According to Daniel Rosenthal’s intelligent and handsomely produced Shakespeare on Screen (Hamlyn £20), there have been more than 50 movies for the cinema or TV of Shakespeare’s most frequently staged play, ranging from Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning film of 1948 to Kurosawa’s 1960 thriller, The Bad Sleep Well.
Rosenthal’s book is so up-to-date that it covers the very latest movie Hamlet, in which the New York independent director Michael Almereyda, taking his cue from Aki Kaurismäki’s quirky Finnish comedy, Hamlet Goes Business (1987), relocates the play to the modern corporate world of Manhattan. Unlike Kaurismäki, who uses scarcely a line of the original, Almereyda sticks to a pared down version of Shakespeare’s text, giving none of the characters additional lines.
Taking the famous formulation Isaiah Berlin made in his essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, Olivier’s film was a hedgehog work with one big idea (‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’) while Almereyda’s is a fox-like film, bristling with endless little ideas. It’s the work of a highly intelligent man who, as the preface and appendices to his published script (Faber £4.99) demonstrate, has thought long and profitably about the project.
His Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is the intellectual drop-out son of the recently deceased head of the Denmark Corporation. It’s now run by a smooth, new CEO, Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), who’s married Hamlet’s mother (Diane Venora). This Hamlet has pictures of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Malcolm X and Poe on the wall of his room at the Elsinore Hotel; he watches James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause on TV, records his life on camcorder, and, like everyone else, is surrounded by electronic equipment and observed on CCTV.
He starts out as a self-pitying counter-cultural malcontent, walking the streets of Manhattan like Holden Caulfield, a woolly hat pulled down over his ears, his reflection constantly seen in the gleaming mirror surfaces of the city. When Horatio (Karl Geary) and Marcella (as Marcellus becomes as Horatio’s lover) bring news of his father’s ghost (Sam Shepard), he’s gradually stirred to action, but his natural decency restrains him from a revenge murder, and he walks through the shelves of the action movie section at a Blockbuster store as he delivers the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy.
The movie brings out clearly the parallel father-and-son story with a sympathetic, slightly smug but never mocked Polonius (Bill Murray), while Liev Schreiber’s Laertes is one of the strongest, most assertive I’ve ever seen. Right from the start, Ophelia (Julia Stiles), a professional photographer, is shown as if on the edge of an abyss, invariably placed beside water. She anticipates her own suicide while gazing at her reflection in Claudius’s swimming pool, and finally goes round the bend on the spiralling ramps of the Guggenheim Museum.
But this isn’t just a family story, because unlike Olivier’s film and the current National Theatre production, Fortinbras is a looming presence, the tougher young business tycoon who, in headlines in USA Today, is seen making takeover bids for the Denmark Corporation. In a final TV broadcast, his success as corporate raider is announced in a news bulletin in which famed US newscaster (and former Panorama presenter) Robert MacNeil delivers lines normally spoken by Fortinbras and the Player King. The latter has been dropped from the cast because The Mousetrap, Hamlet’s play-within-the-play to expose Claudius, has become an avant-garde video film shown in the Denmark Corporation’s private cinema.
I was riveted by this film, by the prodigality of its invention and the sense of adventure. I wasn’t too impressed by the speaking of the verse, which is at times extremely sloppy, even when naturalism is sought. And despite Carter Burwell’s eclectic score, which draws on Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Bob Dylan, I wasn’t particularly moved as I was by the infinitely less imaginative production starring Simon Russell Beale on the South Bank. But I look forward to seeing it again, when the novelty will have worn off.
