the play's opposing facets with full emotional weight, thus making every question the play raises acute and inescapable. Irons is particularly compelling; kindness and blind prejudice sit side by side in his breast, rendering the clashes in his character as vivid as those in the play itself. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 A masterpiece dumbed down for the masses October 10, 2008
I LOOKED FORWARD TO RELISHING THE DUKE OF ARAGON's WONDROUS SPEECH, SURELY ONE OF THE FINEST IN ALL THE BARDS PLAYS, TO WHIT "THE FOOL MULTITUDE WHO JUDGE BY SHOW, CARING ONLY FOR WHAT THE FOND EYE DOTH TEACH ... I PARAPHRASE....TO SEE ITS NOT THERE! AND THEN IT STRUCK ME< IT MIGHT INSULT 99% OF THE AUDIENCE, WHO DO INDEED JUDGE BY SHOW, AND WOULD TURN OFF IN A HUFF! GOODBYE PACINO,I CAN NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS,LIKE HAMLET WITHOUT HAMLET!
 The tragic innuendo of Shakespeare's language is missed August 19, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This play by Shakespeare is worth a pound of gold, at least. It reveals with crudity one side of Shakespeare and Shakespeare's time most people would like to ignore: his supposed anti-Semitism. Everyone wants to ignore it because no one can see the double talk Shakespeare is a great master of. In his days Jews were seen as vultures, tolerated vultures but vultures all the same. Of course Shakespeare could have avoided dealing with the subject. He did deal with it several times. The Saracen in Titus Andronicus is another heroic case. He also had to deal with it because of what was happening around him. Shakespeare was a conscious and socially oriented mirror of his time. His theatre was committed to the real world. He managed to survive longer than his friend and competitor Marlowe because he probably was more prudent and careful. He might have avoided the dangerous spots, nocturnal or diurnal. But even so, he had an art that Marlowe never had. He knew how to speak with a forked tongue, he knew double entendre, he knew double talk and he had many tongues in his many cheeks; This is the case with this particular play and the film, I must say, does not totally show this duplicity. Apart from the famous tirade on the Jew who bleeds when you prick him with a needle, the rest is not seen or shown, and yet it is said. It is not clearly exploited how the ruthlessness and the pitilessness of Skylock is totally and even with a multiplied force inverted and applied to Shylock by the good Christians who do not show the slightness pity or forgiveness or mercy towards the Jew once he is defeated. And the double language is quite obvious in the fact that the learned doctor is an impersonation (note in Shakespeare's time the two women would have been played by two men and then the two women, who would have been men, or rather boys, would have disguised as men) and this does not work today at all the same way since the two women are real women. A false doctor and false man, who is a false woman under that first skin, and who is a real boy under that second skin is speaking the law, justice, truth. What a lie! The only one who is true to his word is Shylock, even if his word is ruthless, but where is the mercy these good Christians were preaching to him, once they have won their case? All that law Shakespeare defends is shown, in the tone of a tragic comedy, as a big lie, as a farce, as a disguise of any truth, and the final episode of the two un-givable rings that were sworn never to be given away and were given to pay the services of two liars and disguised tricksters after the big farce of the use of law to pitilessly fool and victimize a Jew is the most beautiful piece of underground meaning. This is contained in Shakespeare in the balancing act he plays in which any binary element is balance (perfection being four) and any ternary element is disruption. In the "IF" little dialogue of the end Bassanio in four lines tries to build a square that never comes and the four "I" are the only real balanced element surrounded by three "gave" , five "the ring", etc. And Portia can answer with a perfect ternary structure revealing how false his reasoning is, but she is the liar, she is the serpent who forced Bassanio into giving the ring, she is the one who was who she was not and who is who she was not either. The accuser once again is a false Daniel. Daniel saved Suzanne from a lie. Portia saved Antonio with the unjust law of Venice enforced by a lying tongue, hers that was his disguising hers. That's how Shakespeare was being witty with anti-Semitism and thus distancing himself from it. Imagine the wit of the man Bassanio telling the boy playing Portia she/he will be his bedfellow and he will let Her/him lie with Her/him when he is absent. Most of the time Shakespeare uses disguises to reveal some good things like love. Here he uses disguises to reveal the forked tongues with which all these Christians are speaking. The film does not show it and prefers adding some images that exonerate the director from the accusation whereas he should exonerate Shakespeare from it, because Shakespeare does not deserve it.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Wow! May 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I recently watched this in my English class. We are studying merchant of venice. I could get along with this film without getting confused. The topless women were pointless, and I pictured Salarino and Solanio different but never mind. Al Pacino-wow!!brilliant. my friends and i agreed that he was the best.you couldn't help but feel sorry for him when he found out Jessica had gone with his money, with the crying "jessica." We actually clapped when he finished the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech. Very powerful. Brilliant film.
 Great drama, disappointing comedy. March 27, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
A great problem with Shakespeare comedies is that they are difficult to translate to the big screen. Whilst MOV is not, strictly speaking, a comedy perhaps (not sure if Ben Johnson classified it as such), it nevertheless is imbued with much comedy. The casket scenes with the unsuitable suitors, for example, might have been more amusing and similarly so the denouement - portia and nerissa's discovery of the traded rings.
Dramatically and visually speaking, however, this film version is a treat - particularly in the courtroom scene while Pacino and Irons as the play's perhaps two most important characters are in fine form.
Al Pacino's shylock interpretation is played as a particularly miserable usurer Jew: an embittered wretch moulded by Venetian cruelty and oppression. His bargaining for the pound of flesh at the beginning of the play is suitably ambiguous regarding whether or not it is intended to be taken seriously and whether or not his offer to Antonio is in fact an act of generosity given that the loan, if repaid in time, would be interest free.
It is easy to sympathise with the character's need for revenge given that which befalls him thereafter, but his seeming complete inability to forgive during the courtroom scene makes us rather side with the ostensibly more merciful venetians again...until they decide to completely humiliate him and take half what he owns and forcibly convert him to Christianity. This is brought out in this film production with Portia shown to be the main instigator of a fairly aggressive form of Venetian justice.
The juxtaposition of Antonio and Shylock as extreme examples of venetian society is clearly in evidence here. The former symbolizes unbounded generosity, even beyond his means; the latter symbolizes extreme tightness with all things monetary; both, however, are clearly afflicted with weltschmerz perhaps owing to their inability to find some measure of acceptance for that which represents the opposite to which they value most.
In this sense the friction between the two values, necessary for any democratic society to be functional and viable, is clearly expressed. The miserly usurer depends on the merchant, the libertine merchant depends on the usurer, and the entire superficial liberal ethos of the rest of society depends on both - the scapegoat and the martyr.
The denouement is done well enough although again is short on comedy. We understand well enough the need for the new generation of venetians to grow to embrace the responsibility that is required of a democratic, open society - a theme clearly resonant for modern western societies.
 charismatic but unbelievable March 3, 2007
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
I could give it three and a half stars but not four. One for Pacino (and Irons). Half for making Shakespear watchable for the first half of the film. Half for the benefit of the doubt on losing my suspension of disbelief for the last half of the film (the film had lost me emotionally but my mind was still working intellectually). Half for making me think about the issues in the play and half for making me think about Shakespear and his contemporary audience. The last half would be another benefit of the doubt to Shakespear himself who always seems to disapoint me when i watch a play but makes me think for a while afterwards and in retrospect the play grows on me.
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