William Shakespeare’s Hamlet audaciously combines black comedy, political intrigue, murder mystery, social satire and bloody tragedy without losing its focus over its four-hour playing time. Somehow, though, director Michael Almereyda, who halves the story’s length, manages the dubious distinction of so badly blurring the tale’s edges that all we are left with is an amorphous, indigestible gooey glob of a film.
You’d think that Hamlet, that brooding Danish Prince of Darkness Visible, would be made for today’s disaffected ironists. What Gen X’er hasn’t, like Hamlet, felt equal parts affection and revulsion for his parent’s generation? After learning that his uncle Claudius has murdered his father and married his mother, Hamlet alternates (like a figure in a Yeats poem) between moments of passionate intensity and apathetic ennui. About everything – his mother in her “incestuous bed”, his beloved Ophelia, his friends Horatio and Laertes – he cares deeply, and then he cares not at all. Lured by a renaissance man’s idealistic enthusiasm for man’s potential, he’s also sickened by our debasement to the mundane gifts of power offered by banal temporal gods.
Apparently Almereyda wanted to de-mythologize Shakespeare’s most enigmatic protagonist. He’s succeeded only in disenchanting him. Almereyda’s films (Nadja) are often infused with a gothic goofiness, and it is too bad he didn’t spare some of it for this film. Instead, he decides to take us into the bland corporate world of the 21st century, a world sadly devoid of the sort of sexual and political passion that gives Hamlet much of its urgency and relevance. Along the way, Almereyda manages to stumble around long enough to kill one of the great finales in drama, depriving the film’s climax of its drama and emotion.
Visually and kinetically, the film is a washed out and dispassionate variation on Baz Luhrman’s intriguing, marginally unsuccessful MTV-riffing Romeo+Juliet. Despite the New York City setting, Almereyda fails to take advantage of the wealth of visual resources at his disposal. Instead, we get product placements and corporate endorsements. Particularly distasteful is Hamlet’s infamous “to be or not to be” soliloquy delivered in a Blockbuster store and the incomparable Sam Shepard dissolving into a Pepsi vending machine. It isn’t hard to dislike a movie that pretends to be studying the effects of consumerism, all the while reaping its benefits.
Of the actors, Ethan Hawke’s Manhattan-based film school-steeped Hamlet is certainly confused and angst-ridden, but his muttering, fumbling characterization rarely achieves the requisite levels of rage and disgust to invigorate his character and provide the story with a sense of drama and direction. Secondary characters don’t fare much better. Kyle MacLachlan lacks the necessary multi-tiered menace (he and Diane Venora, who plays Gertrude, are an unconvincing couple) to pull off the role of Claudius. However, two performances rise above the tedium: Shepard is an effectively tortured ghost of Hamlet’s father, while Liev Schreiber simmers, bubbles and boils as the heartbroken and enraged Laertes. One can only wonder what kind of Hamlet he would have made.
