Simon Bowler's Hamlet (2010)

I’ve seen heavily cut Hamlets before, but Simon Bowler’s is by far the most cut of them all.  It’s only an hour and fifteen minutes long.  When I saw the length, I was curious to see it to figure out how they condensed the story into that short a time.  As it turns out, they didn’t.  It wasn’t a story so much as a random series of non-sequiturs.  It hardly even contained a rough storyboard of Hamlet, and I’m sure that it would have been completely confusing to anyone who isn’t very familiar with the play.  It was very low budget and minimalist, but that wouldn’t have necessarily been an issue.  What was an issue was that it failed at telling a coherent story or forming coherent characters. 

Bowler advertised this Hamlet as the “Dogma style” Hamlet.  I won’t get into the details of Dogma style here, since my knowledge of it consists of the Wikipedia entry and nothing more.  However, the basic tenets of Dogma style seem to be minimalizing sets and props, operating on as low a budget as possible, and only using handheld cameras.  Perhaps this is a great showcase of that style of filmmaking; I’m no one to judge that.  For my purposes however, I’m judging it as an interpretation of Hamlet, and that’s where it failed. 

In accordance with Dogma style, it was shot on an empty stage with little lighting, and while that’s not necessarily condemning, it did mean that there was literally nothing to set the mood except for the actors themselves.  Unfortunately, they weren’t given the chance to. 

Almost all of the scenes that didn’t contain Hamlet were cut, as were a lot of the scenes with large numbers on stage.  As a consequence, most of the characters aside from Hamlet were not introduced until relatively late in the story.  Ophelia didn’t show up until the nunnery scene, and no dialogue was moved around to try to explain who she was at that point. Her mad scenes were cut, as were all the rest of her lines except for the nunnery scene.  Polonius was present during the Player King’s speech, but it wasn’t clear that he was anything more than a servant.  Claudius didn’t show up until after the nunnery scene, but it wasn’t apparent that he was the King until the play within a play.  Gertrude’s first appearance was that scene as well, but she didn’t have more than one line until the closet scene.  It was never apparent that Laertes was Ophelia’s brother or Polonius’ son, and he seemed more like a hired assassin than anything else.  These cuts meant that David Melville, as Hamlet, was the only actor who even had the opportunity to make an impression.  For the rest of them, the acting seemed to be slightly amateur, but it was really hard to say, since they had practically nothing to do. 

I earlier described Peter Brook’s Hamlet as almost a one-man show.  However, I hadn’t really thought about the extent to which Hamlet simply does not function as a one-man show.  This movie demonstrated just how true that is.  Without the context, none of Hamlet’s emotions or thoughts really meant much, and he seemed like a random pawn being pushed around a stage instead of a character in his own right. 

Melville’s Hamlet was unconventional in a somewhat interesting way.  He was very hyper-masculine, and has this sarcastic swagger about him.  He seemed more like a frat boy than a philosopher, but underneath that was a sensitive soul.  It could have worked very well, but for two issues.  The first was that, as I mentioned above, the story was cut beyond all recognition, removing all context and psychological complexity from the character.  The second was that while his acting was competent, it felt unpolished: more like watching a rehearsal than a finished performance.  However, I would have liked to see where he would have taken the character if he’d had a real production in which to grapple with the role. 

And that’s really all there is to say.  It could have been good, or at least interesting, but it failed to tell a coherent story or create coherent characters.  

Gregory Doran's Hamlet (2009)

The first time I saw Hamlet was when I saw this movie about a year ago.  My only experience with the play before then was when I read it at the age of twelve and understood about four sentences.  I watched this movie in the afternoon before I went to go see a stage production of Porgy and Bess, and though it was a very worthy production, I regret to say I didn’t notice much of it because my head was so full of Hamlet. I became obsessed with Hamlet, and proceeded to re-watch it repeatedly for weeks on end before it even occurred to me to try to find other versions.  I went and bought a new copy of Hamlet, re-read it over and over again, and started memorizing extended passages.  If it weren’t for this movie, I undoubtedly would not be doing this project right now. 

Clearly this movie did a lot of things right, because it made such a strong impression on me.   While I still have a strong sentimental attachment to it, I think it’s an extraordinarily strong production even without taking into account that this movie will always have a special place in my heart. 

This film is based on a stage production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but due to both stellar reviews and an extremely well known cast, it was turned into a TV movie after its stage run was over.  However, despite its play origins, it’s a proper movie, filmed on movie sets, not a stage, and with proper movie lighting.  Because of this combination, you sort of get the best of both worlds.  It looks polished and clean, like a real movie, but the cast has also had a year to work together, tweak scenes, and build up the relationships between the characters.  These strong relationships between the characters were among of the biggest strengths this movie.  Almost the whole cast was very strong, but in addition to being strong individually, they were also strong in their relationships with each other.  Within the first few scenes, most of the major relationships of the play were established clearly. 

