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.  

Campbell Scott's Hamlet (2000)

Campbell Scott’s Hamlet is unfortunately obscure, and it really doesn’t deserve to be as little-known as it is.  It’s one of the most successful Hamlet adaptations I’ve seen, in no small part due to Scott’s captivating, intense and nearly flawless portrayal of Hamlet. 

The setting looked slightly post-U.S. Civil War, and though I’m not sure how much that time period does to illuminate Hamlet, I don’t think it presented any problems either.  The Southern manor was gorgeous, and the costumes were nicely done.  I think it’s a nice time period to set Shakespeare movies and plays in, because it feels distant, but not too far removed from modern culture.  You resist the urge to impose modern cultural standards on behavior and speech, but it also doesn’t end up feeling like something that happened forever ago in an alien world.  Overall, the look was crisp and attractive, and definitely a step up from the other TV movie Hamlets I’ve reviewed so far. 

The text was also nicely edited, cutting the play down to three hours without ever feeling like it was missing anything huge.  The only large omissions were Horatio’s attempted suicide, and Gertrude’s narration of Ophelia’s death.   Both of those seemed acceptable to me, but one more minor cut seemed very strange.  In the closet scene, Hamlet never explicitly tells Gertrude that Claudius is a murderer, but there is one moment that takes place in about three lines where he alludes to it and she realizes with shocked horror.  It’s very brief, but without those lines, Gertrude leaves that scene without knowing or suspecting Claudius’s role in Hamlet Sr.’s death.  I think her knowing that is important for how her relationships with Claudius and Hamlet are staged for the rest of the play, so omitting those three lines seemed very strange to me.  Except for that, the cutting was carefully and thoughtfully done, and it definitely illustrated that it is possible to stage Hamlet in three hours without having to remove any major plot points. 

While the whole cast was strong, Campbell Scott’s Hamlet was by far the best of them.  He had a raw intensity about him from start to finish, and a very natural quality as well.  He never felt stagey or forced, but instead came to life as a very real character.  It was completely compelling. 

I’m of the camp that views Hamlet as completely sane throughout, and though Scott never quite crossed the border into insanity, his Hamlet definitely hovered around it, particularly in the immediate aftermath of his encounter with the Ghost.  He was shown pacing through Elsinore, hearing echoes of the Ghost’s voice over and over again in his head, and slowly growing more and more manic.  The encounter with the Ghost was staged as particularly traumatic for Hamlet, with an unnerving, zombie-like Ghost who simulated his own death on his terrified son, who thought he was really dying.  It was a terrifying, near-death experience for Hamlet, and it nearly drove him insane. The Ghost’s voice wouldn’t leave his head, and he slowly grew more manic and more despairing.  The famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy was relocated to just before his encounter with Polonius, when he was at the height of his despair, and I thought it was an effective change.  The soliloquy was read as a pure contemplation of suicide, and he really did seem on the brink of doing it.  Though it was a fairly simplistic interpretation of the soliloquy, it worked well, and nicely illustrated the state of mind he was in after meeting the Ghost. 

His mocking of Polonius and his joy in running circles around everyone else took on a darker edge here, because it was only then that he would stop hearing the Ghost’s voice.  After the meeting the Players, he was relieved to say “Now I am alone,” only to realize that this meant he’d have to hear the Ghost again in his own head.  Only by talking to himself in the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy could he maintain his grip on reality. 

Though those scenes were played with him struggling to maintain sanity, other scenes where Hamlet more commonly loses control of himself were played with much more restraint than usual.  The closet scene in particular was very calm, with Hamlet furious but in control of himself.  In fact, I found it to be a bit too calm.  The closet scene needs to feel like the breaking point Hamlet’s anger towards his mother, and though he berated her, I didn’t really get the feeling that anything in their relationship majorly shifted as a result of the scene. 

However, I liked the way several other elements of that scene were staged.  The moment where he killed Polonius came off as him genuinely thinking that Polonius was the King, not as him simply running wild and out of control.  His earlier terror of the Ghost, and the mania he felt after the encounter, played wonderfully during the closet scene.  When the Ghost reappeared, he wasn’t just startled or ashamed; he was truly scared out of his mind by it, presumably thinking that this time it was actually going to kill him instead of just pretending to. 

His reaction to Polonius’s death was also particularly interesting, and one of the darkest moments of the movie.  Though he felt guilt immediately afterwards, his reaction to his guilt was to mock Polonius’ death. The sight of Hamlet laughing merrily, covered in blood, was completely chilling.  Having Ophelia come to the scene where he was being interrogated added to the darkness of his reaction to being a murderer.   We’d seen Hamlet using humor to cover up insanity before, but now he was using humor to handle being a murderer.  The “how all occasions” soliloquy was staged as happening later that same night, and it worked very well as a reaction to having killed a man earlier that day, and it had a real weight to it that that soliloquy often lacks.  He didn’t do any of the theatrics that Branagh did, and it was by far the best delivery of that soliloquy I’ve seen because of the sense of psychological grounding it had. 

