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        <P ALIGN="CENTER"><FONT FACE="AGaramond Regular" SIZE=7>The Fresh Prince<BR>
          </font><FONT FACE="AGaramond Regular" SIZE=4><ALIGN="CENTER"><i>Michael 
          Almereyda&#146;s high-tech </i><A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=B00005QATW/bostonreview/"TARGET="blank">Hamlet</a> 
          <i>is&#150;surprise!&#150;a serious interpretation of Shakespeare.</I></font></P>
        <FONT FACE="Helvetica, arial" SIZE=5>
        <P ALIGN="CENTER"><B>Alan A. Stone</B></P>
        </FONT><FONT FACE="AGaramond Regular" SIZE=3>
        <P>Going into Michael Almereyda&#146;s new <I>Hamlet</I>, Bardolaters 
          had every reason to fear the worst. The experimental filmmaker was best 
          known for <I>Nadja,</I> a black and white vampire film that featured 
          Pixelvision&#150;video produced by a $45 Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy camera. 
          Almereyda, who wrote and directed this low-budget film, also used flashbacks 
          of Bela Lugosi footage and worked in a sub-text about HIV infection. 
          Like much avant-garde filmmaking, <I>Najda</I> was more style than substance&#150;not 
          a promising preface to Shakespeare.</P>
        <img src="images/hamlet1.JPG" align=right border=3 hspace=20 vspace=15> 
        <P>Thumbing his nose at traditionalists, Almereyda announced that his 
          Denmark was to be a multinational corporation headquartered in New York 
          City instead of a kingdom, and Elsinore a ritzy apartment hotel instead 
          of a palace. A <I>Hamlet </I>for &quot;Generation Next,&quot; the play 
          would run less than two hours. The official Miramax Web site proclaimed, 
          &quot;The President of the Denmark Corporation is dead, and already 
          his wife is remarried to the man suspected of the murder. Nobody is 
          more troubled than her son Hamlet (Ethan Hawke). Now, after this hostile 
          takeover, trust is impossible, passion is on the rise and revenge is 
          in the air.&quot; Sounds like the Madison Avenue version of the greatest 
          play in the English language. Surely this could only mean that the seven 
          magnificent soliloquies had been butchered and the development of all 
          of the play&#146;s complex characters had been compromised. There was 
          no way that Hamlet could be the moralizing, psychologizing, politicizing, 
          improvising, existentialist actor-prince in this bowdlerizing version. 
        </P>
        <P>Every character in <I>Hamlet</I> is in some way deeply ambiguous and 
          each actor&#146;s and director&#146;s interpretation of a part can tilt 
          the moral adventure of the play. Is Queen Gertrude an innocent dupe, 
          or had she already committed adultery with Claudius before he killed 
          her husband? The Ghost, in his speech to Hamlet, describes her as won 
          over to that &quot;shameful lust.&quot; Has Ophelia already had an affair 
          with Hamlet before her brother and father warn her to guard her virginity? 
          Shakespeare filled her mad scene with bawdy double entendres. Is Polonius 
          a shrewd courtier who rightly has the ear of King Claudius, or is he 
          the &quot;prating fool&quot; that Hamlet proclaims him? John Updike&#146;s 
          recent <I>Hamlet</I> prequel imagines Polonius as a co-conspirator in 
          the adulterous regicidal plot. Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deserve 
          their terrible fate? Tom Stoppard wrote an entire play pursuing that 
          question. And what about Hamlet? Has he merely put on an &quot;antic 
          disposition,&quot; as he warns his friend Horatio in the first act? 
          Or has he gone mad, as he explains himself to Laertes in the last act? 
          Volumes have been devoted to Hamlet&#146;s possible diagnoses.</P>
        <P>The answers to these questions of character shape our understanding 
          of the play, and there are many other ambiguities of the text that every 
          director and his actors will struggle to resolve, knowing that Bardolaters 
          will sit in judgment of every nuance. The late John Gielgud, who reputedly 
          was the best Hamlet of his generation, wryly observed that in no other 
          role does one hear members of the audience loudly whispering your lines. 
