Romeo and Juliet.

Even in the days of silent movies, Shakespeare's plays were brought to the screen, and in these efforts the language was, of course, reduced to a series of captions. How strange that this should happen again in the sound period, only now with the actors able to speak their own captions.

For the script of the latest Romeo and Juliet isn't just an abridgment of the play; it's a specimen of clip art. Boz Luhrmann, the director, has extracted from each scene just those few lines that give enough information for the plot to function, plus a few more that are too beautiful or too famous to be jettisoned. His is a real "movie movie," its dialogue being just another component of the soundtrack along with gunfire, screeching brakes, and the slapping of surf onto the beach. That beach is Verona Beach in present-day Florida where this update is set as the portrayal of the rivalry of two gangster families.

Despite the absurdities any modernization entails (why does the state's governor allow his son, Paris, to marry into a gangster clan? how can the chief of police - Shakespeare's prince of Verona - banish a killer instead of locking him up?), Luhrmann almost pulls this stunt off. He is a clever filmmaker with a romantic sensibility drawn to high camp, and his last film, Strictly Ballroom, was a perfect marriage of romance and campiness. In Romeo, I enjoyed his send-up of the Montague-Capulet brawls as Sergio Leone showdowns right out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I also liked his transformation of the so-called balcony scene into a swimming pool dip, although the frustrated yearning that is usually emphasized by having the lovers occupy different levels is here pretty much lost amidst the splashing and gulping.

Courtesy of Don McAlpine's voluptuous photography, there are several haunting images, especially that of Romeo, having just killed Tybalt, falling to his knees before a huge statue of Christ. Looking down at the boy from camera's viewpoint above the plaster head and hearing Romeo scream "Oh! I am Fortune's fool!" as rain pelts down on him, we may feel the Latin-Catholic sensibility of both play and movie reach its exquisite apogee.

Leonardo DiCaprio, as Romeo, is fine at delivering such raw emotion, but his voice lacks range and trenchancy. Since, even in this version, Romeo is meant to be a poetic youth in love not only with love but with the expression of love (we first see DiCaprio scribbling his soliloquy as thoughts in a diary - nice touch!), the actor seems needlessly slack in every scene in which he doesn't scream, weep, or fight. By contrast, Claire Danes not only radiates dewiness but has the ability to infuse a passage such as:

What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man with a wonderful blend of naivete and nascent lasciviousness (her sly shading of the last seven words) that I found delightful. Most of the rest of the cast is apt, with Miriam Margolyes (nurse) and Pete Postlethwaite (a very post-Vatican II Friar Lawrence) so fine that you wish they had more to do, which is the same as wishing they had more to say.

For when Shakespeare's people do something, it is usually by saying it. The bustle of Cinthio and Plutarch and Hollinshed is transformed by the poet into verbal hang gliding. In this movie, however, the eloquence has been re-absorbed by the bustle. The beginning of the balcony/swimming-pool scene (as entertaining as it is) is more concerned with whether a security guard will discover Romeo than with the stirrings of love. Before the final tragedy in the crypt, there is such a spectacular chase scene with police helicopters tracking the fugitive Romeo that you have to wonder if the cops won't burst into the church and interrupt the final soliloquies (which, of course, are reduced to practically nothing). In fact, midway through this film you may begin to wonder why there's any poetry at all. The few words left simply hold up the action - away with them! Spoiled by the acrobatics and gunfire that had gripped them for the first hour, the teenagers at the screening I attended became fairly restive during the relatively talky pathos of the last half.

Shakespeare's plays have often been successfully transformed into works of art very different from their source. Think of Verdi's Othello and Falstaff, Jose Limon's ballet, The Moor's Pavane and, of course, West Side Story. But Luhrmann hasn't really transformed Romeo and Juliet. He's hyped it up and thinned it out. This movie challenges neither its actors nor its audience. It is Shakespearean snack food.