Hamlet Week: Day Four (So You Won't Have To)

Greetings, readers! Welcome to the fourth day over Cap'n Howdy's investigation into Hamlet on the big screen. Today we come to a very different take on Hamlet, and I'm going to be perfectly honest with you upfront: I must be cruel, but it is not to be kind. As I'll detail below, this particular adaptation of William Shakespeare's play really got under my skin, and I nearly turned it off.

I'm also going to be doing something a little bit different with today's in depth review, because sometimes it's not enough to just tell you about stupid things that happen in a film; sometimes I need to show you.

Cap'n Howdy's Handy Hamlet Handbook:

Date of Release: 2000

Directed By: Michael Almereyda (Deadwood, New Orleans, Mon Amour)

Dramatis Personae: Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), Gertrude (Diane Venora), Horatio (Karl Geary), Polonius (Bill Murray), Laertes (Liev Schreiber), Ophelia (Julia Stiles)

Other Notable Cast Members: Sam Shepard (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff) - Ghost, Steve Zahn (Reality Bites, Shattered Glass) - Rosencrantz, Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat, Syriana) - Gravedigger, Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) - Fortinbras, Larry Fessenden (Broken Flowers, Bringing Out the Dead) - Kissing Man, Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou, Leaves of Grass) - Flight Captain

Setting: New York City, home of the Denmark Corporation, the year 2000 (as a title card makes clear).

Run time: 111 min

What's Missing: Take your pick. 90% of the speeches have been pared down to change the meaning, either on the part of the person saying it or to insinuate something on the part of the listener. Laertes no longer accepts Hamlet's apology on principle, only to insist his honor is tainted; he just walks away like a jerk.

Yorick is gone, not merely in flashback form (as was the case in Branagh's expanded Hamlet), but in skull form too, unless you count two instances I'll detail below, neither of which improve the film in any fashion. The Players are removed entirely, replaced instead with a student film project of "The Mousetrap", a "film by Hamlet Prince of Denmark" (which is what the title cards say). Osric doesn't really exist in this version of Hamlet either. His lines are either given to Horatio, an unnamed fencing officiant, or are, like all other servants of the Denmark Corporation, handed over to a fax machine.

Don't let the frequency of his name appearing fool you: Fortinbras is nothing more than a glorified cameo, usually Casey Affleck's face appearing on a newspaper or on a TV screen. For example:



Fortinbras is a glorified red herring in the 2000 Hamlet, designed to give you the facade of something going on beyond the main story, because Almereyda desperately needs to justify why this interpretation has to take place in the world of big business.


Other Deviations: It's hard to decide where the deletions end and where the deviations begin, since everything cut out is generally replaced by something that is rarely justified. Changes to Hamlet are made seemingly without rhyme or reason, but happen because a) it would look cool if it happened, or b) it makes the material "edgier" or more contemporary.

To wit: one of Hamlet's many videotaped soliloquies involves him putting a gun to his temple, in his mouth, and under his chin, followed by the line "to be or not to be," which Hamlet, in watching this, feels the need to rewind three times so that we "get it." This is following extended TV footage of Peace Is Every Step: Meditation in Action: The Life and Work of Thich Nhat Hanh, which hammers the term "to be" into the ground, just so we understand why Hamlet is thinking about being and not being when he gets to the video store (where the soliloquy takes place).

The clearest deviation beyond this is moving Hamlet from Denmark to New York, for reasons which are unclear at best. Since the text is only conveniently deleted or moved around, all of the characters still refer to "Denmark" and royalty as though they were synonymous with the operations of corporate structures. Which they might be, but this version of Hamlet does a terrible job of making those connections.

See?

Of course, this Hamlet is pretty bad at making connections too: for some reason, Almereyda decided to remove the Prince of Denmark's ability to quickly surmise why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have arrived to visit him. Instead, Hamlet finds out that they've been sent for by overhearing a phone call between Claudius and R&G. Why? I really don't know. Maybe because he assumed the audience might not be familiar with Hamlet, so it's better to keep us all in the dark?

