Rodeo & Juliet: a ShaXmas movie too far?
Last week I shared my love of made-for-TV Christmas movies and considered the relatively new subgenre of ShaXmas Movies — small-screen schmaltz that draws inspiration from Shakespeare, specifically Romeo & Juliet. This week I carry on that exploration with a focus on Thadd Turner’s 2015 ‘masterpiece’ Rodeo & Juliet: a film that merges a Floridian ranch movie with Romeo & Juliet, and with the alternative title A Christmas Pony, a smattering of festive romance.
The set-up is formulaic: stressed but successful city girl heads home to the country for Christmas amid family crisis. Here Karen Rogers (Krista Allen) is a New York best-selling romance writer who left the family ranch twenty years ago, never to return until her father’s sudden death necessitates. However, that’s not very ShaXmas — enter Juliet (Nadine Crocker), the heroine of the piece, Karen’s teenage daughter. Reluctantly, Juliet is being forced to leave New York and her friends for all of four weeks. This is huge when you are a teenager (which Crocker at 27 clearly isn’t, but let’s suspend disbelief for the sake of ShaXmas). Cue FaceTime calls to Juliet’s ‘crew’, Ros, Catherine, and Cleo, an eclectic mix of Shakespeare’s other heroines, who fail to offer any words of moderation — where’s level-headed Beatrice when you need her?
With a familiar refrain of “Juliet!” repeatedly shrieked, our heroines head to RodeoTown and are met by Buck Taylor’s Judge Lawrence. In an inspired piece of casting, Taylor, better known for his extensive Western movie experience, at once ties the rodeo to the Shax as he takes on the role of peacekeeper/confidant/wedding officiant — a cowboy Friar Lawrence if you will. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, all is not cookies and cocoa — the ranch is in dire financial straits. Enter Hugh (Tim Abell), tall, brooding, grumpy, and carrying both a toolbox and a Christmas tree and much too old for our eponymous heroine Juliet (even at 27). With a decidedly frosty atmosphere between Hugh and Karen (not caused by the weather — this is balmy Florida after all), we have found our feud — and it’s steeped in (family-friendly) sexual tension. It’s not long before we learn that no one can find a will for Karen’s father and Hugh has laid claim to 50% of the ranch.
Setting aside twenty-year-old romantic history, let’s move on to the teenagers. Local girl Nan (Ariel Lucius) takes on the role of the Nurse, functioning as confidante and social gatekeeper for out-of-towner Juliet. She acts as a contact point between Juliet and her family history introducing us to Rodeo, the recently deceased grandfather’s rodeo horse (seemingly named either by my four-year-old or for the sole purpose of allowing the clear Shax inspired film title). She also facilitates the meet cute of Juliet and our hero Monty (see what they did there?). Again, Zeb Halsell as Monty is a decade too old to be a realistic teenager but that hardly matters when the local barrel-racing hunk’s eyes meet out-of-place city girl Juliet’s over the dancefloor at a seasonal barn dance — where else would a rodeo Romeo meet his Juliet? With Karen breaking up the budding romance with talk of feuds, Juliet is left lamenting: “Of all the uncles in the world why does yours have to be Hugh? And why does my mom have to be Mom? What does a name matter? This world isn’t fair if you ask me”, in possibly the worst Shakespearean paraphrase of all time.
And there ends any real connection to the Shakespeare text — Juliet and Monty start a clandestine relationship, Hugh and Karen sort out their differences, and there’s a high stakes barrel race as we head to a happy ending of sorts. Judge Lawrence locates the misplaced will in the nick of time (if only his Shakespearean counterpart’s letter to Romeo could have been likewise located) and we end with the wedding, not of our Juliet and her Monty but rather Karen and Hugh (who saw that coming?). It’s all rather lacklustre. We started off with such high hopes for a ShaXmas miracle but got rather bogged down with mucking out horses and tying up twenty-year-old loose ends that, truth be told, have nothing to do with the promised Romeo & Juliet narrative.
In his first article Ben considered what it takes for a film to be a Romeo & Juliet story. And it seems yet again, not very much. Rodeo & Juliet offers no real feud — only the embers of a romance that just needs a little eggnog to be rekindled. Our teenage lovers are very much of the twenty-first century and largely ignore any attempt to curb their hormonal urges. There’s no hint of the murder or suicide that plague Shakespeare’s tragic lovers. Is that all we need? Parental figures who don’t really like each other and teenagers who can WhatsApp their way around any obstacles? Or is it more than that? Do these movies tap into a deeper sense of romance and speak to the teens in us? The teens who still watch Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and will Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo to notice when Claire Danes’s Juliet wakes. Who just want these most tragic of lovers to make a go of it. Who hanker for the happily ever after Shakespeare cruelly denied us.
