Hamlet

At times Michael Almereyda's bold and busy adaptation of Hamlet makes a strong case that Shakespeare intended his play to be set in the 21st century. All the stodgy Elizabethan conventions of asides, soliloquies, eavesdropping, and ghosts seem natural when translated into the artifices of cell phones, video cameras, tape recorders, and bugging devices. Neither could any stage design more faithfully re-create the blasted labyrinth of the hero's mind than the glassy towers and abysses of Manhattan, through which he wanders like a more thoughtful kind of American psycho. And cutting the text to some 90 minutes invokes the postmodern solipsism of the self-enclosed music video. But when it comes to Hamlet himself, there's the rub. Ethan Hawke has grown into an icon of hollowness, especially in the literary likes of Great Expectations and Snow Falling on Cedars, and here, with his stocking cap and mumbled, speedreading delivery of the greatest lines written for the stage, he comes off as Hamlet, Pipsqueak of Denmark, or Hamlet the Dink.

In one of Almereyda's many inspired touches, Denmark is a corporation perhaps more powerful than its namesake kingdom ever was, and its rotten state is made more pervasive by technology. Kyle MacLachlan's Claudius is corrupt and shallow, Diane Venora's Gertrude passionate and broken, Sam Shepard's Ghost smug and tormented, Julia Styles's Ophelia touching, and Liev Schreiber's Laertes posturing and pitiful. Schreiber himself has played Hamlet on stage, and one can only picture him in that role here. In fact, any of the actors here would have made a better Hamlet than Hawke, including Steve Zahn and Dechen Thurman as a zonked-out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Bill Murray as a clownish but malignant Polonius.

Maybe that's what Almereyda had in mind, with Hamlet the concept upstaging Hamlet the character, and the play-within-the-play, here a brilliant little video, becoming the film's high point. It captures the conscience of the king and the imagination of the audience; the rest is anticlimax. It makes sense, then, that one of Almereyda's cuts is the scene in which Hamlet gives the players advice on acting; had Hawke taken it himself, this would have been just another showcase for the melancholy Dane. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.
-- Peter Keough