Hamlet

Is this Hamlet? Depends on who you ask I suppose.

There are some who would require the plot and drama: a son whose inheritance is interrupted, so who may be imagining the murder of his father; a vapid, doting, hedonistic mother; a loyal, by the book counselor, his earnest son and brilliant daughter, she smitten by the prince. A scheming king -- wheels turn and everyone dies.

Some would consider the language the essential element. This is the poet's most convoluted, and heavily annotated metaphoric fabric. Shakespeare is most often celebrated for his layering and interelating of mental images, and certainly this work is his most globally elaborate (sorry).

But just as the language rides on the drama, the ideas of the play ride on the metaphors. These ideas are life-altering in their starkness: Reality, thought, creation, intent, the cause and validity of unnatural action, relationships among cocreated internal worlds. Much of this is developed in frightening and challenging terms. To my tastes, the ideas are what is important. Too many Hamlets (notably Olivier's)faithfully include the first two and never touch the third. I'd buy a complete abandonment of the first, but cannot see how one could get to the third without most of the second.

Now. This film. They have preserved the plot well enough for a film, I suppose. And they have kept the language, about one third of it anyway.

The bad:

Bill Murray is lost in Polonius, utterly lost. The production quality is poor -- that fits the film school motif (see below), but there is no excuse for the many boom mikes sticking down. They repurposed so much to fit the new setting, so why stick with swords at the end?

The biggest complaint is that they missed all the ideas, the big ones. The central example is at the end of the first act, where Hamlet says: `there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Hamlet, and Horatio are students of Wittenburg philosophy, which audiences would have understood as that of the magi Giordano Bruno, martyred by the Pope. (His book is the one Hamlet quotes when asked `what is the matter?,' and Bruno is also quoted in the northnorthwest and hawk from a handsaw lines.) The play has much to do with understanding Bruno's questions of thought and action. When Hamlet differentiates himself from Horatio, the play really starts. In this film, though, the `your' becomes `our.' Why?

The Good:

This Ophelia is wonderful. I don't know her other work yet, but it includes two other Shakespeare adaptations. She certainly was helped by the woman director, who amplifies the female roles in emotion if not screentime. She even transforms Marcello into a Marcella, Horatio's girlfriend. Rather nice. Also well done is the staging of the Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern dialog.

The central device of the film is rather clever, if not original. The play is deeply self-referential. All the rich text about introspection is what is usually cut in the name of modern impatience, and that is the case here. Also gone here is the sharply self-referential scenes of Hamlet lecturing the players. What we have in its place is self-reference about film, and filming. Hamlet and Horatio, indeed R&G and Marcella are all film students. He thinks in film (actually video), and all his ruminations are cast in visual terms, often in the context of video, even a Blockbuster store. The final chorus is in video, and much of the action is seen through surveillance cameras. The play-within-the-play is a homemade video, with clear film-school effects.

This is not as clever as it could have been in the hands of a master. (Or when the goals are exceedingly simple as in `American Beauty.') But it is an honest attempt to cast the reflexive depth of the play in cinematic terms.

Sam Shepard is the best King Hamlet's ghost I have ever seen. He is a solid blessing.

This is a respectable effort, and deserves to be viewed if not celebrated.

Bill Murray doing Shakespeare is the cutest thing ever, it may be the first time Polonius steals the show. Incredible for the NYC buildings, streets, and upper class apartments, creating one great slice of atmosphere after another. The self-awareness of it makes it funny too. All those young 90s actors having fun, and McLaughlan as the King is so great and nuanced you somehow feel bad for the villain. A festive celebration of Shakespeare, cinema, and Gen X. So, films like this are a joke when they're released, hence its reputation, but in time they become works of art. One, because Shakespeare is immortal, and two, this era here of 2000 New York, this is a painting of nostalgia, from a long-gone era of history. It's incredibly fresh.

Otherwise this is the perfect way for young people to understand the play, how the casting gives you an immediate impression who these people are, framing the dialogue in a way that you always understand it. The irony when you get a good rendition you bond to it and don't want to imagine it any other way.

I consider myself a bit of a Shakespeare purist and so put off seeing this film for quite a while. I really wish I'd seen it sooner. All the other comments here about the mangling of the language, cutting of the script to an almost incomprehensible extent, the kind of grungey contrivedness of the whole thing etc etc, are all true, but at the same time the film has little glimmers of something more. The film must be one of the shortest Hamlets ever, and moves along at real speed. The cinematography is beautiful and the juxtaposing of modern images with the text (eg Hamlet's soliloquy being performed whilst he watches James Dean, the rebel without a cause) throws up (almost in spite of itself) some interesting ideas of how the director considers Hamlet. The modern feel works surprisingly well (although it *does* occassionally jar), and throws up a lot of the themes in Hamlet as being particularly relevant today.

The acting is all okay, with a few amazing exceptions -- Liev Schrieber as Laertes really stands out, and Julia Stiles is good too. Kyle Maclachlan makes a very sinister Claudius, and Ethan Hawke is okay, although I couldn't work out whether his Hamlet was pretending to be mad or really was, but this film really belongs to the supporting cast who are all pretty sound.

Good, if you're in the mood for it. If you can't bear the thought of anything being cut or "reinterpreted" in a hit-and-miss way then avoid like the plague!

8 stars (if you like this kind of new Shakespeare) 2 stars (if you believe Hamlet should be done formally, lengthily and in tights)

This is easily the worst translation of Shakespeare's work to film that I have ever seen. In this pointlessly, ineffectively, and inconsistently updated re-imagination of Hamlet, determinedly, overly hip cardboard cutouts do battle within themselves and with one another, using the text of Hamlet as the basis for their acts in a literal sense, but without even a hint of the humanity and insight that the original work gave us or that a new one could attempt to give. I have no issue with resetting classic works, nor do I care if an adaptation is somewhat unfaithful to the text; what I do have an issue with is if a movie simply doesn't work. At least Romeo + Juliet had some kind of emotion behind it; this version is altogether too detached to care about its characters and too clueless to remember that the story just doesn't work if we don't care.

Good points: Bill Murray as Polonius, and Kyle Maclachlan's Claudius, apparently digitally superimposed from another, better movie.

Nearly four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare continues to be the best screenwriter in the English language. This beautiful, moody, stylish adaptation of his greatest play is no exception. Another wonderful thing about the Bard is how his drama seems to elevate any actor willing to take on the challenge. I especially enjoyed Bill Murray as Polonius: his performance was all the more delightful because of the necessity of restraining his comic genius here; he appears always on the edge of cracking a joke, and of course doesn't, adding even more tension to an already extremely taught production.

But what I loved most about this movie was how it departed from the usual staging conventions (medieval costume, stone castles) to get at the heart of what the play is really about: a kid coming home on a college break and discovering that his uncle has murdered his father and is having sex with his mother. Ethan Hawke does a fantastic job in the role, giving us the brooding, confused, lovesick, and ultimately self-destructive adolescent that Shakespeare intended.

If I were a high-school English teacher, this is the Hamlet that I would want to show my students.