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.