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Rating: There are texts, although written for theater, that do not shine on stage. Richard III is one of these. And I say this from direct experience, having seen the interpretation by someone like Branciaroli, who, when it comes to tragedies, is not exactly a newcomer.
I believe Al Pacino thought the same thing one day, perhaps right after exiting the theater: this story acted on stage is ridiculous, from beginning to end. Why does a text intended for theater lose all its meaning in its natural place? What to do?
Let's bring it to the cinema, then. But the problem with the text, after the first scenes with costumes, perhaps reemerged with all its ridiculous effect.
And here's the idea: let’s dissect it verse by verse, line by line, word by word, giving essence and body back to each, taking it off the stage and bringing the camera back to the book. Let’s annotate everything and then put it back in the actors’ mouths.
Then we give a counter-plot to the film: the actors’ struggle to understand and portray Shakespeare, the complex of American actors towards the Great English playwright, their distant linguistic father, the director’s tortuous endeavor to breathe the same air Shakespeare breathed, culminating in the idea to take everyone on a trip to the Globe Theatre where his works were originally staged.
On one hand, an action of deconstruction, reconstruction, and reappropriation of the text, and on the other a material escape from the static stage representation with endless collage of scenes and a plot that unfolds uphill, between hesitations, steps back when near the goal, digressions on what does not admit digressions.
With him, Him, always looming, the unrepresentable, the Richard who speaks too eloquently, too subtly, too ingenious his wit, his smile a sign of betrayal, his benevolence the antechamber of your death. So tragic as to verge on laughter...
But word after word, scene after scene, your skepticism disappears along with that of the actors, and little by little you inevitably find yourself becoming his ally, his most trusted Buckingham. It’s a process instilled by Richard's rediscovered words, the drops that carve the stone over the tomb of your dark side, and without providing a logical explanation, you find yourself admiring him when he seduces the widow of the man he killed in front of his still warm body, venerating him when he says: what woman was courted in such a state of mind, and what woman was won in such a state of mind.
Here his words, finally regaining their shape and primordial meaning, gush blood, tear the flesh, bite the heart, returning to us with blood and flesh the charm of Evil insinuated like a worm inside man, that evil which moves the world, relegating good to a mere appearance. And when the king cries out on the battlefield, you wish you could be the one to bring his horse and save him from the petty and obtuse champions of good.
Only a "non-film" could achieve this. Credit to Al Pacino for restoring a human dimension to the most elusively inhuman king in history.
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