To put it mildly, adopting The Merchant Of Venice for a modern audience presents more than the usual challenges in adapting Shakespeare. It's home to one of Shakespeare's most memorable villains, but that villain, though made recognizably human by Shakespeare's genius, comes cloaked in several centuries' worth of anti-Semitic clichés. It climaxes with a beautiful speech about mercy with an unmistakable subtext: Mercy is a particularly Christian virtue, one a Jew could never know. Ignore these elements and the play loses its integrity. Play it straight and it looks like an incitement to a hate crime.
Director Michael Radford (Il Postino) takes a third approach by turning it on its head and making a Merchant about anti-Semitism. The dare doesn't pay off, but it at least prompts a memorable performance from Al Pacino, whose Shylock walks with a Method-y graveness. Set in a 16th century Venice doing little to hide its decadence (the public nudity is a tip-off), Radford's Merchant makes Shylock the point around which all else revolves. Even before he loans Antonio (Jeremy Irons) his fateful 3000 ducats, his presence serves as a constant reminder that the society that shuns him will some day pay a debt for all its unchecked gaiety.
Still, there's a reason Shakespeare didn't call the play The Tragedy Of Shylock: That title would fail to account for all that pesky comedy. Even without its villain, Merchant would still require a delicate balance of light and shadow. Here it tilts so far in one direction that the comic elements seem to come from another, lesser film. Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins, and others all make for attractive young lovers, and all enunciate beautifully, but there's a heartless flatness to their courtships, and when the halves of the film collide in the courtroom climax, it looks like a misbegotten pilot for Law & Order: Usury Victims Unit. Or it would be if not for Pacino, who creates a Shylock that's at once full-bodied and uncompromising, neither an anti-Semitic cliché nor a neutered substitute for the original text. He just doesn't belong here among all the costumed, stagey tastefulness, and, like his character, he leaves the film looking like a man without a home.