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Halfway through Michael Almereyda's new film version of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take their pal Hamlet out on the club scene, where they slump on sofas with their beers and attempt to sound out Hamlet's secrets by shouting lines at each other over the thumpa-thumpa of the music. It is an amusingly symbolic moment: Can anyone hear Shakespeare's lines over the visual and aural noise of postmodern film?
I'm no language-is-all Shakespeare purist. I like the action, the intrigue, the mistaken identities. I even like the clothes. (Why not? Costumes were by far the largest expenditure for Shakespeare's acting company.) The past decade of image-is-all filmmaking has left me wondering, though, just how much can be suppressed while still offering audiences something of value. Go ahead and cut lines, recast the setting, rearrange scenes—I'm game. But what are we left with? That is the question.
Almereyda's Hamlet cheekily turns Denmark into a mammoth New York corporation. Hamlet's father is its recently deceased CEO, while Hamlet himself is played by Ethan Hawke as a rich-kid slacker, at once cynical and bewildered by the towering buildings and shallow people around him.
The concept and art direction of the film convey this bewilderment very effectively: Hamlet's world seems dominated by electronic devices and images. In his apartment, random still photos cluster around his video editing setup, and video images play distractingly. Fax machines and cell phones beep and buzz their way into scenes, and Hamlet's friends first view his father's ghost through a security camera.
The dominant theme of photo-images comments nicely on the dehumanizing effects of galloping technology while supporting Shakespeare's central concerns in the play with theatricality and introspection. Seeing Hamlet's introspection literalized as video footage is an apt transposition of the excessive speechifying in Shakespeare's text.
The technology theme also propels strong interpretations of certain scenes. In the so-called "nunnery" scene, the one in which Hamlet terrorizes and rejects Ophelia, Shakespeare's text leaves unclear how much Hamlet knows about Claudius and Polonius's plan to spy on him, using Ophelia for bait. Here Ophelia's dad rigs her up ahead of time with a hidden microphone, and the encounter between the distracted lovers begins as a tender near-reconciliation—until Hamlet uncovers the mic. With Ophelia's weak complicity in the spying plot instantly revealed, he storms at her, then exits, finishing the job with cruel messages left on her answering machine.
Almereyda also plays a delightful riff on the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy by having Hamlet, well be fore the actual scene, vaguely attending to a Buddhist guru chirping away on video about how "to be" is not possible; we are in relationship with others and therefore must "inter-be." It's an ironic commentary on the non-relation ships in the film. Then, when soliloquy-time arrives, Hamlet mutters the famous lines while pacing up and down the "Action" aisle of the video store. (This scene's joke depends partly on one's prior knowledge of a traditional interpretation of Hamlet as a thinker who can never act: his own comments about conscience making cowards of us all occur only at the end of the scene.)
The whirring machinery and sterile corporate-and-chrome interiors of the film succeed in suggesting that turn-of-the-millennium life involves too much mediation and not enough genuine human connectedness. In deed, the characters hardly ever actually look at each other. So we perceive that the postmodern self is isolated, fragmented, dwarfed by the artificiality of devices and institutions. We also discover, unfortunately, that the postmodern self is boring.
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