Ophelia still sort-of goes crazy, but not in any way that's radically different from where she is earlier in the film, when the angsty, twenty-something daughter of Polonius imagines herself jumping into Claudius' pool while they discuss Hamlet's letter. Considering that each version I've watched to this point deviates as to whether Ophelia actually has the flowers she's giving to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius, I don't actually take umbrage with photos of rosemary, daisies, or rue being handed out. Her drowning (in the lobby's fountain) kind-of makes sense, depending on whether you think she jumped off of the balcony or not.

There are other, little things, like Marcellus becoming Marcella, Horatio's girlfriend, that are functionally harmless. It means that she appears pretty much every time he does but doesn't say much of anything after the opening scene of the play (which is restructured as a flashback while they recount the tale to Hamlet). I'm not certain you ever hear Bernardo's name, which I felt was a bit rude; instead he's just some security guard.

Going back to the issue of guns, I need to get into two BIG deviations; one involves Claudius' "my offense is rank" scene and the other the final duel. Hamlet carries a gun around for most of the movie, and after the "Excellent well, sir. You are a fishmonger." scene with Polonius, he marches into Claudius' office, weapon drawn, ready to shoot. He draws his firearm again on Claudius, only instead of being in a Chapel, it's in the King's limousine, with a drastically altered speech designed to remove any sense of guilt on Kyle MacLachlan's part.

Of course, Hamlet doesn't shoot, which brings us to the really stupid part. Recall that yesterday I gave credit to Kenneth Branagh for visually anticipating the duel by demonstrating that Hamlet was, in fact, practicing constantly. Well, in the 2000 Hamlet, there's no hint at any point that either Hamlet or Laertes has ever fenced in their lives (and considering the choices made about the kind of person Hamlet is, I doubt highly he ever would), and yet here we are, at the end, for a rooftop duel of fencing foils.

Not a poisoned foil, mind you, just fencing foils, because when the time comes for Laertes to "cut" Hamlet, he shoots him. Then Hamlet grabs the gun and shoots Laertes, so that we can have this scene:

To set up this:

Where Hamlet guns down Claudius. The other deviation, and it's a massive one, is that Gertrude somehow figures out that the wine goblet is poisoned by looking at it out of the corner of her eye, and willingly poisons herself, even though Hamlet would still not take a drink. I suppose it's meant to enhance the "tragedy," but all it really does is make the downfall of Claudius that much more pointless, up to and including being shot in the back by Hamlet.

What Works: This is really going out on a limb, because I barely finished watching Almereyda's version of Hamlet, but the use of security camera footage does, in some way, lay the groundwork for the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation (which is also a contemporary take on the play). Julia Stiles is okay, and so are Kyle MacLachlan, Ethan Hawke, and Liev Schreiber, or as okay as they can be with the changes imposed on their characters. They do the best they can with reconstructed and depthless versions of Ophelia, Claudius, Hamlet, and Laertes. Diane Venora isn't bad as Gertrude, per se; she just doesn't register for most of the film.

If you liked Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, I guess there's an off-chance you'd enjoy this, although it lacks the kinetic energy (some would say ADHD editing style) of that film.

What Doesn't Work: Where do I begin? The "Generation Y" Hamlet isn't merely a bad take on the play, an adaptation full of needless and lazy alterations, but it's barely a watchable movie.

Since the title card plants us firmly in the year 2000, one might hope that it's just because that was the year the film was released in (possibly made in) and not indicative of the music, fashion, tech fads, and attitudes. Right? We don't really want a Hamlet where the Prince of Denmark is wearing a snow cap and eyeliner, do we?

Oh.

