Week 7: Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000)



Hamlet poster & movie trailer link



Michael Almereyda has place Hamlet in a modern day corporate setting. The kingdom of Denmark is now an office tower, the slain king a CEO, and Hamlet records his diary entries and the world around him on digital video. Hamlets  video diaries were a clever way for the audience to experience his thoughts and ‘mind’s eye’, and also gave the audience some background information: his parent’s happiness before his father’s death and his relationship Ophelia. This also gave the audience an indication that Hamlet had been happy before, and gives strength to his families concern over his current brooding mood.

I enjoyed the recitation of the ‘to be or not to be’ speech by Hamlet while he was in the Action aisle in the video shop. It was as if the universe was sending him subliminal messages to get on with it. I saw Hamlets tragic floor as 1: his inaction, and 2: his inability to trust his nearest and dearest. It would have been a very different and much shorter story had he just trusted his mother to tell her of his visit from his dead father, or if he had taken one of the many opportunities to kill his uncle. Perhaps a message to us all of what not to do.

Instead of staging a play to catch out his murderous stepfather, Hamlet makes an amateur film called The Mousetrap which re-enacts the foul deed of his father’s death, and screens it for his family and friends. His stepfather’s reaction surely would have been enough to convince Hamlet of his father’s accusations, and to exercise justice, but he still takes the rest of the film to finally do it.

It was a very dark and tragic film, and Hamlet learns too late that if actions have consequences, inactions do as well. Everyone’s death is directly caused from his revenge campaign.

Discussion Question: Hamlet has been described as a compendium of some of the great world myths: fratricide, incest, seasonal rites and rituals, sexual initiation, the emergence of dark wisdom from riddles and apparent folly, a son's revenge for his dead father, and the cleansing of a polluted house. Choose one or more of these myths and explore their portrayal in some detail in the film.

Even before his father’s ghost appears to Hamlet, he is devastated and disgusted by his mother Gertrude's hasty marriage to his father's brother (Claudius). ‘That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two.’ He is also sickened by the visibly physical and sensual nature of their marriage, particularly as he believed his mother to be so in love with his father: ‘Heaven and earth! Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month-- Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!’

He believes that this hasty marriage is incestuous: ‘Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!’

Hamlet’s father’s ghost describes his murderous brother Claudius as an incestuous, adulterate beast. He tells Hamlet that he seduced the queen with wicked wit and gifts, and says ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damned incest.’