The setting and costuming were modern, but nonspecifically so.  Unlike Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, for instance, it wasn’t set in a specific modern time and location.  I thought that worked well, as it gave the story a chance to create its own world with its own rules and customs, instead of trying to fit itself awkwardly into modern culture.  It was mostly filmed on location at St. Joseph’s College in London, and the set worked well.  It was slick and elegant, but also oppressive, dark and claustrophobic.  The shiny black walls and floors, two way mirrors and surveillance cameras all worked to give a sense of being constantly trapped and observed. 

The surveillance cameras were an interesting touch, and I thought they were incorporated fairly well into the action of the story.   Several little touches with them were excellent, such as the Ghost not appearing on camera and Hamlet ripping the camera out of the wall before “Now I am alone,” at the beginning of the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy.  However, some of the implications of having the cameras there didn’t seem to be very thoroughly thought through.  For instance, if Claudius was aware of everything that was captured on camera, he would have known about the Ghost’s appearance and several other events that it doesn’t really make sense for him to know about.  It was unclear whether he had seen the footage of them encountering the Ghost or not, but I think if he had, he would have behaved very differently than Claudius does.  However, I thought that overall, the cameras were a nice touch, and they were woven in lightly enough that they were consistently present but never distracting. 

The text editing was light, and mostly well done, but I thought there were some issues with the way the Fortinbras plot was done.  Basically everything about him was kept in except for his appearance at the very end.  That seemed strange to me, because it meant they spent the whole movie talking about Fortinbras, only for nothing at all to come of it.  It’s my feeling that either Fortinbras needs to be cut entirely, or you need to include his take-over at the end.  Leaving everything in but that seemed like a strange decision.  Except for that, I thought most of the cuts were well done, and got the movie down to around three hours without omitting anything major. 

They followed the First Quarto scene order in the second and third acts, placing the “to be or not to be” soliloquy and the nunnery scene before the arrival of the players.  While this scene order makes Hamlet psychologically simpler, I thought they did it fairly well.  Tennant’s delivery of the “to be or not to be” as a pure contemplation of suicide was fairly straightforward, but so beautifully done that I had no complaints. 

The only technical issue that I didn’t like was the frequent breaking of the fourth wall.  I know this was based on a stage production in which the actors would directly address the audience, but I personally find this to be a little disconcerting, especially if it’s done with the frequency and intensity of this film.  However, after seeing it a couple times, I got used to Hamlet breaking the fourth wall, and actually came to appreciate it.  Though at times it still seemed a little awkward, Tennant has very expressive eyes, and being able to make eye contact increased the intensity of his soliloquies in a good way.  However, I could not get used to Polonius breaking the fourth wall.  Polonius is not a character where you want that sort of intensity, and I found his constant asides to the camera to be really distracting in several scenes. 

Of course, part of the reason why this production was ever filmed was the two stars at the helm: David Tennant and Patrick Stewart.  They’re both extremely famous and popular television stars, but fortunately for this production, they’re also both classically trained actors with a lot of experience in Shakespeare.  In short, they were big names who really delivered. 

Tennant’s Hamlet was intense, high energy and scathingly intelligent.  At times he seemed almost manic, practically bouncing off the walls.  He was a man of high passions, swinging between extremes of emotion with alarming speed.  He also played up Hamlet’s sense of humor and Hamlet’s joy in being able to run circles around those who are less intelligent than him.  He was by far one of the funniest Hamlets I’ve seen, making his “mad” scenes some of the best around.  He was manic enough that it was believable that everyone thought he was insane, but it was clear to us that he was really just brutally mocking everyone around him, and having a great time doing it too. 

His ability to believably swing between extreme emotion made his delivery of his soliloquies, especially “Oh that this too, too sullied flesh” and “rogue and peasant slave” particularly interesting.  Instead of quiet meditations they were more like sudden outburst of emotions, encompassing fury, depression, confusion and everything in between.  His progress of emotions and thoughts was beautifully done, and his delivery was much more interesting and memorable than playing them as one-note philosophical meditation would have been. 

One thing that was played up with Tennant’s Hamlet was the idea of him being somewhere in between a man and a boy.  With Gertrude, he alternated between uncontrollable fury and a desperate need for a mom.  At the end of the closet scene, he broke down and cried on her lap like a little kid who only needed his mom to make everything better.  Of course, mommy couldn’t fix everything, but for a brief moment, he wanted her to.  With the Ghost, he so badly wanted his father back, and was devastated that the Ghost wasn’t really going to be a father to him.  One of the best moments was in the closet scene when all three were together, and for a moment they seemed like a normal family with a mom, a dad, and a little boy.  His costuming subtly underscored the way in which he had to psychologically grow up over the course of the play: he spent most of the second and third act in a red t-shirt with muscles painted on it, as if he was trying to appear older and stronger than he actually was. 

