It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a new version of “Hamlet” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, because this particular Shakespeare tragedy seems to be in the air these days. Most notably, Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” another Telluride premiere and one of the most anticipated films of the fall, deals with the writing of the play after the death of his young son, Hamnet – making note of the fact that in Shakespeare’s time, the two names were more or less interchangeable.
Beyond that, actor Patrick Ball, one of the stars of the breakout TV series “The Pitt,” starred this spring and summer in the title role of a dramatic and controversial reworking of the play at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles, with director Robert O’Hara twisting the Bard’s work into a detective whodunit.
And now there’s a taste of “Hamlet” the way Shakespeare wrote it – sort of. Where the last major film version of the play was Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation, which used the unabridged original text and was more than four hours long, Aneil Karia’s new version is a visceral, streamlined and furious 114-minute journey through the text, leaving a lot out and speeding up what’s left.
It’s emblematic of this version that star Riz Ahmed delivers the “to be or not to be” soliloquy while driving through the outskirts of London at breakneck speed in his BMW, his hands off the steering wheel and his eyes closed as semi-trucks barely miss him. This is not a Hamlet who’s pondering the nature of existence and dreams; this is a guy who’s put the pedal to the metal and is screaming, not musing. And if the answer to his question is “not to be,” what the hell? At least he lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse.
Acceleration is a big thing in this “Hamlet,” which is revved-up, bloodied-up and trimmed-down. Set in a current-day South Asian community in London, this is a “Hamlet” without Denmark; without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; without poor Yorick’s skull; without Polonius’ advice to his son, or indeed without any other scene that doesn’t include Hamlet; and without even the climactic fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes. (But that doesn’t mean the body count is any lower.)
Director Karia collaborated with Ahmed on the Oscar-winning short film “The Long Goodbye,” and this adaptation shares some DNA with that short film, which began with torn-from-the-headlines social injustice and ended in a blast of street poetry. In this case, the poetry is about 425 years old but the themes haven’t aged much: revenge, power, exploitation, guilt, madness, family …
Director of photography Stuart Bentley’s hand-held cameras observe it all up close, circling the characters in a jittery ballet and edging in on Ahmed’s Hamlet when he mourns his late father or when his father’s ghost appears and says he was poisoned by his brother, Claudius (Art Malik in full glower), who is now planning to marry Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chadha).
The camera comes in close because the movie comes in close: While Morfydd Clark registers as a luminous but fragile Ophelia and Timothy Spall goes fully freaky in playing Polonius as a giddy consigliere, the movie zeros in on the onetime Dane who is a lot less melancholy in this version than in many others.
Ahmed’s is not a dilly-dallying Hamlet or a downcast prince who can’t make up his mind; he’s driven by anger and desperate to act, but he doesn’t trust his own mind. And why should he, with that ghost showing up at the end of an alley or the corner of a room? He’s consumed with flights of hysteria; so feral is his rage that if he’s feigning madness, as some readings of the play have it, he’s doing it so skillfully that he seems to be fooling even himself.
Sometimes, though, he’s clearly performing: At the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet grabs the microphone, does a little beat-boxing (probably a first for this play, but you never know) and turns his mic into a faux penis to tease a stricken Ophelia. At a wedding that is already wild, colorful and hallucinatory, Hamlet’s act is prelude to a play that he’s designed to mimic Claudius’ murder and trigger signs of guilt, and the entire sequence is a deliciously nightmarish showpiece.
(A subsequent scene in which a murder takes place comes in a close second in the deliciously nightmarish sweepstakes, thanks to a whole lot of very dark blood against very white marble.)
In quieter moments – and there are some of those – composer Maxwell Sterling seems to understand Hamlet’s mental state, crafting music that’s keening and sparse, with shards of melody that slide in gently and make their mark.
This is, to be sure, an internal “Hamlet,” and one that follows the story and honors the language but isn’t completely tied to either. Many lines and characters are cut, others are moved; a line that was said to Horatio in the play (“There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy”) is said to Ophelia in the film, while this Hamlet wonders about making his quietus with a “dull dagger” rather than Shakespeare’s more tantalizing “bare bodkin.”
But it’s still the story of an anguished man grappling with death, transplanted to a different world and a different time but still exerting a powerful pull on our imaginations. In one way, it’s an abbreviated “Hamlet,” but in another way, it’s a pumped-up one. At one point toward the end, we hear a whispered, “end the madness,” but the movie doesn’t really want to do that. It loves the madness too much.