A picture's worth a thousand words, so strap on your "I Love the New Millenium" oversized-Jamiroquai hats and have a gander at this artifact of a bygone era:


This film is so shamelessly linked to the turn of the millennium that Hamlet becomes a time capsule in all the wrong ways. It's hopelessly dated; Hamlet wanders around with a Super-8 camera (how American Beauty of him!) and portable dvd player, alternately filming everything he sees or watching video of himself delivering speeches cut out from the narrative proper:


But not only is Hamlet the worst kind of navel-gazing narcissist, but then Almereyda thinks he'll get clever with it by including clips from Rebel without a Cause, something I'm pretty sure is Days of Heaven (it looks like the locusts scene, timed to coincide with Sam Shepard's arrival of the Ghost. How clever!), and... wait for it... Hamlet. Yes, Hamlet is watching Hamlet! Intertextuality, you guys!

But wait, there's more! I'm going to give Michael Almereyda way more credit than he probably deserves here, but there's some accidental intertextuality in the "to be or not to be" scene that a halfway clever film scholar can extrapolate. The timing of dialogue and background image lends itself to a nice joining of William Shakespeare and Graham Greene:



Well, yes, I suppose that is true. That is exactly what happens to Harry Lime in The Third Man (visible behind Hamlet's right shoulder). Am I giving Almereyda more kudos than he deserves? Probably. After all, he does juxtapose "or take up arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" with Hamlet walking down the "Action" aisle. You know what, I'm going to just hang on to that Third Man thing, just so people don't start handing out intertextual kudos to this Hamlet.

Onto the most egregious error in casting: Bill Murray is woefully miscast as Polonius. I'm on the record as being about as big of a Bill Murray fan as a normal person can possibly be (and as I'm far from normal, just work out the implication yourself), and I know for a fact he can be serious. I've seen Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation. Hey, he's even okay in the unwatchable Limits of Control, but not here. Every line reading lands like horse dung on hot pavement. It's embarrassing.

Not that Steve Zahn or Dechen Thurman fare much better as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; they're reduced to leather jacket wearing, grunge hair and facial messes, yelling, beer drinking buffoonery. Because Hamlet (and by proxy, the audience) is too stupid to figure out that they're spying for Claudius and Gertrude, we're repeatedly exposed to scenes where Claudius is talking to a phone with R&G's disembodied voices on the other side. Kind of like when Ophelia dials MovieFone for no apparent reason and we listen to the recorded intro.

This brings me to the Product Placement. See, it's not enough for Hamlet to deliver his "to be or not to be" soliloquy in a video store (or after it's so painfully and obviously teased out in two different places earlier in the film); no, it has to be in a Blockbuster. How do I know? Because of this:


and this, which is somehow even more dull than the still suggests, possibly because it holds for fifteen seconds:

By the way, if you're wondering, The Crow: City of Angels is playing in the background.

And yet, that's somehow tame compared to this:


That's Sam Shepard, as The Ghost of Hamlet, standing in front of a Pepsi One drink machine. He materializes in front of it, then dematerializes walking into it, so that we get two good looks at what we should be drinking when our dead father returns to task us with vengeance for murder most foul.

I save my favorite "why bother?" for the last one. When I saw Jeffrey Wright's name attached to Gravedigger, I was excited. That's a great pairing of actor and role, so imagine my disappointment when Wright is in the film for thereabouts five seconds. The Gravedigger is singing "All Along the Watchtower" for a quick cutaway shot prior to Hamlet and Horatio inexplicably pulling up to a graveyard (there's no reason they'd just wander by since they're on a motorcycle riding from the airport into town) and finding Ophelia's funeral almost done with. Why even hire Jeffrey Wright if that's what you're going to use him for? A cheap music cue that doesn't actually serve the film in any way or add depth (and don't give me the "joker to the thief" line being some arcane reference to Yorick.)

Final Thoughts: It wouldn't matter if the Cap'n hadn't watched three other versions of Hamlet prior to this adaptation; it's a bad movie, no matter how you take it in. Decisions are made that have no logic to them, characters are badly sketched out stereotypes, and Michael Almereyda continually hits us over the head with references that are (at best) tangentially connected to the narrative. This isn't just something I recommend you skip, but it's best you just forget that I ever mentioned it and move along. It's not even worth your time as a "trainwreck" movie. In fact, I'm going to slap a SO YOU WON'T HAVE TO tag on this bad boy...