Hey folks, Harry here and.... Hmmmm... I wasn't able to see HAMLET, those three days up in Wichita Falls really cut into my viewings... sigh... Hopefully, god willing, next year I'll be able to see more. Until I do however, wonderful folks like Saxon here will keep us up to date. BTW... he really really really didn't like Ethan Hawke in this. I did hear from some people that enjoyed the film. Alas... I don't have their reviews, so here's Saxon's...
Hey Harry,
Not sure if someone has contributed anything about the new HAMLET with Ethan Hawke that played for SXSW, but here is my very long two cents (for whatever its worth). Of course if you decide to post this please feel free to edit it.
To me Hamlet is in Laurence Olivier's words, "pound for pound the greatest play ever written." So it was with enormous excitement that I attended the SXSW preview of Ethan Hawke's new Hamlet set in modern day New York City. I think Hamlet is the classic Campbell "Hero's Journey" - a story that can be told many different ways from many perspectives, and that is why such a wide range of actors have found success and fame with the part.
There is a common saying in the theatre that no actor can ever completely fail in the role of Hamlet because the part is so expansive, and encompasses so much what it means to be human and what is humanity, that somewhere, sometime in the play an actor will find success. Ethan Hawke proves centuries of theatre critics and historians wrong. Before the SXSW screening, the director was quick to point out that Ethan Hawke was the only actor under thirty to play the part out of the 43 film versions in existence. He also said the most common question asked of him was "Why another Hamlet?" His response was that hopefully the film would speak for itself and answer that very question. Sadly it did not.
Shot in NYC on a shoe-string budget, with all the actors working for scale, the film does many things to update the story and make it more "relevant" for a modern audience. Denmark becomes the Denmark Corporation. The royal palace of Elsinore becomes the Hotel Elsinore (looking very much like Lincoln Center Apartments). Hamlet's obsession with theatre, acting and actors becomes an obsession with movies, videos, and constantly videotaping himself - his inaction transformed into the despondent apathetic pleasure of watching himself endlessly through the lens of his digital video camera. Ophelia (Julia Stiles) is transformed into a free-spirited TriBeCa hippie-chick photographer who refuses the wealthy lifestyle of her father (Polonius played with great irony by Bill Murray) to the life a tortured artist. The Ghost (Sam Shepard) so paralyzes Ethan Hawke with fear that he stands helpless as his dead father grabs him, pushes him against a wall and pulls his hair (this leaves unsaid the great question - if the Ghost can touch Hamlet why can't he just kill Claudius himself - but maybe that is too much continuity for this film). The token black is the security guard Bernardo (whose name is not even mentioned in the film). Of course Gertrude (played by a former NY Shakespeare Festival Hamlet - Diane Venora) has a drinking problem, and Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) is the cold hearted, silver tongued CEO we expect out of Stone's WALL STREET. The great Steve Zahn (as Rosencrantz) is wasted and transformed into a ridiculously stupid frat boy. Jeffrey Wright as the gravedigger is practically non-existent and Casey Affleck as Fortinbras is confined mostly to the cover of mock USA-Today covers as the head of Denmark corporation's big corporate rival. The most engaging on screen personality behind Murray is Liev Schrieber's Laertes - and one watches the film the whole time wondering why he isn't playing Hamlet himself (Which he just did at the NY Shakespeare Festival to Diane Venora's on-stage Gertrude).
Unlike TITUS, which seemed to at least put some thought into the updating of the narrative, this HAMLET tries a little too hard, is little too self conscious about being "cool" and looking "slick". Now I must confess many things about the film were original and inventive, for example: The decision to present the "Mousetrap" as film/video produced by HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK, was very inventive and led out of a Hamlet who was obsessed with the narcissistic pleasure of videotaping himself. Likewise, Hawke watching James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE before the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I," speech was a nice touch. This was fantastic - the original angry young man trying to communicate with the modern angry young man, but there wasn't enough of these moments.
When producing Shakespeare there are some standard questions that inform and influence production. For example in The Merchant of Venice, one of the fundamental elements that defines a production is dealing with Shylock's exit; in Measure for Measure it is how you deal with Isabella's silence at the end of the play; in The Taming of the Shrew it is how you present Kate's final speech. Hamlet most often is defined by the cutting of the script. Conversely productions which do not cut the play and present Hamlet in its entirety (or "Hamlet in its eternity", as Gielgud called it), also define the production. Nothing defines this production, the text that is cut and rearranged, feels times arbitrary, capricious and random - something thrown together because "this would be a cool idea", rather than this makes sense for the story or Hamlet.
