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Campbell Scott's Hamlet
This version of Hamlet is "set" in early 20th-century America. It's very weird and sometimes comical to hear Hamlet in an American idiom. It's not best designed for the language, but it did bring out some nice moments of naturalistic engagement with the dialogue that made it fresh and real. Scott's Hamlet is not bad; Tennant's is better. Scott's performance moves around between some fairly conventional interpretations, some flat and forgettable readings, and some excellent moments of real facility with the text as a living story. The cast, in general, is competent without being especially memorable.
But the big winner of the production is Ophelia. She is the best Ophelia I have ever seen and, in many respects, the Ophelia I've been waiting all my life for. Given the early 20th-century setting, the conceit of making Polonius's family black is very effective. It recasts the discourse of differing social status and impossible unions in terms that make a lot of sense for the era being visually depicted. And extra special points for putting Ophelia's songs in an African American idiom. This adds a powerful layer to her madness, highlighting how totally her family, as a black family trying to be taken seriously among rich white people, has had to censor their own culture. The actress and the direction are fantastic: this Ophelia is smart and down-to-earth, and for the first time I have a pretty good idea of why Hamlet would be interested in her.
Revenger's Tragedy
This modernized conceptualization of the pretty-good-but-not-great early 17th-century play reminds me a lot of the semi-modernized Titus Andronicus (titled Titus) that came out several years ago. Both are really nasty stories of brutality and vengeance, in which almost all the characters are morally screwed up to a greater or lesser extent. Revenger's Tragedy captures this very dark view of reality well, figuring the evil Duke (played creepily by Derek Jacobi) as a modern business tycoon and the subjects he abuses as the English working class. In a nutshell, Revenger's Tragedy is the story of our (anti)hero (Christopher Eccleston) seeking revenge on the evil Duke who poisoned his wife at their wedding because she wouldn't sleep with the Duke. Along the way, he discovers that the Duke's stepson wants to seduce/rape his sister, which becomes another motive for revenge.
(It's a little scary how readily the cultural construct of aristocracy translates into modern plutocracy. I do, indeed, suspect that plutocratic dynasties will prove to be the central form of the government in most places in the world in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see if the Earth as we know it survives this death or democratic checks and balances, but I digress...)
The language was hard for me. The combination of Renaissance dialogue with British accents of types I have not been much exposed to created the effect of seeing a movie in a foreign language I know very well but not natively. I lost some whole lines to accent; they simply sounded like a foreign language. In other bits, I failed to track the vocab, syntax, etc. Nonetheless, the story is not hard to follow, and the dialogue is nicely rendered in with a tone and inflection that feels very real and appropriate for its modern setting--almost as if people really talked like this! The story seemed to move much more quickly and have a tighter structure than I recall from reading the play, and I'm not sure if that's due to movie editing or to my lumbering through the original text.
In sum, the film is creepy, effective, and worth seeing as long as you don't expect to be deeply impressed by the moral compass of any of the characters.
This version of Hamlet is "set" in early 20th-century America. It's very weird and sometimes comical to hear Hamlet in an American idiom. It's not best designed for the language, but it did bring out some nice moments of naturalistic engagement with the dialogue that made it fresh and real. Scott's Hamlet is not bad; Tennant's is better. Scott's performance moves around between some fairly conventional interpretations, some flat and forgettable readings, and some excellent moments of real facility with the text as a living story. The cast, in general, is competent without being especially memorable.
But the big winner of the production is Ophelia. She is the best Ophelia I have ever seen and, in many respects, the Ophelia I've been waiting all my life for. Given the early 20th-century setting, the conceit of making Polonius's family black is very effective. It recasts the discourse of differing social status and impossible unions in terms that make a lot of sense for the era being visually depicted. And extra special points for putting Ophelia's songs in an African American idiom. This adds a powerful layer to her madness, highlighting how totally her family, as a black family trying to be taken seriously among rich white people, has had to censor their own culture. The actress and the direction are fantastic: this Ophelia is smart and down-to-earth, and for the first time I have a pretty good idea of why Hamlet would be interested in her.
Revenger's Tragedy
This modernized conceptualization of the pretty-good-but-not-great early 17th-century play reminds me a lot of the semi-modernized Titus Andronicus (titled Titus) that came out several years ago. Both are really nasty stories of brutality and vengeance, in which almost all the characters are morally screwed up to a greater or lesser extent. Revenger's Tragedy captures this very dark view of reality well, figuring the evil Duke (played creepily by Derek Jacobi) as a modern business tycoon and the subjects he abuses as the English working class. In a nutshell, Revenger's Tragedy is the story of our (anti)hero (Christopher Eccleston) seeking revenge on the evil Duke who poisoned his wife at their wedding because she wouldn't sleep with the Duke. Along the way, he discovers that the Duke's stepson wants to seduce/rape his sister, which becomes another motive for revenge.
(It's a little scary how readily the cultural construct of aristocracy translates into modern plutocracy. I do, indeed, suspect that plutocratic dynasties will prove to be the central form of the government in most places in the world in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see if the Earth as we know it survives this death or democratic checks and balances, but I digress...)
The language was hard for me. The combination of Renaissance dialogue with British accents of types I have not been much exposed to created the effect of seeing a movie in a foreign language I know very well but not natively. I lost some whole lines to accent; they simply sounded like a foreign language. In other bits, I failed to track the vocab, syntax, etc. Nonetheless, the story is not hard to follow, and the dialogue is nicely rendered in with a tone and inflection that feels very real and appropriate for its modern setting--almost as if people really talked like this! The story seemed to move much more quickly and have a tighter structure than I recall from reading the play, and I'm not sure if that's due to movie editing or to my lumbering through the original text.
In sum, the film is creepy, effective, and worth seeing as long as you don't expect to be deeply impressed by the moral compass of any of the characters.
