Summary
The film begins with lines from Richard III: "Our revels now are ended. These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits and/Are melted into air, into thin air." We see a church as the soliloquy continues, then a basketball court in New York, where Al Pacino is playing basketball.
Al Pacino goes out onto a stage, standing behind a curtain and emerging onto the stage. In the audience is a man dressed up to look like Shakespeare. Looking at the playwright, Pacino says, "Fuck!"
Elizabethan music begins to play and we see various people being interviewed about Shakespeare. As the credits roll, we see Alec Baldwin speaking directly to the camera and saying that the project is paying $40 a day and giving them doughnuts.
We see clips of different people reciting lines from Shakespeare, and an interview with a man who says, "Intelligence is hooked with language. When we speak with no feeling, we get nothing out of our society. We should speak like Shakespeare. We should introduce Shakespeare into the academics. You know why? Because then the kids would have feelings."
Al Pacino walks through Central Park encouraging people to go see Shakespeare in the Park. We then see him walking down the streets of New York, asking a teenage girl what she thought of a production of Hamlet she saw ("It sucked") and asking a number of people what they think of Shakespeare.
In an interview, Kevin Kline tells the camera about his first experience seeing a Shakespeare play, King Lear, and not being very interested in it. Pacino then interviews famous Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh, who echoes the seemingly shared sentiment that early experiences with Shakespeare's work were often boring. He also interviews James Earl Jones.
A titlecard reads, "The Quest." Al Pacino narrates in voiceover, "It has always been a dream of mine to communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people." He introduces his collaborators on this film, and sets his intention to look at Richard III in depth, analyze it, stage it, think about it, and examine it from various angles in the documentary. He says that his desire is to show the ways that Shakespeare's work resonates in the contemporary world.
"The Play," a titlecard reads. Al Pacino asks people on the street what they remember about the play, and reminds an interviewee that Richard III had a deformed arm and back. Pacino realizes that no one knows much about the play, and begins to summarize some of the plot. He describes the first scene, in which the queen meets with her brother and two sons in an antechamber waiting for the sick king to call them in. We see a dramatization of this as Pacino narrates it. The queen is worried that the king is going to die, because the only potential heirs are her two very young sons, who are from a previous marriage. She fears that Richard III will conspire to get the throne and harm her sons in order to do so.
Act I. One of the collaborators tells Pacino that he wants the film to begin with the sleepy sick king, Edward IV, in bed. The collaborator, Frederic Kimball, and Al Pacino go to the Cloisters, a medievalist museum in New York City, to rehearse the first scene of the play. Kimball lies down on a bench to play Edward, the sick king, while Pacino plays Richard. Pacino begins to say the lines of the play, "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York;/And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried."
In a cab, Kimball explains that this line is a pun, in that "the sun of York" is a play on "the son of York," as Richard is one of three sons of York. We see Pacino in a theater reciting the opening speech for a group of students. He asks the students if they know what it means, while also asking a professor to explain the opening monologue. The professor tells him that Richard is talking about the War of the Roses.
Pacino tells a group about the War of the Roses, in which the Lancasters and the Yorks clashed and the Yorks ended up winning the throne. Pacino delivers the entire first Richard soliloquy at the Cloisters, as a historian narrates the historical context of the play and explains that sexual relationships was a form through which the royals channeled their aggression and won power at court. As Pacino continues the soliloquy, the historian tells us that Richard was held back in these carnal pursuits by his deformities—he was a hunchback.
They continue to discuss the script, with Kimball explaining to Pacino that Richard calls his brother, Clarence, "G." Pacino decides to invite actors over to an apartment and have them read different roles in the play, in order to figure out casting.
"Casting the actors," a titlecard reads. We see a group of actors around a table divvying up parts. Casting proves difficult. Later, at a Mexican restaurant, Pacino asks a companion what gets between Americans and Shakespeare. Different interviewees discuss the fact that Americans, and American actors in particular, feel inhibited when it comes to Shakespeare. One man suggests that Americans have been told they cannot do Shakespeare and so become self-conscious when they try to perform it, even though, in his estimation, the best thing about American actors is that they are not self-conscious.
Different interviewees discuss iambic pentameter (the meter most commonly used by Shakespeare), in which there are five beats in a line of verse.
Analysis
The film seeks to blend the worlds of Richard III, a Shakespearean play, and contemporary New York City, where the acclaimed actor Al Pacino is seeking to piece together a story about it. Pacino is looking to merge Shakespeare's play with a glimpse at the New York theater world, as a way of showing what contemporary society stands to learn from Shakespeare's work. It is a documentary that delves into the fictional realm of its subject matter.
From the very beginning of the film, there is a playful interplay between the antiquated language of Shakespeare and the contemporary signifiers of New York. The first lines of the film are a soliloquy from Richard III recited in voiceover as we see shots of a very old church. The speaker has a British accent, and the combination of his voiceover with the shots of the old church transport the viewer to the England of Shakespeare's time. Soon enough, however, we see a basketball court and New York City, and Al Pacino in a backward baseball cap. The film is structured around these kinds of juxtapositions: between past and present, classical and contemporary.
Pacino's interest in Shakespeare is connected more broadly to his love of the theater as an instrument in society and particularly in its ability to encourage people to feel for one another. In one interview early on, a man suggests that much of the violence in the world can be linked to the fact that human beings do not know how to feel for one another, and if Shakespeare and the language of emotion was more integrated into education, there would be less pain and harm in the world. Thus, Pacino's project of looking more closely at Richard III and the theater is not simply about theater in and of itself, but also an investigation of its effect on people and its capacity to bring people closer together.
Part of the pleasure of the film is the way that it juxtaposes English history with the more earthy attitude of Al Pacino and his identity as a quintessential New York actor. With a turtleneck and a backward baseball cap, Pacino wanders through the background information he is collecting on Shakespeare and the play with an open desire to learn and to break down the esoteric scenarios and language of the play. With a Bronx accent, he transposes the language into more accessible increments, then launches into the actual Shakespeare text with a lilting British accent and a playful ease with verse. This contrast is part of his project: his earnest desire to bring his love of Shakespeare to the masses, and show that the work of the English bard is not as rarefied as it seems.
The film jumps around a great deal, moving from interviewee to interviewee, from staged scenes in costume to uncostumed documentary footage, from actors to scholar. This all serves to create a tapestry of interpretation and meaning-making. The viewer never stays with one authority for very long, and thus follows along with Pacino's open and inquisitive project, trying to piece together the story and significance of Shakespeare's work.
