Summary 
Stylish modernization to New York big business boardrooms in the year 2000 is visually and metaphorically inventive as well as entertaining, but with a disconcerting paucity of dialogue and interaction. Shakespeare's poetry is sliced and diced, cut into awkward chunks of narration and monologue, or delivered within the story by voicemail, conference call, payphone, and fax, as well as via caption or news anchorman's studio teleprompter. Alternately daring then ill-conceived, chic then clumsy, this uneven film relies on appearance and attitude for Hamlet and Ophelia, reducing them respectively to an alienated insider and an unhinged schoolgirl, each with little to say.
Design
Directed by Michael Almereyda. 2000. 1:51.
Cast
Ethan Hawke (Hamlet), Kyle MacLachlan (Claudius), Diane Verona (Gertrude), Sam Shepard (Ghost), Bill Murray (Polonius), Liev Schreiber (Laertes), Julia Stiles (Ophelia), Karl Geary (Horatio), Paula Malcomson (Marcella), Steve Zahn (Rosencrantz), Dechen Thurman (Guildenstern), Jeffrey Wright (Gravedigger).
Analysis
Michael Almereyda's bold but fractured vision of Hamlet modernizes the revenge tragedy to the year 2000 and resets the story within the big-business world of contemporary New York city. The Denmark Corporation is a Wall Street company within the Hotel Elsinore skyscraper, Hamlet's father the recently deceased CEO "King." Almereyda consistently eschews Shakespeare's dialogue, providing background details via captions seen through the sunroof of Claudius' jet-black limousine, the evening Manhattan sky passing by on either side. The 1.2 gathering at court is, in Almereyda's update, a crowded press conference presided over by Kyle MacLachlan's suave and sophisticated Claudius, answering questions amid a crush of reporters and photographers, his bride Gertrude giggling girlishly while hanging on his arm. Later, they kiss in the back of the limousine, celebrating the USA Today business-news headline, "Claudius Thwarts Fortinbras," while the brooding Hamlet glumly stares.
Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, first shown in a tracking shot as he shuffles across a neon-lit Times Square to a thumping hip-hop riff, wears black winter clothes and a ski cap. Portrayed as a too-cool insider, he lingers beyond the press conference, videotaping the reporters and photographers, and he lurks at the edge of Claudius' sidewalk entourage in dark sunglasses and his Elmer Fudd-style winter cap. Long-haired and with a day or two of beard growth, he sports stylish clothing and shows an affinity for homemade video and photography - he narrates grainy black and white film of himself ("what a piece of work is a man"), intercutting images of warfare and bombings - and proves an artsy beatnik rebel, sulking and brooding in an inky cloak. Hawke suits the intellectual loner role admirably well, barely concealing his character's disgust for the fat-cat corporate drones all around him, but Almereyda limits Hawke's Hamlet to few moments of interaction, and rather than reveal his inner torment via poetic soliloquy, Hamlet's innermost thoughts are voice-over snippets from Shakespeare's play, detached narration to the video styling of Hawke's fashionable avant garde artist Hamlet. Almereyda's unfortunate result is that Hawke's hyper-cool Hamlet instead comes off as a spoiled and self-indulgent elitist in a swank apartment stuffed with techno-gadgets, and worse, as an üaut;ber-entitled ingrate living a lavish non-working rich kid's lifestyle, resentful of his parents for their wealth, pretentiously displaying posters of Malcolm X and Che Guevara on his walls, and with very little of substance to say aloud to anyone. Hawke's slouching Hamlet, his soliloquies delivered in a self-consciously hushed mumble like a whispery Shakespearean James Dean or Marlon Brando from the 1950s, seems self-conscious in his interactions, like when he stops and removes his sunglasses on Wall Street - "seems, madam?" - the skyscrapers looming threateningly around him.
