Summary
Titlecard: Now to take the crown. The king is dead.
We see Penelope Allen, who plays Queen Elizabeth, out of costume, crying about her dead husband.
Kevin Spacey, who is playing Buckingham, discusses the fact that Buckingham aligns himself with Richard in order to forward his own political career. He is instrumental in Richard's ascension. Richard and Buckingham begin to betray everyone and steal the young child of the now-deceased king.
Pacino visits the Globe Theater in London, built in 1599. It is undergoing renovations and is a messy construction site at the time of his visit. He stands in the center and delivers some of Richard's lines, before approaching a woman on the site who tells him she keeps records about the theater and introduces him to the son of one of the builders.
In the play, we see Richard speaking to the young prince he has kidnapped, as Buckingham watches, smiling. Richard brings the young princes to the Tower of London. We see Pacino visiting the actual Tower of London, where executions took place.
The only person now standing in Richard's way is Lord Hastings. Hastings was the best friend of the former king, and shared a mistress with him. Now he wants the prince to become the king. Richard and Buckingham discuss the fact that they will cut off Hastings' head if he doesn't comply. Hastings clearly does not want that. A Shakespeare scholar tells Pacino, "The text is a means of expressing what's behind the text." He says that American actors get sidetracked by the text itself and lose sight of the most important thing, which is knowing what each moment is "about."
Lord Stanley, a friend of Hastings, tries to convince Hastings to leave the country with him, because he knows Richard is planning something for the council meeting. The meeting takes place on the day of the coronation, and the courtiers meet to approve the little prince as king of England, but Richard has something else in mind.
Richard enters and asks to speak to Buckingham privately for a moment. They plan to use Hastings' mistress as bait to get him to say the wrong thing. Richard enters and accuses the courtiers of plotting his death, and brings up Hastings' mistress to throw him off. He accuses Hastings of treason and Hastings is taken away to be executed. The other courtiers follow Richard, pledging allegiance—even Stanley.
Buckingham and Richard expect everyone to be excited about Richard's ascension, but they are met with coldness. Richard pretends to be very religious as a way of winning favor with the court, and maligns the reputation of the young prince who is to be heir to the throne. Richard tells them that the prince is a bastard, knowing full well this is a lie, and people believe him. Buckingham endorses Richard as the rightful heir to the throne and the others go along with him.
The scene shifts to a cocktail party in New York and we hear different people talking about Shakespeare, one woman talking about the fact that she's re-staging Macbeth in a "rock and roll context." Pacino goes up to Kimball and tells him he wants to stop making the documentary, that it isn't working. Suddenly we hear Pacino—maybe as himself, maybe as Richard, say—"I want to be king already."
"Richard is King," a titlecard reads. Richard ascends the throne with Anne as his queen. At the throne, Richard instructs Buckingham to kill the two princes, but Buckingham is apprehensive. A scholar tells the camera, "The action of the play, the sense of exciting movement, is Richard's finding out the point beyond which people won't go."
Kevin Spacey and Pacino discuss the character of Buckingham, with Spacey suggesting that Buckingham always manages to avoid blame, to keep the blood off his hands.
Analysis
Pacino's desire to immerse himself in the play not only by mining the text with other actors, but by investigating the history surrounding Shakespeare's work, leads him to London, to the Globe Theater. Pacino, the consummate New Yorker, holding a cup of coffee, wearing dark glasses and his backward baseball cap, goes to this site as he went to Shakespeare's birthplace, less as a historian and more as a kind of seer, anxious to stumble across some kind of intuition or psychic transference from the place itself. As a tour guide tries to tell Pacino some more about the history of the site, Pacino bursts into lines from the play, overtaken by an urge to be a part of the history, to bring it to life.
There are subtle shifts in the way the film is edited that seamlessly blend the past and the present, the fictional and the real. In one moment, we see modern-day Pacino at the Globe speaking to the young son of one of the builders, and the scene shifts immediately to the young prince whom Richard has captured. In this moment, the filmmakers elide the past and the present, blurring the lines between a real contemporary child and a fictional child in the play. Similarly, when Pacino points up at the Tower of London, the camera shows two young boys, the kidnapped princes, waving down at him.
Time and time again, the film examines the way that Shakespeare's language is a vehicle for intense emotion. In one moment, we see the actors breaking down the text, and the actor who plays Hastings improvises a line based on the meaning behind it, expressing in no uncertain terms that he will not yield to Richard's demands. Immediately following this, a scholar of Shakespeare suggests that "The text is a means of expressing what's behind the text." Shakespeare's language, the film suggests, is a rubric for unleashing and unfettering the emotion that is bubbling up within the characters. While the verse and structure of the text seems like something that is rarefied or esoteric, it is this structure that gives a container to the unruly feelings that launch the words.
In spite of Pacino's passion for the material, we are also privy to his moments of doubt. At a cocktail party, he goes up to his collaborator Kimball and tells him that he wants to stop making it, claiming that he's gone too far and it doesn't work. For all his experimentation and enthusiasm, Pacino finds himself intimidated by the ambitiousness of his own project at this point in the film.
Just when it seems that he is ready to give up, however, Pacino and his character, Richard, begin to blend with one another, and Pacino invites the viewer yet deeper into his artistic process and relationship to acting. His complaining about the project at the cocktail party seamlessly blends into a voiceover in which he tells Kimball, "I want to be the king already." Pacino can barely distinguish between himself and the character, becoming himself enamored with Richard's motivations. Pacino's frustration with the film project, his desire for it to be more formed, becomes indistinguishable from Richard's desire to finish his plot and become the king once and for all, and we see what a committed performer Pacino is.
