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.
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