Almereyda similarly reduces Ophelia to an awkward and equally reticent teenager, although Julia Stiles imbues the character with touches of the true outsider: a shabby and threadbare little apartment in a seedy brick tenement, a ramshackle bicycle as a means of conveyance, a red-bulb developing studio for photographs (as opposed to Hamlet's digital imagery). Stiles' almost Bohemian Ophelia physically projects a girlish vulnerability in sneakers and parachute pants, wearing pig-tails and green fingernail polish, and toting an oversized school backpack. Almereyda's camera captures her waiting by a stone water fountain for Hamlet, at one point teetering along the rim of the water like a tightrope walker, in what will become recurring imagery tying the tragic girl to water. Stiles' Ophelia harbors at least a schoolgirl crush for Hawke's Hamlet, sneaking a peek at him during the press conference, as he leans with way-cool boredom against a wall next to a portrait of his father, his hair wild, his sunglasses tinted yellow, a cranberry shirt under a black suit. She sneaks a note to him afterward that Laertes intercepts and returns. When Hamlet pulls her away by the hand post-press conference, Liev Schrieber's possessive and disapproving Laertes sternly goes and brings her back. Ophelia's odd family relationships contribute to her conflicted behavior. Schrieber's Laertes, menacing in medium-close-ups as thunder peals outside, says his goodbyes and gives his admonitions - "fear it, Ophelia" - to her less like a brother than a lover, secretly snatching a pin from her hair as an unsolicited remembrance. And Bill Murray, playing a slightly daft Polonius in a gray power suit, seems like an ill-equipped single father compensating for the loss of his children's mother, offering only vague advice to his son - "these few precepts" - before chasing him into another room for the pointed, look-in-the-eye close up of "to thine own self be true." Murray's kindly old advisor helps Laertes pack his bags but secretly stuffs a wad of cash into the luggage, and later he politely bends to tie the scatterbrained Ophelia's sneaker. Within the long-shot view of the white sterility of an opulent family room, Murray's Polonius digs for information about his daughter's relationship with Hamlet - "you must not take for fire" - and in another fatherly close-up becomes suddenly harsh: "look to it, I charge you."
Ophelia's slightly twisted and more than slightly suffocating family life seem to contrast to her interaction with Hamlet, and Almereyda's most poignant sequence is a non-textual scene void of any dialogue at all. After birds scatter in a twilight blur and soar upward above a church steeple, a guitar plays softly as Hawke's Hamlet watches video images of Stiles' Ophelia on his hand-held camcorder. Almereyda then shows him sipping coffee at a cheap diner, still wearing his goofy ear-flapped winter hat, struggling with writing love letters - "the most beautified Ophelia" - and poems - "doubt truth to be a liar" - and crumpling paper after paper. When Hawke's Hamlet exits into the night, he hesitates and turns, walking back past the camera, then is shown making a surprise appearance at Ophelia's threadbare little home. He silently hands her the love note, steps close, and rests his head on his shoulder - a poignant evocation of a tortured young soul's only oasis - but he must flee in a rush when Murray's Polonius arrives with a string of birthday balloons. Almereyda takes pains to reveal Hamlet as a loner self-trapped in the isolation of his apartment, but the deeply poetic soliloquy voice-overs seem like afterthoughts to the visual of Hamlet sprawled and watching television - "o that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew" - or watching black-and-white video of his father - "how weary, stale, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world" - or, after a tight close-up of Hamlet's eyes, "frailty thy name is woman." Hamlet's remark about Gertrude's "o most wicked speed" comes as he fast-forwards through video to images of Ophelia. The net effect of Hawke's Hamlet, then, is not the sensitive rebel poet, but a spoiled and self-indulgent young man who is profoundly deep but powerfully privileged, with insipid social skills and a propensity for voyeurism.
The 1.2 account of the sighting of the ghost of Hamlet's father comes from Horatio and Marcella, a chain-smoking security guard girlfriend version of Shakespeare's Marcellus. A flashback reveals Horatio, in jeans and a multi-colored jacket over a white tee-shirt, watching the apparition on the security monitors at the Hotel Elsinore guards' station, and then his and Marcella's pursuit of the ghost into the dank corridors of the building basement. The ghost - an intimidating Sam Shepard in slicked back hair, a corporate suit and a long black overcoat - disappears down a corridor and into a Pepsi One vending machine, an image which is both crass product placement and an ill-conceived criticism of modern American consumerism. The next night, Horatio and Marcella telephone Hawke's Hamlet, of course soliloquizing in voice-over within his apartment, and even his exclamation at the sight of his father's ghost outside on his balcony - "angels and ministers of grace defend us" - is an unspoken inner thought, as if Almereyda dared not trust Hawke with the blank verse. Shepard's Ghost, not the expected white-noise grainy video specter, but a flesh-and-blood creature, makes Hamlet flinch and raise a hand in self-defense - "mark me!" - and the ghost clutches his son by the temples and pushes him back against a wall. The ghost seethes with angry demands and with a bitter countenance - "murder most foul" - and Almereyda's camera circles them in an effectively chilling and surreal sequence. Shepard looms over Hawke's Hamlet - "horrible, most horrible" - his diction and command of the language impressive, a plain gray wall almost ethereal behind him, and he starts away but returns for a long embrace: "remember me." Almereyda then cuts again to narration by Hawke - "the time is out of joint" - and speeds up the film for a dizzying blur of Manhattan traffic and pedestrians at night, in a visually memorable suggestion - "my fate cries out" - of Hamlet's whirling frame of mind.