As Claudius, Patrick Stewart was significantly better than he was in 1980 when he played Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi.  There he went for a grinning, jovial Claudius, but he lacked the necessary darkness beneath that smiling exterior.  This Claudius was very different: a coldly intelligent, fanged politician.  He made an ostentatious show of mourning for this brother, but made a clear point of publicly spurning Hamlet in the first scene by addressing him after Laertes.  During the play within a play, he was especially strong.  As the murder was being re-enacted, he realized that Hamlet must somehow know.  His “give me some light” wasn’t panic.  A servant handed him a lantern which he held up to Hamlet and shook his head slowly, letting Hamlet know that he realized what Hamlet was doing and he wasn’t going to put up with it. He suffered from a brief attack of guilt, but after praying, he was able to coldly push it aside with a little smirk.  He was the type of Claudius who would tie Hamlet to a chair to interrogate him, and have him sedated to be taken to England.  At the end, he just shrugged, and gulped down the poison Hamlet handed him, as if he coldly evaluated the pros and cons of everything, even his own death.  As far as “terrifying Claudius” goes, he was excellent.  He was also a stellar Ghost: stern and commanding, and with the necessary otherworldliness to seem like more than an ordinary human.  The double-casting of the Ghost and Claudius is fairly standard, but works well. 

Of course, despite being the two biggest names in this production, they weren’t the only actors on stage.  Most of the rest of the cast was excellent, with one major exception, Mariah Gale’s Ophelia.  She started off well, doing an excellent scene with Laertes and Polonius.  She wasn’t buying a word of what Laertes said, but their strong bond was apparent nonetheless.  With Polonius, she was unable to outwardly defy him, so she unwillingly agreed to do what he said.  She was sweet and charming, but unfortunately, in all her scenes after that she was stiff and rather stagey.  Especially in her mad scenes, she just wasn’t believable. 

With that one exception, the cast was extremely strong.  Penny Downie’s Gertrude was amazing.  She wanted desperately for Hamlet to be her little kid, and the openly doted on him throughout the entire movie, even when he frightened her.   She was completely happy in her new marriage, and wanted nothing more than for him to be happy with her.  I think her best scene was the brief conversation she had with Claudius after the closet scene.  It’s a short scene, and it’s often cut, but she managed to convey so much information in those few short lines.  She was aware that he was a murderer, or at least strongly suspected it, and at first seemed inclined to hold her distance, but she was so overwhelmed by what had just happened that she needed him more than ever.  Regardless of what he’d done, she needed him, but for the rest of the play, she was, more than ever, torn between her son and her husband.  Downie showed the complexity and contradiction in a woman like Gertude elegantly, and was particularly good at communicating relationships.  

Peter de Jersey’s Horatio was everything Horatio can be: intelligent, loyal and completely rock-solid.  He had a strong enough presence in the first act that his reappearance in the middle of the third didn’t feel at all random, and his relationship with Hamlet was played with a light enough touch to be believable.  His constant concern for Hamlet was almost palpable, and he was very good at saying a lot in very few lines.  There was a wonderful moment in the Graveyard scene when Hamlet saw the funeral procession, and in that instant, it was obvious that Horatio knew whose funeral it was, but he simply couldn’t tell Hamlet.  If you’re going to end the play on “Goodnight, sweet Prince,” he’s the one you want to be saying those lines. 

Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius was less universally successful.  He very much went for the “doddering old fool” image of Polonius, and while he played very well against Tennant’s humor, it’s my feeling that Polonius needs to be a bit more of a threat than Davies was.  The other problem with playing tedious Polonius is that he often ends up being rather tedious.  Davies didn’t quite cross the line here, but he was often rather close.  Despite the somewhat weak characterization, he was genuinely funny in some scenes, and he never felt like a problem in the same way that Mariah Gale did. 

All the minor roles were done extremely well: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, the Gravedigger, the Players, and Osric were all quite good.  Sam Alexander and Tom Davey as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were fairly sympathetic: they seemed like genuine friends of Hamlet’s, and Rosencrantz especially grew increasingly uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do.  They were also relatively distinguished from each other, with Rosencrantz more loyal to Hamlet and less interested in Claudius, and Guildenstern looking for some political gain.  However, they were both fairly hapless and well intentioned, making Hamlet’s treatment of them reflect badly on him.  I was glad to see a film brave enough to make Hamlet unsympathetic at times, and having them be sympathetic characters definitely had that effect. 