And that leads me to the biggest problem with the film: Ethan Hawke. He comes off so unlikable and so un-charasmatic that ultimately NO ONE CARES. He tries so hard to make Shakespeare not sound like Shakespeare that you can't understand a word he says. I seriously doubt that anyone who didn't know the play would have been able except but in the most general terms to follow the story. Certainly no one around where I was sitting understood exactly what Hawke was saying. That is because he didn't either! My God! Hawke was more concerned with conveying grunge-cool while he opened a beer bottle for Ophelia in the nunnery scene than he was in really letting the audience know what is going on with an ambiguous line like "I never gave you aught."
To me, what makes Shakespeare the greatest writer in our western culture is his use of ambiguity and contractions along with irony. Human Beings are by our nature ambiguous, difficult to define - just when you think you have someone pegged, they do something completely different and unexpected. All of his characters are this way. The common axiom in the theatre is that to play the great roles in Shakespeare you must play the contradictions and by playing to the hilt all of the contradictions and inconsistencies in a character at the end you will have a fully formed consistent whole, compromised of all the small nuanced details that make us human. Likewise the use of irony is rampant through out all of Shakespeare. There is a reason that Falstaff is perhaps Shakespeare's saddest creation and Hamlet maybe his funniest. Americans are not good with irony - we are very good and very effective with sarcasm, but not irony. Think about it - ask yourself if you even know the difference between sarcasm and irony. Shakespeare does and he uses it in all of his plays. Hawke doesn't. In fact Hawke comes off like the sort of poseur rich kid spoiled by fame that his Hamlet is trying to rail against.
To an Elizabethan audience when they looked at Hamlet they would have seen a Prince who was cheated out of his crown, they would a have seen a man who should be king. This is a difficult frame of mind for us in America to even contemplate - we have no context for monarchy. So what most often happens in American productions of the play is that HAMLET becomes a domestic drama, a simple conflict between mother, son, step-father/uncle. But this is wrong and ignores a giant element of the play. At no point in this film did I believe that Ethan Hawke was ready and willing to become CEO of the DENMARK CORPORATION. He was just a sort of artsy-fartsy college student with some Euro-trash friends (Horatio and Marcellus), more concerned with his video equipment and looking good while he was riding a motorcycle or at a chic club with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, than a man who was concerned that his uncle had "popped between the election and my hopes".
When Mel Gibson played the part there was some criticism of such a large Hollywood star doing the role, but that is exactly what Hamlet needs - star quality - of which Hawke has none. The play needs an actor who can be very cruel in the nunnery scene to the woman he loves (Ophelia), who can kill an innocent man (Polonius), who can send two old friends (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) to their deaths, who can force his mother (Gertrude) to smell the "rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love..." of her incestuous love (Claudius). You need an actor who can do all of these horrible things and we forgive him because he is the hero. Anti-hero Hamlets (such as David Warner's Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 60's) capture the intellectual imagination but never the theatrical imagination. That is because we want to follow a classic hero's journey. How many times did Joseph Campbell talk about Hamlet? There is nothing heroic, nothing transformational about Hawke's performance and that is why the film ultimately fails despite some clever trickery from director Michael Almereyda.
The sad thing about the film is that for some kid Hawke will be the first. As an actor that is one of the great bonuses associated with the role - for someone, somewhere you will be the first, your Hamlet will pop the Shakespearean cherry for somebody. What a shame. For anyone who doesn't know Hamlet yet - lose your virginity with some other Hamlet. If you want the man of action, the man who should have been king, Shakespeare's revenge hero, watch Gibson, if you want the consummate Shakespeare actor watch Jacobi's BBC version, if you want the neurotic scholar watch Nicol Williamson, if you want the dynamic tortured soul of a man doomed to death then watch Burton's, if you want the conflict between the private Hamlet and the public Hamlet watch Branagh, if you want the Prince of Denmark watch Olivier.
If you want a punk ass kid who got a movie made because Miramax thinks his name will sell tickets, if you want a Hamlet so bloated with ego and self-importance that every frame drips with the disdain Hawke so obviously feels for his audience (who must be too stupid or too enamored to realize that they are being hoodwinked) then by all means flock to the film. Everybody should see this movie - it is the first, and I am sure last time in theatre and film history that an actor has and will ever totally fail in the role.
Saxon
