The 44th movie version of Hamlet transposes it to New York in the year 2000, and thoroughly Americanises it, replacing the grand flourishes of a Kenneth Branagh with the Brandoesque mutterings of Ethan Hawke.
The Hotel Elsinore is buzzing in the aftermath of the takeover of the Denmark Corporation by Claudius (Kyle Maclachlan), brother of its late CEO; he has also just married his brother’s widow, much to the disgust of young Hamlet, a would-be film-maker type given to wearing a woolly hat and writing on his hand. Spurred by his father’s ghost (Sam Shepard), Hamlet plots revenge, except that his conscience has made something of a coward of him, and he rather bungles it.
This is a thoroughly media-saturated world, with cameras and screens constantly in evidence. Instead of using a playlet to establish Claudius’s guilt, Hamlet makes a cartoony collage video; he ponders whether to be or not to be while wandering down the “Action” aisles of Blockbuster Video. The Guggenheim Museum and a local laundromat also provide settings in which the tragedy is played out.
Michael Almereyda’s film is not definitive, nor is it meant to be. He cuts the play in half, but you can’t make an under-four-hour Hamlet without breaking eggs. I think it works, providing an oblique view of an oft-recycled and ultra-analysed classic. Hawke (the first under-40 Hamlet on film) can’t find the humour in the prince’s antic disposition, and tends, with his disordered coiffure, to look like a fretful porpentine, but he is appropriately gloomy and intense.
The real gem of a performance, though, is that of Bill Murray as poor Polonius, the verbose courtier whose death signals the final declension of Hamlet’s tragedy.