        </P>
        <P>How to interpret those sometimes baffling lines has been the challenge 
          to all the great actors who have had the courage to attempt that unforgettable 
          poetry. And there is no certain or definitive rendition. Hamlet&#146;s 
          character and his ideas are inescapably complex and every simplification 
          seems an oversimplification&#150;particularly on film, where the actor&#146;s 
          interpretation can be scrutinized again and again. Even Olivier&#146;s 
          1948 Oscar-winning performance seems, in retrospect, to have short shrifted 
          the other characters and reduced Hamlet to his Oedipus complex and Sir 
          Laurence&#146;s narcissism. And that was Olivier. What cartoon characters 
          could one expect from a director who had cut the more than four hour 
          play down to 112 minutes? </P>
        <P>Almereyda &quot;Let the great axe fall&quot; on the entire dynastic 
          structure of the play. The question of whether Claudius has &quot;popped 
          in&quot; to the line of royal secession by marrying Gertrude and thus 
          prevented Hamlet from becoming king is lopped off. Hamlet is no longer 
          a prince, and the play within the play is also no longer the &quot;thing 
          that catches the conscience of the king.&quot; Henry James noted that 
          Shakespeare the artist is everywhere in his plays, but Shakespeare the 
          man is nowhere in them. My fantasy has always been that Hamlet is the 
          character who comes closest to being the person Shakespeare was. And 
          Almereyda has taken the liberty of making this Hamlet in <I>his own 
          image</I>&#150;a student filmmaker whose &quot;mousetrap&quot; is a 
          homemade video instead of a play. That radical translation not only 
          allows the director to make the play his own, if you can stomach this 
          colossal conceit; it is a marvelously apt strategy for this hi-tech, 
          New York Hamlet. He enters the king&#146;s court, now a corporate press 
          conference, with a video device in each hand; facing down the world 
          with his camera instead of his mordant wit. The Ghost, first glimpsed 
          on the Elsinore Hotel&#146;s security monitors, disappears into a &quot;Pepsi 
          One&quot; dispenser. Every scene contains fax machines, video displays, 
          Polaroid cameras, voice mail, and, of course, the PXL 2000. One critic 
          nailed the film as the &quot;Radio Shack Hamlet.&quot; But taken &quot;all 
          for all&quot; it works brilliantly.</P>
        <P>Almereyda, as it turns out, is a serious and gifted filmmaker. Dig 
          into his resume and you discover that he wrote an original screenplay 
          for Wim Wenders. He based his own first film on the Lermontov novel 
          <I>A Hero of Our Time, </I>and his stylish vampire film was produced 
          by David Lynch. Lynch considers him the best of the new wave of directors, 
          and judging by his <I>Hamlet</I>, Lynch may be right. His intelligence 
          makes this <I>Hamlet</I> sparkle. His idea was to make a film that would 
          be an echo chamber for a text that is alive in the minds of his audience.</P>
        <P>To prepare himself for his project, Almereyda went through film archives 
          and studied every <I>Hamlet </I>film that had ever been produced, including 
          the <I>silent</I> versions. He read and reread the play as well as some 
          of the literary criticism. He appropriated everything he liked from 
          earlier performances and then steeped it all in his own quirky irony 
          and the grainy, magnified, black-and-white images of his trademark Pixelvision. 
          Almereyda threw himself, his wit, and his sly humor into the project 
          and reinvented the play as an American film for the 21st century. But 
          despite all the novelty, this is not for beginners. This is <I>Hamlet</I> 
          for &quot;insiders,&quot; people who really know and love the play and 
          still want to be surprised by its possibilities. Orthodox Bardolaters 
          with settled expectations will find much to lament. The play within 
          the play is lost, and with it Hamlet&#146;s wonderful directions to 
          the players, &quot;Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.&quot; 
          Many other favorite lines and scenes are gone. Still, those who welcome 
          radical invention will taste Shakespeare&#146;s wine in Almereyda&#146;s 
          new bottles.</P>
        <P>Almereyda chose Ethan Hawke as his Hamlet. He is reportedly the first 
          actor under thirty to play the part in a film. Hawke was eager to take 
          on serious roles and jumped at the opportunity. With Hawke on board, 
          Almereyda began assembling an unlikely crew of American actors, among 
          whom the most intriguing choice was Bill Murray, the actor-comedian, 
          who was cast as Polonius. Diane Venora, a distinguished actress who 
          had been the gender-bending Hamlet of Joseph Papp&#146;s 1983 stage 
          production, accepted the role of Gertrude. The teenaged Julia Stiles, 
          who like Hawke started acting in film as a child, would be a &quot;new&quot; 
          Ophelia. Liev Schreiber, known in independent film circles and a seasoned 
          stage actor who had done his own Hamlet, agreed to be Ophelia&#146;s 
          brother Laertes. The extraordinary Sam Shepard, playwright and sometime 
          actor, signed on to do the Ghost. And the crucial role of the fratricidal 
          Claudius, who looms large in this production, was assigned to Kyle MacLachlan. 
