Review: Hamlet — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Hamlet

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

1 hour 54 minutes  

Stars: Riz Ahmed, Morfydd Clark, Art Malik, Sheeba Chaddha, Timothy Spall

Writers: Michael Lesslie, from William Shakespeare’s play

Director: Aneil Karia

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

The “Shakespeare-in-the-Present-Day” genre always presents inherent challenges: We don’t currently live in an era of omnipotent kings and queens, and no matter how powerful someone is, they very seldom can get away with cold-blooded murder.

In his imaginative adaptation of Hamlet, Oscar-winning British director Aneil Karia (The Long Goodbye) attempts to resolve the conflict by staging the drama within an insular, spectacularly wealthy South Asian family, owners of a massive English conglomerate. Accordingly, obsessed with preserving his family’s essential upstanding public image, young Hamlet (The Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed) doesn’t go to the cops when he suspects his uncle poisoned his father and is now going to marry Ham’s mother. Instead, he hurls himself into a doomed attempt to prove his uncle’s guilt and then exact all-in-the-family revenge.

No brooding around a castle keep for this Hamlet: Contemplating the nature of mortality, he barrels through the streets of London in his electric Lamborghini: “To be (screeeeech!) or not to be (honnnnnk)!” Boardrooms replace throne rooms. Hamlet’s iconic play-within-a-play becomes a Bollywood dance extravaganza. Elsinore is not the name of the family’s palace fortress, but that of their sprawling company.

For the most part, the updates work nicely, once more proving just how bulletproof The Bard’s work can be. Still, while this version takes occasional liberties with the original text – assigning some lines to different characters and substituting a place name or two – the disconnect between a 21^st century setting and Shakespeare’s Elizabethan prose can be stylistically jarring. Are we really going to accept, for instance, that when Hamlet’s dad is referred to as “Our King,” the speakers actually mean it in a CEO kind of way?

Ahmed, dewy-eyed and open-gazed, makes a uniquely vulnerable Hamlet, utterly believable as a super-sensitive drama school type who naively believes he can unmask his father’s killer through a play. As Ophelia, Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud) bears a heavier load: It may be heresy to say this, but to my mind Shakespeare himself never really nailed the transition of Hamlet’s beloved from a self-assured, cynical observer to a self-destructive basket case, so there’s no sense faulting Karia or Clark for not pulling that off convincingly.

Longtime movie bad guy Art Malik (The Living Daylights, True Lies) makes a suitably diabolical Claudius; Bollywood legend Sheeba Chadda manages to infuse some dignity into Hamlet’s maddeningly spineless mother, Gertrude.

Among Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet is famously “the one where everyone dies.” Here, the climactic bloodbath is staged as the Worst Dinner Party Ever: One after another, the leading lights of Elsinore shed this mortal coil with varying degrees of shocked disbelief – especially Timothy Spall’s Polonius, who seemingly chokes to death on the scenery he’s been chewing for the past two hours.

Outrageous fortune, it turns out, ain’t all it’s cut out to be.