Ryan Gage’s Osric was definitely the best of the minor characters.  He was only on stage for a short time, as his scene was unfortunately trimmed, but he made a fantastic impression in that brief space. He was smarmy to the core instead of the usual effeminate foppishness, and it worked beautifully against Tennant’s gleeful mocking.  Gage had this spectacular fake smile, and his obsequious phoniness was completely hilarious.  He was completely a caricature, but the best kind of caricature, and a very welcome change from the “effeminacy is funny” type of Osric. 

Overall, it’s well acted, thoughtful and visually sleek: not perfect, but about as close as I’ve seen.  It’s a great watch for someone who’s seeing Hamlet for the first time, and for someone seeing Hamlet for the hundredth time; I’ve seen this movie probably fifteen or more times, and it’s never stopped feeling fresh and exciting.  

Michael Mundell's Hamlet (2003)

Michael Mundell’s Hamlet is one of the weakest that I’ve seen, with almost everything, from acting to lighting, done poorly.  There are a lot of technical problems with the movie, and a real lack of creativity in setting, staging and characterization.  There’s nothing special here to raise it above its technical failings. 

One of the biggest issues with this Hamlet was the editing of the text.  It was both heavily and sloppily cut.  One problem with the cutting was that a lot of scenes that really needed emphasis went by so quickly that they almost didn’t happen.  Hamlet’s entire encounter with the Ghost was under a minute long, and all of the Ghost’s instructions for Hamlet were cut.  He came, announced that he had been murdered, and left without ever mentioning revenge.  Another example of the extreme shortening is the way Polonius’s character was edited.  They were clearly going to for the “tedious old fool” interpretation of Polonius, but almost all of his long speeches were cut down to just a couple of lines, removing both the humor and personality of the character. 

The editing also occasionally lead to actual issues with the meaning of the lines.  For instance, the first lines of the “oh that this too, too sullied flesh,” soliloquy were cut, so Hamlet started it by announcing “It is an unweeded garden that grows to seed!”  For all the audience knew, he was actually talking about a garden, since there was no indication in this edited text that “it” was the world.  During Hamlet’s initial speech to the Ghost, he is supposed to say “Be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou comest in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee.  I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane, O answer me!”  What he’s supposed to be saying is that whether or not the Ghost is good or evil, he will speak to it.  In this cut of the text, he says “Be thy intents wicked or charitable, I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane, O answer me,” which seems to imply that he’ll call the Ghost those titles regardless of the Ghost’s intentions.  That’s not at all what those lines are supposed to mean, and that also doesn’t make very much sense.  During the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, Hamlet refers to himself as “the son of a dear murdered,” leaving out the important word “father”.  Before the “how all occasions” soliloquy, the fact that the army was being marched to win land that was undefended and not worth winning was cut out, making a lot of Hamlet’s statements during the soliloquy sound very strange.  Issues like that abounded in this movie.  There were also several times when lines were edited out of conversations, causing characters to respond with complete non-sequiturs.  Overall, the editing was messy and seemed to have been done with a desire to make the movie shorter at any cost.  

There were several cases where words were substituted for others as well, presumably for clarity.  Most of the changes felt neutral, but occasionally they were bizarre and confusing.  The worst example was in the final scene, where Hamlet is supposed to say “I’ll be your foil, Laertes, for in mine ignorance, your skill shall, like a star in the blackest night, stick fiery off indeed.”  This is a clever pun on the word foil, since they had just been discussing the foils they were equipping themselves with to fight.  Hamlet takes the second meaning of foil here, punning even to the end.  However, because the fight scene was staged with large, heavy swords, until that point, they had replaced the word “foil” with “sword”.  However, they also swapped in the “sword” in that quote, making Hamlet say, “I’ll be your sword, Laertes.”  That just doesn’t make sense at all, but apparently nobody in the production of this film realized that. 

The technical aspects of the film were also extremely poorly done.  The camera angles and framing were consistently bizarre, they seemed to be shooting without a tripod or support for the camera during several scenes, and continuity and lighting problems were virtually constant. 

This was a very low-budget film, but that’s not necessarily a condemning fact.  The thing about having a low budget however, is that you have to be clever about how you use it.  That means it’s probably better to go for modern costume over period gear, and to find ways to stage the supernatural without using too many special effects.  Unfortunately, this film went for an aggressively Medieval look, but due to a small budget, it came out looking more “local Renaissance fair” than legitimately Medieval.  Some of the costuming was fine, but some of it was downright embarrassing.  Hamlet spent most of the second and third acts in a v-neck dress that was so low that I felt quite concerned for his modesty whenever he moved quickly.  The sailors who brought the letters to Horatio had especially hilarious costumes: they looked like they were wearing Halloween pirate costumes, complete with eye patches and bandanas. 

