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.