Shakespeare Meets The Godfather: The Postmodern Populism of Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard

Abstract

‘It has always been a dream of mine to communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people.’ So says Al Pacino at an early stage of Looking for Richard in a remark which clearly posits this film as the culmination of that dream. What is unusual is the way he has gone about it. Unlike traditionalists such as Laurence Olivier and, more recently, Kenneth Branagh, whose desire to communicate their love of Shakespeare on film has resulted in a handsomely mounted production of a selected play (in which they both direct and star), Pacino’s approach is altogether looser, more open, less grandiose. True, he directs and plays the leading role, but Looking for Richard is not simply an adaptation of Richard III but a meditation on what Shakespeare means at the end of the twentieth century.