The Ghost was also handled poorly, given their budget.  The thing about the Ghost in Hamlet is he really doesn’t have to be spectacular.  I’ve seen the Ghost staged with everything from shadow puppets to an ordinary actor with nothing supernatural at all about him.   Everyone will have a preference for how human vs. unearthly they like the Ghost to be, but there’s no mandate saying that you need to use special effects at all.  I do, however, think there is a mandate that if you don’t have the money to make special effects look good, you should find a way to do without them.  I don’t quite know how to describe the effects they used for the Ghost.  It was some strange combination of line drawing and infrared effect.  It looked like something one could do in Photoshop.  It reminded me slightly of the jokey cartoon monsters in Scooby-Doo.  In terms of quality, I’ve seen better effects on 1960’s era Doctor Who, and that’s not exactly setting a high standard.  In my opinion, it doesn’t matter how badly you want an extremely supernatural Ghost; if you don’t have the budget to make it look good, don’t do it. 

The strange camera angles were extremely distracting.  During the “to be or not to be” soliloquy especially, the camera seemed to jump around at random as if trying to test out every possible angle.  A large portion of Ophelia’s mad scene was shot with Gertrude’s backside dominating the frame, and Ophelia barely visible at the edge of it.  Edge of tables and candles would often accidentally dominate the foreground or hide the faces of the actors.  The scene where Claudius interrogates Hamlet about Polonius was shot so that the only part of Claudius that was visible was his left ear, and the rest was completely dark.  I couldn’t figure out much of a rhyme or reason to a lot of the camera angles, and I found its constant jumping around to be somewhat distracting.   There was also a problem with the camera wobbling or shaking during several scenes, most notably during “to be or not to be” when the camera shook wildly up and down. 

Continuity issues were also constant and extremely noticeable.  I’m actually really terrible at noticing issues with continuity.  I’ve seen the second Lord of the Rings movie countless times, and I never notice that the cut on Merry’s face switches between his right and left side repeatedly.  Even knowing that it does this, I still don’t notice.  In this Hamlet, I noticed a continuity issue in almost every scene, and without a doubt, there were many that I didn’t notice due to my general obliviousness towards continuity.  During the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, the sky suddenly shifted from clear blue to completely covered in clouds.  Hamlet’s dress was falling off his shoulder, then pulled up again in the next cut.  During Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencratnz and Gildenstern, all three of them remained seated for the entire scene, yet in some cuts there was a river directly behind Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, and in others there were several trees behind them.  The camera frequently showed shots of the moon as if to indicate that in was nighttime, only to have the characters bathed in sunlight in the next second. 

The lighting inconsistencies were constant, but in addition to being inconsistent, the lighting was also very strangely done.  In many scenes, the characters’ faces were completely dark or strangely shadowed.  During the scene where Claudius interrogates Hamlet and the “how all occasions” soliloquy, it was almost impossible to make out any details of any of their faces.  In some scenes it would appear to be nighttime in a room lit only by candle, and yet the characters would be bathed in light.  In one shot, Hamlet was lit only by the moon, but his face was brightly lit as if with fluorescent lights.  During a lot of the night scenes, they used strange blue neon lights that looked less like nighttime and more like a nightclub. 

The soundtrack was also strange throughout, sounding like an odd combination of Renaissance Faire and action/suspense movie.  It wasn’t glaringly bad in the same way as the soundtrack to Campbell Scott’s Hamlet.  It just felt constantly and subtly mood inappropriate.  It consistently left you with the feeling that it was part of another movie, not this one.  

Despite these problems, the movie could have been redeemed by very good acting.  Unfortunately, the acting was fairly flat at best.  Most of the characters just came off as rather bland, and some of the moments that should have been intense were downright funny.  During the closet scene, when Hamlet kills Polonius, he screams “DEAD!” at Polonius, and looked exactly like a little kid throwing a tantrum.  My sister and I collapsed into laughter both times we saw that scene.  Jason Harris’s Horatio managed to look bored out of his mind in most of the shots of him, especially during the play within a play scene.  The effect was so extreme that I began to wonder if they told him when they were going to cut to a shot of him, or if he was unaware of it and thus completely spaced out. 

Gareth Thomas’s Claudius was a more complete character than most of the rest of the characters.  He was lusty, dirty and unscrupulous.   He was never especially kingly.   During several scenes, he sat down on the ground, and his public displays of affection towards Gertrude were more suited to a teenager than a king.  Despite his lack of regality, I thought he worked well as an especially condemnable Claudius.  

William Houston’s Hamlet was bland.  He didn’t seem to be particularly anything.  I found his facial expressions during a lot of scenes to be somewhat bizarrely smiley, but other than that, I didn’t really get much of a sense of character from him.  He wasn’t particularly intelligent, angry, depressed, witty, philosophical, or anything that Hamlet can be.  He wasn’t quite as actively bad as Ethan Hawke was, but he was bland and boring.  A boring lead in a movie already weighed down by technical difficulties and a lack of imagination was really the final nail in the coffin. 