While Almereyda's emphasis on inner monologues may undermine the character of Hamlet, the imagery is clever if a tad pretentious. In a kind of prelude to the "to be or not to be" speech, he is shown watching a self-shot black-and-white video of himself in extreme close-up, holding a pistol to his temple, then putting the barrel in his mouth, then aiming again at his temple, and finally under his chin. His on-camera image intones "to be or not to be" while Hawke's eerily fascinated Hamlet toys with the image and words, rewinding to watch and listen both backward and forward, over and over again. Almereyda intercuts with a nearby television monitor showing Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and his tenets of Zen. And later in 2.2, Hamlet enters Claudius' offices, shot from a low angle, listening to his camcorder - "so oft it chances in particular men" - until he is surprised from behind by Murray's jolly Polonius. Almereyda cuts to shots of them as if from a grainy security camera, until Hawke's Hamlet breaks free - "except my life" - and repeats his monologue in narration until he storms into Claudius' office, handgun drawn and searching, but finding the office empty. The actual "to be or not to be" soliloquy - of course just more voice-over narration - would be a travesty if not for its audacity: Hawke's Hamlet shuffles down the Action aisle at his local Blockbuster Video - "to die, to sleep, perchance to dream" - looking silly in boots and Elmer Fudd hat, approaching a blaring television playing a violent explosion scene from the Brandon Lee graphic-comics revenge movie The Crow. When Hawke finally speaks - "ay, there's the rub" - it is only for closing emphasis. Finally, Hamlet's "o what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy is narrated as he lies on his stomach on his bed, watching an old black-and-white James Dean movie, and in "what would he do?" Hamlet seems to be inquiring what 1950s icon James Dean himself would have done in his situation. Almereyda then fades to black as Hawke's Hamlet begins editing video images for his Mousetrap film.
Almereyda depicts the conspiracies that crush the spirits of Hamlet and Ophelia with some cinematic ingenuity. To a jazzy instrumental score, Claudius swims laps while Gertrude reclines in a lounge chair. Murray's Polonius hauls Ophelia to them by her arm, and she tries to snatch the love letter from him before he can read it to them. When she fails, Stiles' Ophelia walks away from the camera shot, turning to re-approach in a close-up - head down and arms out as if again upon a tightrope - while Polonius reads her intimate letter aloud in a gross invasion of her privacy. She studies her own reflection in the swimming pool, her expression as if wishing she were already drowned - "Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star...this must not be" - then plunges feet first into the pool, sinking to the bottom with her face in her hands. Almereyda's camera captures her plunge from the bottom of the pool, then cuts to her still standing poolside, looking forlorn, the plunge just an escapist - for the moment - suicidal fantasy. Hawke's Hamlet, meanwhile, drowns his sorrows while sitting at a bar, club lights swirling around him. When he is surprised by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "my excellent good friends!" - in their leather jackets and rocker long hair, they share big embraces and playful pseudo-martial arts moves. They shift to a couch bathed in surreal green light, but Hawke's Hamlet soon becomes sullen, then angry, as he realizes his supposed friends are in fact lying spies for the King, and therefore drones of the corporate world. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern later provide an update to Claudius, it is via speaker phone on a conference call, and he barely seems to listen as he and Gertrude - she in a scarlet negligee - drink cocktails and kiss each other as she unbuttons his shirt. The couple also contributes to the 3.1 exploitation of Ophelia as an unwilling accomplice, Gertrude sitting in Claudius' lap at his office desk, while Murray's increasingly unctuous Polonius now kneels before his child-like daughter and tapes a listening device around her waist. With a drunken Rosencrantz and Guildenstern slurring more observations about Hamlet on speakerphone, Stiles' Ophelia stands and openly weeps, her face running with tears as she sobs over her role in the betrayal of Hamlet. Almereyda moves in for a close-up of her face, then matching-cuts to Hamlet looking out at her from the peephole on his apartment door.
The effect of the betrayal and exploitation should be devastating, but the impact is blunted. Hawke's Hamlet brings each of them a bottle of beer and they sit at a kitchen table, his "I loved you not" cutting to an inexplicable outdoor sky shot of a jet trailing vapor high overhead, before returning to Ophelia's injured expression. But he kisses her, and she kisses him back, and they seem on the verge of reconciliation until Hawke's Hamlet finds the wire for tape recording strapped to her side. Hawke's Hamlet explodes in anger, swiping her box of love mementos from the table and shouting - "get thee to a nunnery" - and Stiles' Ophelia gives an achingly wounded response: she regathers her things into the box, sobbing almost uncontrollably, then struggles upon her bicycle on the street, and finally - her face mascara-streaked and teary-eyed - she burns photographs of Hamlet within her darkroom as he leaves screaming hoarse messages on her telephone voicemail: "get thee to a nunnery go, farewell" and "I say we shall have no more marriage!" The potentially searing confrontation loses a great deal of poignancy when deprived of face-to-face dialogue, and voicemail lacks dramatic punch, no matter how loud the message.
