Hamlet
by Shari L. Rosenblum

There was only one disappointment for me in Michael Almereyda's updated screen Hamlet: that I was unable to revisit it immediately with a second viewing. I was so filled with aesthetic energy after the first viewing that my heart was pounding still when the last marks on the last reel disappeared into the darkness. Like a small child who has just been read something that enchants him, a voice inside of me wanted to shout: "Again!"

I love Shakespeare's Hamlet. I never tire of reading it or of seeing it on stage or film. I am continually recharged by its richness and its depths - ensnared in its layers of beauty and layers of emotion and layers of meaning - enrapt by its language.

Almereyda's re-fitting of Hamlet's tale touched me with cinematic and intellectual delight. No more than "[b]ased on the play by William Shakespeare," as the credits understate, it is an adaptation in the true sense: a modification to suit a new situation - a composition rewritten into a new form. Unlike Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet a few years ago - there is no claim that this is "William Shakespeare's Hamlet." Almereyda recognizes and reveals his Hamlet - through homage and allusion - as an heir to multiple Hamlets, by that name and by others, that Shakespeare could not even have imagined.

More grounded than the surrealist landscapes of other recent Shakespeare updates, the New York this Hamlet navigates, set between limousines and laundromats, luxury highrises and East Village flats, and drenched in commercialism, has its own mythical proportions. Almereyda captures them with plays of light and colors red, blue, and green.

Denmark has here been transformed from a nation into a corporation (even if not for the first time in cinematic history). It is a corporation of which Hamlet, Sr. (Sam Shepard) was the CEO and King, and to whose governance Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), married to the late CEO's widow, Gertrude (Diane Venora), now rises. Polonius (Bill Murray) is a bureaucratic toady; Fortinbras (Casey Affleck) a competitor whose image threatens from the newspaper and the TV screen. Etc., etc. But Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), a young man for all ages, is still the disaffected son - more accurately so, in fact, than in any adaptation I have ever seen.

The language of the film, pared down and played with, nonetheless remains Shakespeare's own. The American variances and intonations might trouble practiced ears, but the actors, unintimidated by the ghosts who have borne Shakespeare's legacy with historical weightiness, deliver their lines with a fresh rhythm surprisingly suited to the characters they play (word to action, action to word, as to make the young prince proud).

Every production of Hamlet chooses an interpretive slant - lust (oedipal, homoerotic, or straight), disillusionment (familial, historic, romantic), politics (of wealth, power, and corruption), performance (as madness, mise-en-abyme, or manipulation). Almereyda's slant is personal perspective: Hamlet's conceptualization of himself and his surroundings. The avant-garde director turns the eponymous subject inside out and gives us the play as the impressionistic rebel's impressions. To this end, he shifts scenes, resets speeches, and makes soliloquys into concrete visual reflections (projected into a mirror or onto a video monitor).

Remarkably, the most famous soliloquy, To be or not to be, is reclaimed from the solely suicidal distortion Olivier and others made of it with an ingenious, if easily dismissed, placement in the aisle of a video rental outlet. With a nod to the common misinterpretation - Hamlet intoning to be or not to be on the video screen as he holds a gun to his head and mouth - Almereyda quickly removes us to a variant but more apt setting than a cliff overhanging the water or a silent crypt. He playfully resets this over-famous contemplation of action, of release from the effective death of inertia, of an end to life's roadblocks, among signs that scream "Action," that advertise "New Release," and, most humorously, I think, announce in o'erhued blue the purpose of his own planned film to catch the conscience of the King - Blockbuster Video.

But before we get there, Almereyda starts us off with two sets of images to set the mood and the story's intended oppositions. On one hand, we have scenes of Hamlet alone, inactive - frustrated and phlegmatic, more self-pitying than self-critical - alienated, introversive.

He is surrounded by videographic objects and devices, through which and over which he questions what he is made of and for and what a piece of work man is. On the other hand, we have the group-inclusive scene of Act I, Scene 2, in which the camera travels from face to face. Hamlet stands to the side, observer rather than participant, as the director's unseen hand succinctly frames the dramatis personae the way Hamlet's own camera might: Claudius in predatory corporatist preening, Gertrude in shameless infidelity, Polonius in sycophantic endorsement, Ophelia (Julia Stiles) in demanding neediness, Laertes (Liev Schreiber) in dubious uber-fraternity, and Hamlet the father in silent superintendence above it all.

Hawke's trademark gen-X screen persona - in emotional stagnation between the desire to belong and the urge to tear down - creates an uncanny imagistic echo of Shakespeare's discontented Dane. His tones at times like swallowed sullenness, turned inward, and at others lashing outward in impudent defiance. He never does seem mad, truly or feignedly, nor do I think Almereyda intends him to. He is motivated by anger and anxiety, with mood swings that have the look of chemical alteration. It is a modernization that works.

Stiles' Ophelia is given an equally modern context. Her character has a natural and healthy sexuality, neither under nor overstated - youthful, anxious, impulsive - Shakespeare's symbolic water and flowers still intact - but it is a sexuality thwarted and misdirected by her father's and her brother's impositions.

Bill Murray's Polonius is ideal: both prating fool and sympathetic pawn. He creates humor with the platitudes that pour out of him, but imbues them, all the same, with an arching vulnerability. Liev Schreiber's Laertes, sounding the most traditionally Shakespearean of all the players here, combines hints of incestuous longing with faith in family honor in a singly impressive mournful glance.

Their intrusions upon Ophelia's personal space are palpable - whether Polonius is bursting into her apartment, shaded in a box-like reddened hue, physically displacing Hamlet, or fitting her with a miking apparatus as she stands on a make-shift pseudo-pedestal, his hands fiddling mysteriously under her shirt - or Laertes is leaning in too close, surveying possessively her moves with Hamlet, and even, in heightened consciousness, jumping into her grave.

If Elaine Showalter is correct in her theorizing the link between Ophelia's sexuality and insanity as something culturally inscribed, its inscription in Almereyda's film is telling. It is not Ophelia's sexuality unleashed that makes her mad this time around, but her inability to wrench control of it from the men who would lay claim to her. They are all eventually undone by their inability to let go.

Diane Venora's Gertrude confirms a consciousness of modern woman's sexuality as her own. Where Shakespeare cast Gertrude as a symbol of Denmark, possession of which the men in her life were willing to kill and die for, she is here a sexual equal aligned with but not subordinated to her lover /husband / co-conspirator / partner. And Hamlet, decidedly unoedipal, has no designs upon her, nor she on him. Her last act is a maternal one, protective and self-effacing, and he sees it as such.

Kyle MacLachlan's Claudius is divinely evil in both act and character - plaster cast megalomanager - cold, corporate, capitalist, self-interested - fratricide is only the most bloody of his sins. While Sam Shepard is remarkably moving as a quietly forceful paternal presence, no more or less ghostly in effect than an image on a surveillance monitor. Steve Zahn's Rosenkrantz hits all the notes with perfect pitch, both as comic relief and murderous foil (the speaker-phone effect a tonal match to the timeless writing), and could with ease slip into Tom Stoppard's comedic reinterpretation of his character. But it is Karl Geary's Horatio whose measured earnestness gives a final, lasting tone to the piece, with eyes that bespeak the warmth that should be between brothers, and support that men should bear their kin. It is his sadness and regret you carry with you out of the theater.

Shakespeare had his young prince articulate the goals of dramatic performance: "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." This, I think, Almereyda has done most admirably with a jab at the 21st century. If it be madness for a director to take Hamlet up again, Almereyda's method is nonetheless something to see.

CineScene, 2000