Hamlet
2011: Bruce Ramsay

After many years of looking for a copy of this, I eventually found it available on Blu-ray disc.

The play’s scant ninety minutes, and the creator’s avowed intention, should make it clear that this is no standard version of Hamlet, and certainly it is not. It’s a “reimagined” version of the play, in the more extreme sense of that term. It turns thus into a sort of aristocratic soap opera playing out over the course of a single sordid evening in a contemporary setting. Young Hamlet comes home to a moody house, where he moodily finds that all is not well; he winds up having moody sex with Ophelia, shooting Polonius, and finding Ophelia drowned in her mood and in the upstairs bath; all finishes in a kind of armed free-for-all in which all the right people get conveniently gunned down with a revolver in the foyer and in the space of about twenty seconds. When all is said and done, everyone who remains alive is very sad. Mood alone endures.

The language is still mostly Shakespeare’s, and it is not badly delivered, when anything is being said at all. A good deal of the play is taken up with wordless exchanges of one sort or another, and the opening credits are spun out at laborious and pretentious length over the first five minutes or so of its total ninety. The actors in general speak their lines well enough, though to say that they were really playing roles in Hamlet would be something of a stretch; none of them is really playing a role in a real version of Hamlet, though, and it doesn’t come off as a connected phenomenon.

Ramsay (who plays Hamlet and directs) had the play shot, if accounts online are correct, in the space of three days with minimal hand-held equipment. The sets are all in some sort of women’s club, and they do provide the requisite aristocratic setting. Ramsay apparently conceived of the enterprise as a pedagogical tool, to introduce Shakespeare to students with shorter attention spans and an incapacity to think outside contemporary society. If it has been successful, it is perhaps an achievement on the positive scale. As a representation of Hamlet it is woefully insufficient; it reduces a play of ideas and themes and moral problems to a melange of intensely-felt depression, focused on nothing in particular. It is beautifully filmed — which is the more impressive, given the limited resources.

Parents and teachers should take warning for the explicit sex here, but need not trouble themselves about skipping this for that cause — there are plenty of other reasons not to bother with it. There are bits to admire here, but as a path into the actual play Hamlet, not many.

Buy Hamlet from Amazon.