The garish junk in Baz Luhrmann's
new "Romeo and Juliet" can't
bury the brilliance of Claire Danes

By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

it’s one thing to be haunted by a movie you love: it's quite another to find yourself unable to shake one you abhor -- to find yourself thinking about it days afterward, despite your efforts to brush it away. On the whole, Baz Luhrmann's gaudy, choppy "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" is a travesty -- a film that turns the play's characters into broad caricatures, that demolishes most of its language in a hailstorm of fast cutting and swervy camera angles. It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes. Danes -- only three years older than the character she plays, and completely unschooled in Shakespearean drama -- gives us a Juliet so open, so natural, and so fearless that she manages to claim the movie for herself and her costar, Leonardo DiCaprio, whose scenes with her are his only memorable ones. Luhrmann draws wide, garish circles around their exquisite performances; they slip his deadly noose without even trying and escape without looking back -- the ultimate lovers on the lam. Next: A special kind of idiot.