Twisted Spinster

Okay, I tried to watch The Brothers Grimm, but I just can’t finish it. I just don’t care — it’s too incoherent, too frenetic, its attempts at broad fantastic farce in the manner of Baron Munchhausen or something of that ilk too clumsily done, and the characters are too sketchy to be sympathetic. This includes the two heroes, played by Heath Ledger and some other forgettable fellow whose name I am not going to bother to look up. The plot is also uninvolving, mostly due to the aforementioned incoherence and scanty attention paid to the characters trapped therein. I’m usually willing to slog through just about anything to the bitter end, but this is not one of those times.

Onward to the New-York-set version of Hamlet that was released in 2000, but reeks of late-90s “nothing is too dark and edgy that it can’t be made darker and edgier” values. Yep, you got it: the filmmakers decided that Hamlet, one of the gloomiest plays ever written wherein almost every character dies violently at the end, wasn’t dark enough: it needed that extra dollop of existential horror known as “Modern Day Corporate America.” The effect is almost as quaint as a high school production of The Nutcracker Suite in full period costume.

You know you’re in the halcyon days before planes piloted by evil foreigners slammed into the World Trade Center when the setting of the film you’re watching is the shiny, glamorous New York of the rich and amoral, and the rotten soul of “Denmark” is underscored by harsh, artificial lighting in gilded, modern interiors. And yet, for the most part the setting works — where it doesn’t is when the 16th-century morés in the dialogue are uttered (for example, when Polonius is chastising Ophelia to guard her “chaste treasure” from Hamlet; considering that the Ophelia in this version is the sort of sullen-faced teen that looks like she’s been “hooking up” with not just Hamlet but every other male in Elsinore, the line falls particularly flat).

The acting is uneven, ranging from excellent (Kyle McLachlan’s wearily guilty Claudius, Diane Venora’s Gertrude — who plays the Queen as not so much a silly, shallow woman who has to be abused into proper behavior than as a woman who willingly traded her intelligence and virtue for a chance to feel “sexy” again, and whose world crashed in on her) to the merely “meh,” (Bill Murray seemed uncomfortable throughout as Polonius, a part I would have thought he’d run away with — perhaps he was told to take the part too seriously; Liev Schreiber would have made an excellent Laertes if he had the ability to move a few more muscles in his face) to the crap — the actress who played Ophelia as an already dead-to-the-world waif, and the Hamlet of Ethan Hawke, who brings nothing to the part that couldn’t have been brought by a life-size cardboard cutout of said actor. One of the things the movie makes the mistake of doing is showing scenes and still shots from a couple of other Hamlets — I think there was a scene from the Olivier version, and I swear a still shot from Ralph Richardson doing a classic pose from the play (the one where he’s talking to Yorick’s skull, I believe). All these brief, almost subliminal images do is highlight the fact that we are in the presence of an actor whose brief promise in the one other movie I’ve seen him in, as the disturbed boy who committed suicide rather than be sent to military school in Dead Poet’s Society, has long since been pissed away in the name of some sort of misconceived James Dean-ish method acting hommage. Hawke even does the Player King “what’s Hecuba to he” speech while watching blurry images of Dean on one of his many televisions. That was another mistake, because like his acting style or not, at least James Dean had the ability to project emotion; Hawke does not. The fact that Hawke has not become more preposessing as he has gotten older hasn’t helped, but he wouldn’t need good looks if he at least had expressive eyes. Unfortunately his eyes are like two dead pebbles set nearly motionless in the front of his skull. Oh — and he stands about in a hangdog, “affectless rich white kid trapped in a Universe He Knows Is Meaningless” fashion, and his mouth usually hangs open.

This, in short, is an un-princely prince, whose fate I can’t begin to even care about. Hamlet is supposed to be hesitant and even vacillating, true, but he’s not supposed to be a dead fish. Even the classic fight over the grave scene between Hamlet and Laertes succumbs to this Hamlet’s ennui — the two end up rolling down a hill and just lying at the bottom after Laertes aborts a feeble attempt at strangulation — voluntarily, since how can you strangle a corpse?

As I mentioned in an earlier post this movie might as well be called I, King Claudius. Kyle McLachlan manages to nearly make the murderous uncle the protagonist, mostly by default of seeming to still possess the capacity for human emotion. Hamlet even dispatches him by shooting him in the back, which when I last checked was an almost complete guarantee of victimhood (and thus hero status by default) on the part of the character so treated. I’m not sure if that was the intent, but that’s how it came out.

A few more notes: I didn’t recognize Sam Shepard (who played the dead king’s ghost), and thought he was Rutger Hauer. Horatio was played by some Irish youth, with a silent blond girlfriend. The soundtrack was not obtrusive, and was by (then) cool groups like Morcheeba, and wasn’t too bad as modern alt-rock “edgy” sountracks go. There is heavy, metaphorical use of once-cutting-edge, now-retro props like videotapes and floppy disks, so this “modern-day” movie is now as dated as an Elvis flick. Oh yeah — and that goddamn yarn hat that Ethan Hawke sported in many of the scenes — the kind of knit hat with two hanging tassels on either side that is some sort of Peruvian mountain hat or something and that every young pothead used to wear in 1999 — drove me bonkers. It made me hate the character of Hamlet himself, something not even Mel Gibson’s mush-mouthed psycho version made me do. Thanks a lot, Hollywood.