Hamlet (2000)

(On TV, July 2022) I’m rarely a good audience for Shakespearian movies (especially in English—the French dubs somehow sound better to me) but I’ll always give a look to any adaptation that tries to do something different with the base material. This is certainly the case for writer-director Michael Almereyda’s 2000 of Hamlet. Even twenty years later, it remains (and may forever be) the only Shakespeare adaptation blessed with the sound of a dial-up modem and its “Perchance to Dream” scene set in a VHS video store. Yes, it’s Hamlet brought to 2000 Manhattan, the kingdom reimagined as a corporation, Hamlet as a pretentious video editor, and the action sped up with pistols and fax machines. The dialogue is (as usual for film adaptations) shortened for pacing but remains Shakespearian in origin—none of that modern update when it comes to what the actors are saying… sometimes to the detriment of the result. And what a cast! Retrospectively, the film assembles old and new actors in a bizarre but seldom boring blend, with many, many of them going on to big later careers. In no particular order, feast your eyes on the following list: Bill Murray, Casey Affleck, Ethan Hawke, Jeffrey Wright, Julia Stiles, Kyle MacLachlan, Liev Schreiber, Paul Bartel, Sam Shepard, Steve Zahn and Tim Blake Nelson! Much of the fun in the film is in seeing these faces pop up (sometimes briefly) and seeing familiar material being remixed to a circa-2000 environment. It’s not always successful and the passing of years has definitely put a strong patina of period detail on the result, but it’s far more interesting than a straight historical adaptation would have been. I can’t say I liked it all that much, but if you’re going to watch the quasi-contemporary (and superior) Romeo + Juliet, this is an almost-perfect pairing.