          A David Lynch favorite (he starred in <I>Twin Peaks</I> and <I>Blue 
          Velvet</I>), MacLachlan looks and acts like a department store mannequin 
          but is perfect in this role. </P>
        <P>Orson Welles described his own low-budget <I>Macbeth</I> film as a 
          &quot;charcoal sketch of Shakespeare&#146;s play,&quot; and Almereyda 
          makes the same claim for his low-budget <I>Hamlet</I>. However, a charcoal 
          sketch implies a clear outline. This <I>Hamlet</I> is more a collage 
          of cut-up and out-of-order pieces that audiences will have to re-assemble 
          in their own minds. Thus, Shakespeare&#146;s inspired lines from act 
          2, scene 2 are placed at the beginning of the film: &quot;What [a] piece 
          of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in 
          form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, 
          in apprehension how like a god&#150;the beauty of the world the paragon 
          of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?&quot; 
          Hamlet speaks these lines to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play, 
          but in the film Almereyda deploys them as a Hamlet soliloquy to establish 
          Hawke&#146;s character. Dare one say that it is better as a soliloquy? 
        </P>
        <img src="images/hamlet3.JPG" align=left border=3 hspace=20 vspace=15> 
        <P>Almereyda gambled that everyone who sees his movie will know the play 
          and will be able to connect the dots he sets out. For example, the entire 
          gravediggers scene (&quot;alas poor Yorick&quot;) from act 5 is compressed 
          into a dot-like image of Jeffrey Wright shoveling dirt out of a deep 
          hole. Wright, an overnight success in the 1996 film about the avant-garde 
          graffiti painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, will be unrecognizable even to 
          his most devoted fans. To anyone who is unfamiliar with the play, that 
          gravedigger nanosecond will be a surrealistic incident. Ophelia&#146;s 
          coffin is being buried elsewhere in this modern cemetery and there are 
          no gravediggers and no Yorick Skull in the scene.</P>
        <P>As if mindful of what he has left out, Almereyda sets out another dot&#150;a 
          quick cut to a theater poster of Gielgud in &quot;the alas poor Yorick&quot; 
          moment. Gielgud looks almost as ancient as the skull he is holding. 
          It is like a condensed image in a dream&#150;part homage, part ridicule 
          of the venerable Hamlet.</P>
        <P>Almereyda has an astonishing theatrical grasp of the play: one can 
          sense it in every choice he makes. But he has no Royal Shakespeare Company 
          pretensions. This is a Jazz <I>Hamlet</I>, with the reckless creativity 
          of bebop. Every directorial improvisation, like the poster of Gielgud, 
          is a riff on some previous interpretation of the play. </P>
        <P>The youthful Ethan Hawke gives something less than a virtuoso performance 
          as Hamlet. The lines are quite obviously too much for him. But in this 
          stylish fast-moving production, that is not the disaster one might expect. 
          Almereyda has suited the action to his actors.</P>
        <P>Since this is a Denmark without a royal throne, it is not unreasonable 
          to imagine that the son of an American merger king would be an aspiring 
          filmmaker and that his girlfriend Ophelia would be a still photographer. 
          They are the artistically minded anti-establishment children of New 
          York&#146;s new limousine class. They have all of the privileges of 
          wealth but reject the corporate-culture values of their parents. This 
          Hamlet obviously does not want to follow in his father&#146;s footsteps 
          as CEO of a major multinational corporation. And Ophelia is no reclusive 
          virgin. She is a feisty young woman who has her own East Village studio 
          loft with a darkroom to develop her films. Roles like these are not 
          a stretch for Hawke and Stiles. For the first half of the film, Hamlet, 
          when he is not in his apartment watching black and white Pixel videos 
          of his dead father, makes his anti-corporate-culture statement by wearing 
          one of those knitted Peruvian hats with earflaps one sees on flute-playing 
          street musicians. Ophelia wears baggy raver pants and sneakers. Together 
          they are the sullen outsiders at the shareholders meeting where the 
          pin-striped Claudius announces he has replaced his brother, married 
          his wife, and resisted a hostile takeover by Fortinbras. </P>
        <P>Although Almereyda sets his <I>Hamlet</I> in New York City and films 
          the action against Times Square, glass sky scrapers, the Guggenheim, 
          and other recognizable landmarks, the imaginative cinematography creates 
          not the gritty reality but an other-worldly New York. The visual location 
          of the film, very much like Shakespeare&#146;s own Denmark, is an imagined 
          actuality&#150;a place outside real time. The Pixelvision on the screen 
          casts ghost-like images that conjure up the something rotten in the 
          state of Denmark. Inter-cut with the lush, high-quality cinematography 
          of the other-worldly New York, it makes a striking contrast.</P>
        <P>Almereyda, by eliminating the political, foregrounds the personal Hamlet 
          and Ophelia relationship. Instead of a prince and a commoner, they become 
          star-crossed lovers whose tragic affair is central to this non-dynastic 
          plot. There have been many productions of the play in which Hamlet&#146;s 
          feelings for the frail and pious Ophelia pale next to his love for his 
          true and trusted friend Horatio: &quot;Give me that man that is not 
          passion&#146;s slave, and I will wear him in my heart&#146;s core, ay, 
          in my heart of heart, as I do thee.&quot; From first to last Hamlet 
          is gentle and trusting with Horatio, and, as Granville Barker points 
          out, only with him. In the final scene, as Shakespeare wrote it, Horatio 
          proves this love is not one-sided. He wants to finish the poisoned wine 
          and die with his beloved Hamlet. The dying prince begs him to live and 
          suffer awhile, &quot;to tell my story.&quot; What greater trust could 
          Hamlet and Shakespeare bequeath to Horatio? </P>
        <P>Almereyda de-emphasizes the Hamlet&#151;Horatio relationship and provides 
          Horatio with a girlfriend (Marcellus of the night watch becomes Marcella), 
          who strikingly changes the male chemistry. She is one of only three 
          significant characters who have been added to Shakespeare&#146;s <I>dramatis 
          personae</I> (the others are Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist Guru, and 
          Robert MacNeil, formerly of PBS news). I take it that Almereyda chose 
          to suppress the homophilic and misogynist undercurrents in the play. 
