A Hamlet that runs for less than two hours: who could resist such a bargain?
Unfortunately, even more is added than taken away in Michael Almereyda's updated version - a sort of Hamlet Does Manhattan. America not being a monarchy, and having trouble at the moment even to come up with a presidency, it is not the most congenial place to relocate a royal court among the skyscrapers, complete with king, queen and prince.
Still, Almereyda tries relentlessly and sometimes succeeds inventively. At worst, it's always fun to see what gimmickry he can come up with next.
Elsinore has shrunk to the size of the Denmark Corporation, and just beaten off a hostile takeover from the Fortinbras empire. Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is a slacker prince in a woolly hat, a couch potato drinking Carlsberg (natch) and o'ershadowed by not just the pale cast of thought, but three days' growth.
His father's ghost (Sam Shepard) begins promisingly by walking through a Pepsi dispenser, though later becomes an all-too-solid piece of flesh amid the fittings and fixtures. King Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) rides in a stretch limo and has his regicide exposed on a home video, The Mouse Trap, subtitled A Hamlet Production. Queen Gertrude (Diane Venora) is a Vanity Fair celebrity in designer shades. Ophelia wears a "wire" to record Hamlet's ravings, scatters Polaroids of rosemary and rue, etc that she's developed in her dark room and, since Manhattan lacks "weeping brooks", suicidally submerses herself in a public fountain.
Polonius (Bill Murray) is a "suit" with a rep tie who gives advice like a PR man. Guildenstern and Rosencrantz get into a yellow cab whose recorded exhortation to "Belt Up" reminds them ominously that "A cat has nine lives, you have only one". And "To be or not to be" is staged in a Blockbuster store among racks of Action videos.
Much of this is amusing; virtually all of it is shallow and reductive. The film has been shot in a hard north light (or maybe a north-by-northwest one), which shows up everyone's pores and pockmarks, but generates a palpable atmosphere of corporate sleaze despite the high-gloss board-rooms, penthouses and luxury apartments.
Cameraman John de Borman does bring a unifying look to the play, though some scenes defy even him and Almereyda to turn the kingdom into a contemporary business empire. Thus the duel scene begins conventionally enough with fencing foils, but suddenly turns into pistols for two, presumably because the gun is America's murder weapon of choice, and possibly because fencing foils might be thought too European or too cissy.
The production's best feature is its use of CCTV, digital cameras and even tabloid photos to relate the narcissistic "Me Culture" of modern America to the self-exploration of an image-fixated prince. Its worst feature is, predictably, the failure of all but one member of the all-American cast to speak blank verse and give it the resonance of poetry instead of simply the gabble of street vernacular. The sole exception is Liev Schreiber's Laertes, who deploys breath control and voice projection with real feeling and, even in his few scenes, quite dominates the absurdly overrated Ethan Hawke's flyweight Hamlet.
Hamlet
Cert: 12A
