A pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood. Four hundred years on, Shakespeare's satirical nightmare on the theme of the kosher ritual retains its power to offend, to challenge, to subvert, and to trigger debates on antisemitism in canonical English literature. His Jew, Shylock, is not crouching in some estaminet of Antwerp but right up on stage, flinging defiance in his oppressors' teeth, devastating their hypocrisy and cruelty, angrily asserting the only identity available to him within the gentiles' culture and, in a final speech, lacerating Christian Europe's reliance on slavery. But he is also grasping, cantankerous and, in private, appears to equate his daughter with money; he winds up being brutally humiliated, and further abased by having his comeuppance made subordinate in narrative importance to the final, simperingly romantic "ring" scene between the lovely Portia and her impetuous suitor Bassanio.
Michael Radford's fresh, lucid and unpretentious screen revival of The Merchant of Venice is raised above the commonplace by a brilliant performance from Al Pacino as Shylock. The role offers opportunities for the wildest thesp grandstanding, and with Pacino so often given to croaky shouting and preening, you might be fearing the worst.
But his is a cool, considered Shylock, retaining an icy good humour while the Christians hold their noses and solicit loans from him, who finally forces the issue of how they pay for credit: a flourish of socio-professional suicide that Pacino endows with ferocious calm. And in case we were thinking of patronising the American interloper, Pacino gives an object lesson on speaking the verse, matching and often outclassing our native Brits who sometimes breathily over-emphasise and over-interpret the lines.
Jeremy Irons is the Merchant, Antonio, and his sonorous languour is beautifully suited to the character's melancholy: the Venetian entrepreneur who has all his capital hazarded in various adventures, and in middle age is beginning to feel how precarious and how short life really is.
Joseph Fiennes is his friend Bassanio, in love with a beautiful young woman, Portia (Lynn Collins), who, like a princess in a fairy tale, is a prisoner to her late father's wishes. Potential husbands must undergo a riddling quest, choosing between symbolic caskets of gold, silver and lead, and no paupers need apply. The correct answer to the riddle is incidentally to provide yet another implied rebuke to Shylock's values and way of life, but meanwhile Bassanio needs 3,000 ducats to approach Portia. His friend Antonio agrees to lend it to him - Radford implies a homoerotic charge of loyalty between the two men - and in turn clenches his teeth and borrows the sum from the foul, usurious Jew, Shylock, who writes a terrifying clause into his bond. In forfeit, the debtor must pay with a pound of flesh cut from his own body.
This is probably Joseph Fiennes's most successful performance. In the past, his smirking mannerisms have been frankly unbearable, and even Roger Moore would suggest counselling and drug treatment for his addiction to single-eyebrow-raising. But this is better. With Fiennes, as perhaps with Pacino, Radford has exerted himself in keeping the tics and mannerisms under control, scraping away the spangly encrustations of star quality and allowing something warmer and more intelligent to come through. Lynn Collins has perhaps a butter-wouldn't-melt approach to Portia, but her scenes have charm, and it is a measure of how classy the cast is that actors of the calibre of John Sessions and Allan Corduner take minor roles.
Radford's movie looks good, too. Designer Bruno Rubeo and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme achieve an understated authenticity, very different from the painterly tropes of Girl With a Pearl Earring. Natural daylight and muted colours are what they are working with in interiors cleverly interwoven with location work.
The final trial scene is where the movie's spinal column has to be located: and Radford's film boldly makes it an arena of ideas as well as passion and revenge. Shylock is the outsider who is enemy and critic of the Christians' fatuous posturing but whose last stand Shakespeare, with enigmatic ruthlessness, forbids you to endorse by making him not simply an anti-hero but a glowering and greedy malcontent whose insistence on his pound of flesh is petty and spiteful. Al Pacino inhabits the contradiction with muscular ease. It is refreshing and rare for a movie to show ideas being contested, assumptions questioned and liberal sensibilities twisted to breaking point.