The Mousetrap, a world premiere film by Hamlet - "the play's the thing" - in a movie theatre, would be the turning point of the tragedy, but here Hamlet is already convinced and intent on murder. Hawke's depressed and angry Hamlet, not pretending to be insane because he is already a little crazy, waves at his mother, insults Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and steps over theater seats to dally with a now dreadlocked Ophelia. The film shows a blooming red rose, then 1950s-style images of young boys playing with their fathers, then a cartoon of a vial of poison being poured into a man's ear. When MacLachlan's Claudius recognizes the accusation, he appears alarmed, then sickened - "give me some light" - and Hawke's Hamlet now jumps over seats to pursue: "frighted with false fire?" But Almereyda cuts to more narration, even eliminating the sound completely, as if the world of revenge exists in a vacuum - "my wit's diseased" - and Hawke's Hamlet evades Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 3.3, then creeps up a city street to a punk-rock soundtrack - "now 'tis the very witching time of night" - and gets into the driver's seat of Claudius' limousine: "now I could drink hot blood." When MacLachlan's Claudius lurches past a young trick-or-treater into the limousine - "my offense is rank, it smells to heaven" - Hamlet draws a handgun, then turns and aims into the backseat. But Claudius is in prayer, confessing while weeping and wiping at his forehead, his head down. Hawke's Hamlet parks in front of a Broadway theatre playing, appropriately enough, The Lion King, to leave Claudius - "words without thoughts never to heaven go" - with his guilt, escaping in long strides beneath a triple-tiered yellow-on-black stock ticker.
Almereyda cuts to Diane Verona's alcohol-soaked Gertrude, enduring more advice from Murray's slightly addled Polonius. When Hawke's Hamlet bursts in, after hollering her name and pounding on the bedroom door, the trench-coated Polonius is hidden behind a mirrored closet door. Hawke overplays the scene, so animated that he rushes the dialogue and brutalizes the meter, sounding so awkward - "sit you down!" - and forced - "o shame, where is thy blush?" - that Almereyda has him - after he rashly shoots Murray's closeted Polonius through the eye - finish the scene from a payphone in the building basement: "good night, mother." Verona's Gertrude, on the other hand, delivers an effective and subtle performance as an aging beauty clinging to youth and power. She slaps her son across the face, but is hurled to the carpet and shoved against the mirrored closet, watching Hawke's Hamlet tear apart her sheets and the bed itself, then wrap her in the incestuous sheets and speak to Shepard's invisible ghost. Verona's Gertrude makes the realization - "kill a King?" - that Claudius is indeed guilty of regicide, then the slow and sobbing connection that Hamlet is not mad - resting her forehead on his - and that she is at least complicit in the murder: "thou has cleft my heart in twain."
Almereyda visualizes Hamlet's descent toward the bloodbath conclusion more powerfully than the final duel scene itself. He begins with a close-up of Hamlet's eye, superimposing clothes spinning in a coin-operated dryer as he hides from Claudius' 4.2 wrath within a neighborhood laundromat. Discovered by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - their approach noticeable in the reflection of the dryer's glass door: "take you me for a sponge, my lord?" - Hawke's seated Hamlet defies Claudius and his black-clad bodyguard henchmen 4.3 ("your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service") but his attempt to bolt fails, and he is slammed against a washing machine and roughed up. After Claudius smoothes his hair and helps him with his coat, Hawke's Hamlet kisses him on the mouth, and ominous music plays as he is spirited to an airport terminal for his banishment. Verona's staggering-drunk Gertrude casts a suspicious eye upon Claudius and bristles when he slips an arm around her. Hawke's Hamlet sits in first class on the plane, wearing earphones, sorting through photographs, and watching cable business news reports about Fortinbras. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sit in coach a few rows behind, Steve Zahn's Rosencrantz particularly repellent in his hockey jersey, slouching and grinning while gnawing airline peanuts. Hamlet's thoughts remain an inner monologue - "spur my dull revenge" - until he moves down the aisle toward the bathroom, and he then speaks directly to the camera, then to the reflection of himself in the lavatory's tiny mirror: "from this time forth my thoughts be bloody."