Perhaps if this were movie of a less frequently adapted play, its virtues would be more appreciable.  However, Hamlet has been done so many times, and so well too, that the competition is intense, and a movie like this one doesn’t really add much to the already extensive group of Hamlet films.  

Peter Brook's Hamlet (2001)

If Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet was Hamlet zoomed all the way out, Peter Brooks’ Hamlet zoomed all the way in.  Hamlet already has an almost unrelenting focus on Hamlet himself; in the uncut text, he has around forty percent of the lines, and most of the remaining lines are spoken either to or about him.  This Hamlet was even more focused in on him, with almost everything else trimmed away.  It felt almost like a one-man show at times.  Sure, there were other actors, but they were back-up singers, really just support for the leading man.  In a production so tightly focused on and dominated by one character, you need a very special actor to play him.  Fortunately, Adrian Lester was more than up to the task, making for one of the most compelling and fascinating Hamlet films I’ve seen. 

The text was extremely heavily cut, and what remained was often heavily re-arranged.  It opened with Hamlet’s “oh that this too, too sullied flesh” soliloquy, then moved straight into Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost.  After that was his opening scene with Claudius and Gertrude, which cast his barbs at Claudius in a very different light, since in this version he already knew that Claudius was a murderer at that point.  The rest of the film was similarly re-arranged, and I thought for the most part, it worked well.  While some of the soliloquies and scenes were in very different contexts than they originally appear, the effect didn’t feel misleading.  Instead, I felt as if I was being asked to take another look at each scene and read each line and interaction in a new light.  It felt simultaneously fresh and familiar, respectfully riffing off a beloved classic.  It had none of Almereyda’s embarrassing attempts to be cool and new, and was instead thoughtfully edited and rearranged in a way that actually was both cool and new.  In a way, it felt like seeing Hamlet for the first time again, and it put me back on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what would happen next. 

The cuts were heavy, but I rarely found myself feeling as if I was missing anything.  It was so captivating and beautifully executed that it felt complete as it was.   Only one cut seemed really problematic to me, and that was the fact that Laertes was edited out from the beginning of the story.  The effect of this was that when he showed up in the fourth act, he seemed both completely random and way too convenient.  Despite my familiarity with the play, he felt like a Deus ex Machina.  The fact that the actor playing Laertes also played Gildenstern only added to the strangeness.  That aside, I didn’t feel a sense of loss from most of the cuts, since what remained was so beautifully done.

It was filmed in the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, with a beautifully minimalist set.  The actual set consisted of just a couple of cushions on the ground and the plaster walls painted a gorgeous rusty color.  That was it.  The costumes were similarly simple, and props were also cut to a minimum.  The swordfight was done with painted sticks, and the grave was constructed out of pillows arranged in a rectangle.  In the hands of less captivating actors, the technical simplicity would have been off-putting, but in the hands of Adrian Lester, the minimalism seemed to serve only to shift attention to where it belonged: on him. 

The soundtrack consisted of several different Eastern-sounding stringed instruments and drums, and it worked well with the look of the stage: both were striking but minimal, and served to disassociate from any clearly defined setting or political background.  The set and music coupled with the extremely international cast to make it a play set both everywhere and nowhere.  It could have been any time and any place, completely universal and part of its own unique world.

Adrian Lester was the heart and soul of this Hamlet, and his portrayal of Hamlet was completely captivating.  He was brilliantly clever, unpredictable and occasionally ruthless, making for a powerful, compelling and not altogether likeable character.  You couldn’t stop watching him, but you also were kind of glad you didn’t know him in real life.  He was completely sane throughout, with a probing mind, constantly examining and asking questions.  This thoughtful philosopher blended beautifully with the brutal murderer, making a Hamlet who was both dangerous and thoughtful.  Despite the heavily cut text, he seemed to embody every different facet of Hamlet with subtlety and nuance.  His delivery of the soliloquies was particularly striking; he didn’t seem to be giving a speech, just thinking aloud.  He made every emotion and every thought clear without ever seeming to be acting at all; it really seemed like he simply was Hamlet.  

Hamlet’s brutal side came out especially strongly in his performance. During the “play upon this pipe” speech, he smiled and advanced slowly towards Gildenstern, with his tone mild throughout.  On the last line, he shifted his grip on the pipe to a fist, as if he was about to stab him with it.  The slow advance and quiet smile were all it took for him to be completely intimidating.   His coldness at the murder of Polonius was even more chilling, and it cemented what had been clear about him from the beginning:  despite being brilliant and thoughtful, he had no qualms about casual violence.  Even Horatio seemed slightly nervous around him at times.  