Though I could talk about Scott’s performance all day, this wasn’t a one-man show.  Fortunately, most of his supporting cast was also quite strong. 

Jamey Sheridan’s Claudius was cold and calculating, and while he wasn’t Derek Jacobi, he did a good job with the part, playing one of the most chilling Claudiuses I’ve seen.   He didn’t have too much nuance in terms of character, but as a purely chilling, powerful King, I’ve never seen anyone like him.  His reaction to Gertrude drinking the poison was particularly telling; he didn’t panic or stop caring about the fight, and he seemed primarily to be angry with Laertes for not having killed Hamlet yet.  In the first scene especially, Hamlet seemed like a little boy in front of him, and that was exactly how Claudius treated him. 

Blair Brown’s Gertrude was also very strong, and much more nuanced than her husband.  Her relationship with Hamlet was particularly good, and they seemed to really interact with each other as mother and son.  She doted on him, but was also willing to tell him off when his behavior became out of line.  She was sexually entranced by Claudius, and though their relationship became stressed, they never lost their faith in each other.  She didn’t know what she did when she drank the poisoned cup, and due to the strong sense of her failed relationship with Hamlet, her death felt particularly tragic. 

Roscoe Lee Browne was an excellent Polonius, playing him as a shrewdly intelligent politician.  In the behind the scenes commentary, Browne said that he initially wasn’t interested in playing the role, feeling that Polonius was old and doddering.   Apparently, Scott persuaded him to take it by telling him “Roscoe, you’re not old, and please don’t dodder.”  He certainly did no doddering here, and though it resulted in the loss of some otherwise very funny scenes, it added to the very real threat Hamlet faced in opposing the King, and it made it very clear that Elsinore was a place where intelligence and political skills were of utmost importance.  In the brief, silent scene that introduced him, he was shown burning a document while several attendants waited on him, and I think that summarized who his Polonius was very well. 

Lisa Gay Hamilton was a strong Ophelia who never broke down before her insanity.  She was strong enough to stand up to Hamlet, and their dynamic together made it easy to infer that they had previously had a passionate, sexual relationship with each other.  Her strength and impassivity were a welcome change from the typical weak, constantly sobbing Ophelia, but I think she took it a bit too far, making her madness seem almost random.  Though the mad scenes weren’t bad, they seemed to come out of nowhere character-wise. 

One interesting choice was to cast Byron Jennings as both the Ghost and the Player King.  It added an extra dimension to Claudius’s reaction during the play scene, since he wasn’t just seeing the murder re-enacted, he was seeing it re-enacted with a man who he suddenly realized looked exactly like his brother.  His portrayal of the Player King was especially strong, and though the play itself was heavily cut, he gave the character quite a bit of heft.  He also seemed to be very much an adoptive father figure to Hamlet, adding to the smart casting choice of having him also play Hamlet’s real father. 

The more minor characters, Horatio, Rosencrantz, Gildenstern, Osric and the Gravedigger were all competent but fairly unremarkable.  Rosencrantz and Gildenstern were a fun combination of genuine friends and political gain-seekers, and Horatio was competent but fairly bland. 

The movie did, however, have two major weak points: the soundtrack and Laertes. 

The soundtrack was the worst of the two, because it was distracting throughout the entire movie.  It was a strange combination of drumming and elevator music, and the tone remained chipper regardless of what was happening on screen.  The uniformity of tone was bizarre at best and completely distracting at worst.  The slightly jazz vibe of it was also very strange in contrast to the post-Civil War look of the film.  During the graveyard scene it sounded like hold music on a telephone, and during scene transitions there tended to be a lot of loud, bizarre drumming that didn’t serve much purpose.  I really have no idea what they were thinking, but I certainly would have rather had no soundtrack at all than this. 

The second weak link was Roger Guenveur Smith as Laertes.  He commented in the behind the scenes special feature that he worked really hard to get a lot of subtlety into his portrayal of Laertes.  He certainly did.  Way, way, too much subtlety.  He essentially whispered every line he said with no inflection, and the effect was actually rather funny.  I’m not quite sure how one can calmly whisper lines like “The drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard!” with a straight face, because I certainly couldn’t watch it with a straight face.  It’s easy for Laertes to overdo it, and many of the actors I’ve seen play him this month do go way over the top.  However, calmly whispering everything was way too far in the opposite direction, and it really hurt a lot of the major scenes in the last two acts. 

However, I found it fairly easy to overlook those two issues because the rest of it was so impressive and compelling.  Campbell Scott’s Hamlet was everything one could ask for in Hamlet, and one of my favorite portrayals of him.