I avoided this Hamlet for many years feeling sure there was no way I could fail to hate it. It was a 110 minute Hamlet with actors largely recognizable from light fare (Scream, Ten Things I Hate About You, Sex and the City etc). Worse, it brought to mind the kind of self-consciously hip and irreverent productions as Baz Luhrman's abortive Romeo + Juliet. I have rarely been so pleased to be so wrong. Here, Michael Almereyda gives us one of the richest and most thoughtful films of Hamlet ever realized.
Much of the credit belongs to Almereyda himself. To begin with the issue that immediately seized my attention, as it must have many others, is the cutting of the text. This is, of course, nothing new. Directors, performers and audiences have been grappling with the scale of the play since the begininng. On stage and on screen, heavily cut versions of the play have been common. Even so, 110 minutes may seem a bit extreme given that a performance of the "full" text (conflating both the quartos and the first folio) can run over four hours. Even more remarkable, Almereyda (unlike, for instance, Olivier)chooses to keep both Rosencratz and Guildenstern and Fortinbras. I was amazed by how well Almereyda weilded the scissors. To begin with, he cuts resolutely. No players (an avant-garde film serves the plot function). No grave-diggers. Much of the batllement scenes are chucked. This spares us the kind of sawing off a line here and there for time (which so marrs the Kozintsev film), although the odd speach does go missing (I particularly miss "There is a willow grows askant the brook..."). Further, Almereyda includes few wordless stretches such that the short run time is used to convey the most verse possible. My impression was that no major dimension of the play (political, sexual, psychological) was missing and in fact the film offers so much in each scene that it never occurred to me to ask for more. My second concern was equally allayed. The uses of modern settings and clothing is not meant to be self-consciously provocaive and counter-intuitive in the Luhrmn vein. It is simply modern-dress Shakespeaare.
Almereyda also deserves great praise for taking on the play's meta-theatricality so directly. It is somewhat remarkable given that there have been so many films of Hamlet and that film, as an art-form, has been equally inclined to reflect on itself and explore self-aware performance (think 8 1/2) that no other director has reveled in these aspects of the play and turned Hamlet's meta-theatre into meta-cinema. Then again, most of the major films of hamlet (Olivier, Zefferelli, Branagh, Kozintsev) have been in period dress, often marble-mouthed to various degrees and film-makers hve felt queasy about translating theatre into film. Almereyda is by far the bravest in this department. Hamlet is frequently outfitted with a camera which he uses to capture the world around him, including both the things he loves (close-ups of Ophelia) and loathes (he is elaborately filming the press-conference at which Claudius delivers his "Though yet the memory of Hamlet, our dear brother's death"). He then runs home to his slovenly hotel room where he seems to stay editing these together for hours at a time. This captures brilliantly the oft-noted paralell between Hamlet's search for coherence and meaning in his world and the audience's search for coherence and meaning in a play which often seems to foil or ignore audience expectations in uniquely cinematic terms. This comes to a head in the film within the film which is given a title sequence deliberately similar to that of the film we have are watching. As Hamlet has been seen on stage as tempted to espcape into the world of theatre, so this Hamlet escapes into the world of film. In a brilliant moment Hamlet delivers "to be or not to be" while walking up and then back down (roughly on "aye thats the rub")the "Action" aisle at Blockbuster. Having expent his energy in his soliloquy, he waits bored while the cashier checks out a large stack of videos.
Of course any director of Hamlet must rely upon a strong cast and the cast proves to be extremely well chosen. Ethan Hawke plays a young Hamlet, looking to be just off to college. Often bored, wasting time watching movies and playing with his camera and visibly hesitating is attempts on the King's life, this is a hesitating, Coleridgian Hamlet. Hawke downplays (without ignoring) the cruelty and psychological torture of which Hamlet is capable. "Get thee to a nunery" is howled into an answering machine after Hamlet has alreay stormed out. Before Ophelia, he is only hurt. Likewise the barbs he throws at Polonius and Rosencratz and Guildenstern are off-handed and seem to Hamlet barely worth speaking to such inferiors. He does not take deep pleasure in them. Neither does Hawke have use for the "antic disposition" which becomes so central to the interpretations of Branagh, Tennant and others. These choices make for a refreshing and compelling interpretation which focuses on the hurt and sense of being in-too-far which this young man suddenly asked to grow up must endure.
The supporting cast is uniformly brilliant but a few must recieve special note. Sam Shepard is a revelatory ghost. This performance is worlds away from the droning, ethereal gohst of Olivier's film. This ghost appears as flesh and blood and terrorizes Hamlet, at one point pinning him against a wall. Shepard understands how large the Father looms in Hamlet's psyche and how deliberately the ghost weilds that power. No performance I have seen is so alive to the possibility (never eliminated I believe) that the ghost is in fact a "goblin damned". Bill Murray drew much attention for his Polonius. His is not a foolish, dottering Polonius but an efficient, effective courtier and a loving father. Both aspects are well demonstrated when while forbidding her to make contact with Hamlet, he deliberately ties Ophelia's shoe. Yet perhaps most non-traditional is Julia Stiles as Ophelia. This Ophelia is brash, defiant and strong-willed, but instead of sitting uneasily with the text, this serves only to highlight the passive posture Ophelia assumes. We see more externally than we are accustomed to the inner struggle which will drive her mad. Khyle MacLachlan and Diane Venora are also exceptionally strong as Claudius and Gertrude.
For the calibur of the acting, the brilliant direction and the constant and deep attunement to the text, this film stands second only to Olivier's seminal film. As that comparison alone should make clear, this film stands in the front rank of all films of Shakespeare.
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