Despite this power and violence, he was remarkably vulnerable.  During his first encounter with the Ghost, he hugged him hard as if to keep him from leaving, but the Ghost pushed him away.  For just a moment, he seemed like every little kid who’s ever felt rejected by their parents.  At the end of the closet scene, Gertrude reached out to put her hand on his leg and he leapt up as if he couldn’t bear for her to touch him, only to turn back a few seconds later and embrace her.  Little details like this throughout added to the complex characterization, and each small move like this spoke volumes about who he was and what his relationships to the other characters were. 

While he was the undisputed center of the story, he also had very good support from the rest of the cast. 

Jeffrey Kissoon was both the Ghost and Claudius, and he couldn’t have been more different in the two roles.  The Ghost was stern and commanding; Claudius was sly and smiling, sugar sweet on the outside and ice cold beneath.  He had power and ruthlessness to match Hamlet, but couldn’t hope to keep up with him in intelligence.

Yoshi Oida was a powerful Player King, and he, interestingly, delivered his Priam speech in Ancient Greek.  While the decision sounds strange on paper, it was surprisingly effective in practice, because it shifted the attention away from the words and onto the act of acting itself.  It didn’t matter that we didn’t know what he was saying because he managed to make it captivating anyway.  Even more interesting than his delivery of the speech was Adrian Lester’s reaction to hearing it.  He was completely entranced by the Player King, and his excitement was almost palpable.  Because Oida’s delivery of the speech forced the audience to think about the effects and power of acting, the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy felt especially grounded, and Hamlet’s intense reaction to seeing the Player King act was very real. 

As Gertrude, Natasha Parry was somewhat bland, but her relationship with Hamlet was strong.  One really got the sense that they were mother and child, despite the brokenness of their relationship.  Her horror at Polonius’s death was grounding in contrast to Hamlet’s callousness, and though she didn’t particularly stand out as a character, she did her job as supporting actor for Adrian Lester. 

Shantala Shivalingappa was a very strong Ophelia, both vulnerable and very real.  She was very graceful and delicate, but she had enough courage to stand up to Hamlet during the nunnery scene, even when he was angry with her.  Despite her inner strength, her insanity didn’t feel at all random, and she did an effective job of laying the seeds of it earlier in the film.  Her mad scenes had real power to them because she felt so real in everything she did, despite the fact that her story was heavily cut. 

Bruce Myers doubled as Polonius and the Gravedigger.  It was a novel and creative double-casting, and I thought it worked fantastically.  There’s something deliciously macabre about seeing a dead man come back to life to joke about digging a grave for his own daughter.   While the Gravedigger’s part was sadly cut very short, he did a good job of it, and his Polonius was also quite solid.  He wasn’t played merely as a joke, and he worked well against Lester during their scenes together. 

My last review could be read as story of the difference between concept and execution; Almereyda had a decent concept that he failed to execute.  This film tells almost the opposite story: a potentially problematic and strange concept that was executed to perfection.   

Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000)

Setting Hamlet in a big company in modern-day New York City isn’t necessarily a bad idea.  I’m not sure how much the play has to say about CEOs in New York, or how much the setting has to say about the play, but it’s not inherently a bad idea.  It’s possible that the setting could make the play feel more accessible to people who are put off by period clothing and Shakespearean language, and that the modern setting could help remind people of Hamlet’s continued relevance.   So this wasn’t a bad idea, even though I find it offensive and patronizing that some people think that young people can’t be engaged by a more traditional staging.  However, whether or not anything came of the concept depended on execution, and that was where this film fell flat on its face. 

The actual transition to modern day New York was fairly smooth.  Few logical issues arose from the relocation, and some of the ways they staged scenes were actually fairly clever. During the nunnery scene, Polonius spied on them using a wire hidden in Ophelia’s clothing.  When Hamlet found the commission for him to be killed, he just backspaced and substituted Rosencrantz and Gildenstern’s names for his.  At the end, Fortinbras’s description of the deaths was turned into a news announcer describing what had happened.  It was fairly clever, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that this was all a little gimmicky, and didn’t add much actual substance.  Sure, you can make it work to have a wire put on Ophelia, but that doesn’t mean that the scene as a whole is done well, and ultimately I don’t think any of these clever adaptations added much.  While some elements of the transition were clever, almost everything else in the film was sloppy, poorly acted and illogical. 

I understand that you have to edit the text fairly significantly in order for the transition to modern times to really work.  However, they were just straight sloppy with the text, exchanging random words for others, shuffling lines around within speeches, and inappropriately using anachronisms when the text doesn’t actually call for them.  Sometimes the word substitutions felt neutral, and sometimes they just made the line sound less elegant, but sometimes they rendered whole sentences either grammatically incomplete or illogical. 