Stiles' Ophelia ironically suffers through a more emotional descent and a more convincing ultimate tragedy than Hawke's Hamlet. With a drum-roll cut, Almereyda moves to the spinning corkscrew walkways of the Guggenheim art gallery, Gertrude and Claudius at the top, as Stiles' Ophelia pushes her way manically through a crowd to them, insane with the loss of Hamlet and the death of her father. Her terrifyingly shrill scream - "pray you, mark!'" - echoes throughout the museum as they try to be conciliatory, but she shakes free of Claudius' grip, turning to scream into the open air until silenced and hauled away - "my brother will know of this!" - by security guards. MacLachlan's rattled Claudius is then confronted by Schrieber's livid Laertes, who grabs him by the lapels then by the neck - "I'll not be juggled with" - and shoves him against an art gallery window, the setting sun visible on the horizon. After Laertes pushes Gertrude aside - "to hell allegiance" - he is stunned silent by the return of Stiles' nearly cross-eyed Ophelia, her face streaked with tears - "they say he came to a good end" - while she distributes photographs of Polonius and Hamlet as remembrances. Claudius coldly plots later, in 4.7, with Laertes, their plans interrupted by a message from Hamlet - on an "Osric" fax machine - announcing his imminent return. Schrieber's creepy Laertes, certainly angry over the killing of his father - "let him come, it warms the very sickness in my heart" - also seems jealous of Hamlet and more than attracted to his own sister, rubbing a finger along the barrette clip he has stolen from Ophelia's hair, although Almereyda cuts the revealing extent of Laertes' passion: "to slit his throat i' the church." When Gertrude lurches into the doorway with news of Ophelia's suicide, Almereyda cuts to a crane shot from high above the waterfall fountain, and Stiles' Ophelia can be seen floating on her back in the water, drowned and captured in the fountain spotlights, love letters floating in the water around her as security guards rush in. Almereyda fades to black, focused on her letters in the water.
Almereyda's film limps to its conclusion with little more to say rather than hurling headlong toward an inevitable bloodbath. Hawke's Hamlet returns 5.1 to New York wearing a blue hoodie beneath a black leather jacket, picked up by Horatio on a motorcycle for a rock-music drive - elegiac guitars and drums - to a cemetery on a sunny afternoon. An unseen gravedigger sings Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watch Tower" as Hawke's Hamlet approaches Ophelia's grave, leaves falling from autumnal trees around him. He helps Laertes out of her grave but is assaulted, and the two roll down a hill of leaves, wrestling until Schrieber's Laertes chokes Hamlet but is pulled loose by Horatio. They flee on the motorcycle, all sound again eliminated for supposedly dramatic effect. Hawke's Hamlet narrates for Horatio and Marcella the story of his return and the demise of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "they did make love to this employment" - then accepts the faxed challenge of a fencing duel wager: "we defy augury." After a quick cut to Claudius crushing a poisonous pill into a glass of wine - "Hamlet, this pearl is thine" - Hawke's Hamlet leaves his apartment for the last time, pulling down the poster of Che Guevara and taking one last look at images of Ophelia.
The 5.2 conclusion lacks excitement as well as dramatic import, although cleverly set as a public fencing exhibition upon a windblown Manhattan skyscraper rooftop. With Hawke's Hamlet looking as if he knows his doom is at hand, Laertes appears angrily resolved, Claudius nervously puffs a cigarette, and Verona's Gertrude casts suspicious stares. When Hamlet wins the first two rounds of swordplay, she realizes the wine Claudius has offered him is poisoned, and she intercepts the glass, draining the contents in a selfless suicide, then embraces her son. Schrieber's frustrated Laertes, his foil neither unbated nor envenomed, then draws a pistol, and Hawke's Hamlet grapples with him until both are quite undramatically shot. After Laertes confesses - "the king is to blame" - for no apparent reason, Gertrude collapses and Horatio helps Hamlet rise, and Hawke's Hamlet then shoots the fleeing Claudius three times before falling again himself. The soundtrack music comes to a dramatic stop with Claudius' death, and Hawke's Hamlet - "I am dead" - sees his life flash before in his eyes in a quick montage of black-and-white images, tears on his face: "the rest is silence." Horatio's words - "good night, sweet prince, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" - are followed by another head-scratching cut to a jet airliner in the evening sky, then a concluding news report regarding Fortinbras' takeover of the Denmark Corporation, the anchorman delivering his commentary - "our wills and fates do so contrary run" - from a scrolling teleprompter.
Almereyda's undeniably entertaining modern Hamlet concludes, appropriately, with a rock music coda then Franz Liszt's Hamlet, Symphonic Poem No. 8, an uneasy blend of modern rebellion with classical beauty that, ironically, can define the film itself.