The West Bend Current

There are more Shakespeare adaptations and re-imaginings than I could ever know, but of the ones I have seen I can diagnose most with the same issue: the ideas and prose of the source material are lost in translation between text and film.

Although the same is true for Aneil Kara’s new film “Hamlet,” Kara does showcase an original voice and unique perspective. Often, adaptations of Shakespeare are period pieces of either their setting or the time they were written, but the shining examples of great adaptations inject modern perspectives. 

Some are obnoxious, like the 2023 movie “Anyone But You,” utilizing the classic enemies-to-lovers trope in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Or, there are the famous examples of “The Taming of the Shrew”’s influence in the creation of “10 Things I Hate About You.” There’s also Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet,” which pairs Shakespearean dialogue perfectly with a modern urban environment.

Kara’s “Hamlet” falls into the category of the more modern adaptations. Taking place in what appears to be modern-day London, the film combines a refreshing mix of contemporary culture and appreciation for Shakespeare that it is able to sustain itself surprisingly well, but there are certain aspects that become grating by the end of the film. It opens with a handheld camera sequence, which I appreciated at first, but it quickly turned nauseating. After Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) visits a club, he races to the home of Ophelia (Morfydd Clark). He had just seen the apparition of his father, who tasked him with enacting revenge against his murderous, treacherous, lecherous uncle. In this scene the handheld became too much. I understand what they were trying to portray–Hamlet’s fraying mental state and psychosis–but that filmmaking tactic only works to a degree and at a certain point it was just far too much, for far too long. 

A lot of Shakespeare adaptations also suffer from pacing issues, and “Hamlet” does as well. Cramming a four-and-a-half to five-hour play into the film’s short 113-minute runtime is bound to create issues.

Many of the things that are the best about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” are the best about Kara’s adaptation: The famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy, the final act and the melodrama are all present. But the glue that kept the play together is not present here. At best, Kara’s “Hamlet” feels like an ode to its source material, and the modern frame for the play’s events is interesting but lacks depth. There’s a lot of what I think are genius things done here too, like the renaming of Elsinore the castle to Elsinore the development property, which also has a wonderful relation to that of Fortinbras and his cause. But overall the film just feels like a motley mix of ingredients. There is the shape of a great adaptation here, but that is just an outline.

Kara assembled a stellar cast–I feel like Timothy Spall was born to play Polonius, a thought I’ve had ever since seeing him as the snobby groundskeeper in Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer”–but then again, the cast is just a small portion of a coherent whole. If I hadn’t read “Hamlet” prior, I do not think I would have the slightest clue what was happening. This could be applied as praise, as the film doesn’t cut corners to make itself more apparent and digestible, but that is only valid to a degree.

Another big issue I had was that I could hardly hear the dialogue. The flowery Shakespearean language is sizable as always, but without subtitles I often found myself filling in the gaps for fragments of conversations I didn’t absorb because I just couldn’t catch what the characters were saying. I don’t think this was an issue with my theater; I think the dialogue was recorded poorly considering the melancholic, restrained delivery of many of the lines in “Hamlet.” Of course there are not going to be subtitles in a theater, but I still believe that I could have understood more if they were present. And a film also shouldn’t need subtitles to be understood unless there’s a language barrier.