Though it’s tempting to say any past movie represents a more innocent time-and certainly this pre-pandemic movie is squarely from the Before Times-there’s nothing innocent about the city in the film. Many of his subsequent films, including Tesla, which came out last year and also starred Hawke (as Tesla) and MacLachlan (as Edison), were shot on digital video.Īll of these future ghosts, including Facebook, seem to possess Hamlet. Almereyda shot the film on film, but neither crude Super 8 nor glamorous 35 mm he chose the betwixt-and-between 16 mm, which means that the look of the movie also seems to suit its liminal period in film history.
Offscreen but casting a long shadow are the Twin Towers, which were of course not yet murthered in the tragedy-if not a Shakespearean tragedy, maybe a Greek one-that would befall them the next year. Digital phenomena confront all the characters as they pace and stagger around the Manhattan of car phones, personal DVD players, video cameras, consumer tracking devices, Blockbuster Video. It represents humans and tech as on a collision course, just as Hamlet and Fortinbras are, and it seems to know much more than it should. Or did Almereyda know something we didn’t? I asked Almereyda about it, and he told me its cover shows Casey Affleck as Fortinbras, the prince who makes Hamlet obsolete in the play, whom Almereyda conceives of as an “up-and-coming tech whiz, ready to take over the world.” Affleck in the cover image looks not unlike Mark Zuckerberg, but that couldn’t be Zuckerberg was only 16 in 2000, and he didn’t start Fortinbras-er, Facebook-till four years after the film. In 1992, he made a film on a toy camera from Fisher-Price the pleasure-pain of ephemeral technology is not lost on him.Ī fake issue of WIRED also shows up in one scene, leafed through by Rosencrantz, or maybe Guildenstern.
“The fact that much of this technology is now obsolete can make the movie seem both poignant and comic,” Almereyda told me recently, by email. Flashing slants of screens, reflections, and projections abound in Almereyda’s film, along with the uncertain transitional tech that defined the years of the so-called analog sunset. Hamlet is a film of blue hallucinations and vertigo in a strange, nervous year that seems to prefigure the anguish that is 2020. For extra bittersweetness, Sam Shepard, who died in 2017, plays Hamlet’s father, the ghost. Hamlet is a pre-Prozac indie filmmaker (Ethan Hawke), Claudius is a bluff CEO (Kyle MacLachlan), and Polonius is a washed-up comic (Bill Murray). Almereyda situates the play in New York City, where the centuries-old rot of Shakespeare’s Europe becomes the brand-new rot of the 21st century United States. Almereyda’s inventive film adaptation is particularly necessary now in plague times, when theaters are dark around the world, and our flesh is heir to the thousand natural shocks of this damned pandemic. If American Beauty is best forgotten, Hamlet in its 420th year should always be close at hand.
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