Campbell Scott and Eric Simonson's Intelligent, Original Hamlet
It's not as raucously entertaining as the underrated 1990 Mel Gibson version, as visually expressive as the 1948 Lawrence Olivier version or as conceptually rich and internally consistent as Michael Almereyda's 2000 edition, in which Ethan Hawke played the Dane as a morose boho-arty loner whose soliloquies were committed to videotape. It's one of the least pretentious productions I've ever seen?generally much smarter, clearer and sharper than Kenneth Branagh's four-hour, 70 mm, supposedly definitive screen Hamlet, with its cornball special effects, pounding score and ludicrous, chandelier-swinging final showdown.
The playful, contemplative tone of this new Hamlet seduces you into re-experiencing the play not as a spectacle, or even as a performed drama, but as a literary feat. It avoids cliched Oedipal baggage and meaningless visual stuntwork. As the Machiavellian operator Claudius, Jamey Sheridan comes off as a perfectly ordinary man who can't imagine he's done anything evil enough to merit death; he's like a cool suburban dad with a felony in his past. As Hamlet's mother Gertrude, Blair Brown grounds the performance in emotional reality, playing the character not as an emblem of stolen maternal affection, but simply as a woman who lost her husband to death and may be losing her son to madness.
All the performances are as real as these, and the film complements the actors' efforts. Its spacious yet unpretentious settings, loose compositions and conversational American performances invite you to respond to the characters as characters?graspable, recognizably screwed-up people?rather than as archetypes or symbols. This Hamlet reminds us that when you cut through the dense language, hefty themes and centuries' worth of encrusted social and historical interpretations, you're left with a play about a man who's in way over his head?a man figuring out his life, his family and his world, and then embracing a destiny that could spell the end of all three.
Scott codirected this version with Eric Simonson, who directed him in a recent stage production. It was shot in a nearly empty private castle on Long Island, without extras or ritual pomp. Although it claims a specific time period?about 100 years ago?and sports appropriate vintage costumes, its strategy owes less to the standard Shakespeare-on-film adaptation than to Louis Malle's sublime Vanya on 42nd Street, which was set in a then-abandoned Broadway theater and featured a cast of brilliant actors in everyday modern garb, performing a David Mamet translation of Anton Chekhov's drama. No filmed play better communicates the imagination-stoking power of uninflected dialogue. As Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith and other distinguished actors sit in perfectly ordinary chairs and speak the dialogue conversationally?as if taking part in an exploratory reading rather than an all-stops-out performance?you find yourself concentrating, for lack of distraction, on the words themselves, the spaces between the words, the silence between sentences, and then imagining not just appropriate scenery, but concrete representations of what might otherwise be considered hopelessly abstract ideas: jealousy, disappointment, unrequited love; fear of motherhood, fear of impotence, fear of death. Scott and Simonson pull off a comparable feat, and they do it by making Hamlet's verbal self-analysis the crux of action in the movie.
Perhaps because Hamlet is Shakespeare's most philosophically expansive character, some productions of the play have a tendency to fixate on his descriptive and interpretive powers; when Hamlet uses those powers as a cudgel to probe or abuse other characters, we're invited to groove on his aggressiveness. Not so with Scott's Hamlet: this prince is presented not as a woe-is-me doomsayer, a self-emasculated genius or a frustrated artistic type, but as sort of an anthropologist?someone whose ability to comprehend the world far exceeds our own, but who cannot will his words into action. This is not a cruel Hamlet; his desperation is palpable, but he doesn't lash out, verbally or otherwise, unless he's backed into a corner. Consider how Scott and Simonson stage the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia. It's often played as an awful power trip?a hail of abuse that lets us enjoy the sight of Hamlet being a bastard, even though he's just trying to keep Ophelia from getting sucked into his self-destructive revenge spiral. The way Scott and costar Lisa Gay Hamilton play the scene lets us see that Hamlet's rough treatment of Ophelia is purely strategic, and that Hamlet takes no pleasure in it; Ophelia's distress, which will eventually lead to her demise, is just collateral damage in an awful war Hamlet was drafted by his father to fight. He pushes her away, citing his own realizations about man's capacity for evil?and in the act of pushing her away, he gives Ophelia reason to believe that those revelations apply to Hamlet.
