The setting is New York City in the year 2000, providing an instant entree to a new generation of filmgoers. Hamlet is born of an alienation and angst not unfamiliar to young audiences. Denmark is not a kingdom but a huge corporation, and the ghost of his father appears to him on the terrace of his sterile metropolitan hotel. The famous 'to be or not to be' speech is delivered under the glare of fluorescent lights in the aisles of a video store. It seems as if once again, this version of the
classic tragedy resonates with its true meaning: one man's youthful idealism destroyed by the knowledge of his world's corruption.
Icy-cold in its palette and unwaveringly cool in its application of modern settings and gizmos to a text that stands up to endless reinvention, this is a Hamlet that brings imagination matched by thoughtfulness to its appeal to both eye and ear.
By equating the garish feudalism of the play's original setting with the megalopolis of today's New York, [Almereyda is] at least on the right track. The problem is, it's just about his only track.
The city becomes a living emblem of the tense coexistence of art and corporatism, an uneasy relationship which Almereyda emphasizes as the core conflict of his picture.
In a sense, it's B-movie Shakespeare, the same as Orson Welles' inspired version of Macbeth (1948), which was produced on a skimpy budget for a B-picture studio.
Hamlet is supposed to be melancholy, but Hawke plays him as a disturbed loner who is more likely to infect the world's computers with an e-mail virus than avenge his father's murder.
It seems like they're just actors somehow in a modern setting reciting off of their script (or, in this case, screenplay), but it's all a great, fantastic production otherwise.
June 15, 2011
Alexander Diminiano
Super Reviewer
This is not bad at all. Again, it's no Branagh, but I enjoyed it. I"m not sure if BIll Murray -- who is on my favorite actor list -- is delivering intentionally his Polonius lines the way he does, in that halting manner, as if not fully comprehending the words, or if he really is not doing a very good job. Even with
that, this is well worth seeing.
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