Take, for example, a single-word change during the “to be or not to be” soliloquy that made an entire section of it make no sense at all.  Hamlet refers to death as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” but for some inexplicable reason, Hawke substituted “to” for “from”, making it read “the undiscovered country to whose bourn no traveller returns.”  What in the world does that mean?  Does he mean that nobody dies a second time?  You can’t go back to death after leaving it?  I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.  Either the script editor didn’t know what he was doing or Ethan Hawke flubbed a line and, somehow, nobody noticed during the editing process.  If this was the only time something like that happened, I could maybe see it as the kind of embarrassing mistake that everyone makes, but problems like this happened continually throughout the entire movie. 

Another example of sloppy editing was the way the Fortinbras subplot was handled.  He was mentioned in the beginning during Claudius’s speech, but no ambassadors were sent to Norway, and he wasn’t heard from again until Hamlet was on the plane for England.  There, Fortinbras was apparently on the television and the flight attendant briefly told Hamlet that Fortinbras was the man they were discussing on the news station (it’s unclear why he needed a flight attendant to tell him this).  However, all references to Fortinbras’s army were cut from the “how all occasions” soliloquy, and he was never mentioned again after that. Why would he be included then?  He was only mentioned twice, briefly, and in neither case did he have any effect on the characters or the story.

The entire staging of the final scene was also illogical.  In the actual play, the swordfight is staged so that Laertes can kill Hamlet and make it look like an accident.  And the poisoned cup is there just in case Hamlet wins and Laertes can’t hit him.  It’s not a very good plan, but it coheres logically.  Now, staging swordfights in the year 2000 is going to look a little bit silly, but I’ve seen other modern dress versions where it hasn’t presented any issue.  However, they decided that instead of stabbing Hamlet with a poisoned sword, after two bouts, Laertes would just whip out a gun and shoot him.  The issue with this is that it renders the rest of the their plan completely illogical.  What’s the point of staging a swordfight (on the roof of a skyscraper, I might add) if the plan is actually for Laertes to just shoot him?  There’s really no way to make that look like an accident, rendering the swordfight completely pointless.  The poisoned cup was also a waste of time, seeing as there’s no way Hamlet could somehow win against a guy with a gun when he’s only got a foil.  The complete pointlessness made it impossible to take the last scene seriously, though by that point I was so sick of this film that I hardly cared. 

If, at the end of a film that’s under two hours, it feels like it’s lasted forever, you know something’s wrong.  What was wrong here was Ethan Hawke.  His Hamlet was, in a word, boring. 

Hamlet certainly suffers from depression, and while I wouldn’t say depression is his defining characteristic, you can play Hamlet where his depression is fairly central to his character, as Laurence Olivier did.  However, if you choose to manifest Hamlet’s depression by having in speak monotonically with no expression for the entire movie, what you get isn’t a coherent or an interesting character.  What you get is a strange combination of boring and annoying.  Hawke’s Hamlet came off as a moderately stupid whiny rich kid who thought it was cool to emote as little as possible.  I didn’t care about him and I wasn’t intrigued by him.  Why would I be, when the most emotion he ever expressed was self-indulgent whininess, and all of Hamlet’s wit, intelligence, anguish and thoughtfulness were all gone? 

During the nunnery scene, I excitedly turned to my friend and said, “Wow, he’s finally emoting!”  My friend shrugged.  “Yeah.  I mean, I guess.  He’s louder.”  I think that brief conversation sums up Ethan Hawke’s performance fairly well.  

Some of the other characters came across much better.  Julia Stiles’s Ophelia probably was the one who worked the best, despite having most of her lines cut.  However, her character felt weighed down by some very clunky foreshadowing.  She was shown staring into a pool and fantasizing about jumping in during the scene where Polonius showed Claudius Hamlet’s letter to her, and she was also shown waiting by a fountain outside of Hamlet’s apartment for extended periods of time.  It didn’t take a genius to guess that she would drown in the fountain, and sure enough, she did.  It was just so obvious and clunky, but despite that, her character actually came through with some real feeling.  

Bill Murray’s Polonius was also fairly successful, although rather less so than Stiles’s Ophelia.  He toed a good line between foolish bureaucrat and overprotective father, and their relationship was the only one in the movie that really had the ring of truth to it.  He viewed her as a little girl, despite the fact that she was in her twenties, and his concern was coming from the right place, misguided though it was.  Unfortunately, he was less good during his scenes with Claudius, and he often ended up looking a bit lost, as if he didn’t quite know what he was supposed to be doing there. 

Except for those two, most of the performances were mediocre to bad, and none were really memorable either way.  Their lines were so shortened and mashed up that characterization was fuzzy at best, though, to their credit, everyone had more life than Hawke did. 

This could have been good, and the concept wasn’t bad, but the execution was uniformly terrible.  Ultimately, I don’t think Hamlet needs a modern setting to make it feel fresh, especially if that setting is the only new thing in the entire production.