It's just one smart, humane interpretation of a classic scene; there are many others. The only serious shortcoming in the production is its failure to exploit a provocative casting idea: the presence of African-American actors in the roles of Ophelia, brother Laertes (Roger Guenveur Smith) and father Polonius (Roscoe Lee Browne), the king's adviser. Temperamentally, Scott and Simonson seem opposed to mucking with the text, yet the presence of a black family at the highest level of royal power opens up fascinating racial terrain. The nunnery scene, for instance, involves an inexplicable sexual rebuff; in the context of the play, it's mainly about Hamlet's desire to distance himself from Ophelia for safety's sake, but now that the couple is interracial, there's a suggestion of racial panic that goes unexplored. Similar unresolved tensions invade the relationships between Hamlet and Laertes (they were raised as brothers, then pitted against each other) and the Hamlet-Polonius relationships (black Polonius became the adviser to the killer of a good white ruler?the ultimate act of Uncle Tom-ism). But this is the only major instance where I wished the filmmakers had taken more liberties; elsewhere, they confine their explorations to the existing text, inventing very little?and the production is the better for it.
Through a simple crouching posture and friendly, inquisitive inflection, Scott turns the first scene with the visiting Players?a setup for the guilt-confirming play-within-a-play The Mousetrap?into a commentary on art's capacity to help us understand life. There's an additional layer of playfulness at work: Scott is an actor directing himself as Hamlet, the most actorish of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, in a scene where Hamlet plays the role of director. But the filmmakers aren't into force-feeding you secondary interpretation. This stuff is there if you want to look for it; if you don't, you can enjoy Hamlet as Hamlet.
Scott plays Hamlet as a man whose already formidable powers of analysis are reborn and reshaped, by news of his father's death, into something dark, powerful and useful. Hamlet is always the smartest person in the room, but unlike some performances (notably Olivier's and Branagh's), Scott's doesn't treat Hamlet as a figure to be pitied?a tormented, brilliant observer who may never face his intellectual equal. Scott's Hamlet is a nervous talker, adept with language but unable to find much practical use for it?until he learns of his father's murder, after which point he uses language to understand himself and come to terms with his assigned role as avenger. In this version of the play, Hamlet slowly comes to understand that thoughts?and their linguistic representatives, words?can be used not just to understand one's predicament, but to alter it. Torrents of poetry erupt from his mouth before he can measure them; sometimes the phrases that pop out of Hamlet seem to surprise even him; they make him laugh with surprise, delight, anxiety. It's the reaction of a man talking to himself in an empty room. This Hamlet reacts the same way whether he's alone or surrounded by people. (Like a Jeff Goldblum character, Scott's Hamlet tickles himself?then stammers half-apologetically, as if he's faintly embarrassed to have gotten a kick out of his own words.)
Whenever this Hamlet works out cosmic theories aloud, onlookers often seem confused (they don't know what he's talking about) or impatient (even if they did understand, they wouldn't care). It's a realistic touch that makes the high-flown language play not like a dramatist's conceit, but as the elaborate babblings of a man who might actually be losing his mind.
Some Hamlets fake insanity; at times, Scott's performance suggests that Hamlet only thinks he's faking. The "To be or not to be" monologue, staged as a botched suicide attempt, confirms this interpretation. It starts with a closeup of Hamlet's face as he lies on his belly, dispirited and ready to give up on life. The awkward angle abstracts Scott's handsome mug and forces us to concentrate on Hamlet's lips?and on the words they're speaking. Which is how it should be.