        </P>
        <P>Almereyda&#146;s echo chamber nevertheless allows us many of the reverberations 
          of Shakespeare&#146;s play. Several strategies combine to this result. 
          First is the use of Shakespeare&#146;s actual language: cut back relentlessly, 
          those magic words manage to summon the echoes of all the rest. Almereyda&#146;s 
          wit is an unpredictable catalyst. His hi-tech devices shrewdly, ironically, 
          even humorously give Shakespeare&#146;s substance a new style&#150;a 
          style that reminds us that <I>Hamlet</I> has a number of wickedly funny 
          lines. The hi-tech devices also, surprisingly, help the plot along.</P>
        <P>A good example is the famous &quot;get thee to a nunnery&quot; scene. 
          Distrusting Ophelia, Hamlet has become stand- offish. His attitude toward 
          her, as reflected in Shakespeare&#146;s lines, changes dramatically 
          in the middle of the &quot;nunnery&quot; scene. To explain that change 
          Branagh and many other directors have created a stage direction (few 
          if any of the original stage directions exist) in which Hamlet sees 
          something that makes him realize that they are being spied on and that 
          Ophelia may be in on it&#150;&quot;Are you honest?&quot; </P>
        <P>Almereyda builds on that premise. We are shown Polonius wiring the 
          recalcitrant Ophelia before he &quot;looses&quot; her on the unwitting 
          Hamlet. Hawke&#146;s Hamlet, though wary, cannot resist this passionate 
          Ophelia. They embrace and as his hand caresses her body it encounters 
          the wire&#150;the uncontestable evidence of a hi-tech betrayal. Most 
          of Hamlet&#146;s long speech has been sacrificed but the few words that 
          are left juxtaposed against the wire give the scene a dramatic clarity 
          that many Hamlets have not matched. </P>
        <P>Almereyda made a virtue of necessity: he did not ask his actors to 
          attempt the high style of British actors who have been schooled in the 
          prosody, mastered the rhythms of Shakespeare&#146;s iambic pentameter, 
          and can project to the second balcony. The truth is most American actors 
          look silly and unnatural when they make the effort. One need only rerun 
          the video of Marlon Brando trying to do Marc Anthony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz&#146;s 
          <I>Julius Caesar</I>. Almereyda wisely encouraged his actors to &quot;draw 
          on their own experience and traditions, rather than classical Shakespearean 
          technique.&quot; </P>
        <P>The cast did just that. The notable exception was Liev Schreiber, who 
          had trained at the Royal Academy and knows how the British do it. It 
          is true that he does not look silly saying the lines, but he is certainly 
          out of place in this cast. His performance has been a litmus test for 
          critics. Those who do not like the film tend to think that Schreiber 
          is the only one in the cast who can act: &quot;The only tragic thing 
          about the &#133; new <I>Hamlet</I> is the lonely spectacle of Liev Schreiber 
          giving a deeply felt, expertly spoken performance as Laertes,&quot; 
          wrote Jonathan Foreman of the <I>New York Post</I>. Since I am of the 
          mind that Almereyda&#146;s American re-conception is the inventive strength 
          of the film, it seems to me that Schreiber has made a lonely spectacle 
          of himself. He seems to be declaiming in the spit-flying style of the 
          English stage while the rest of the cast has the typical psychological 
          inwardness of American film actors, whose &quot;method&quot; recognizes 
          the power of the medium.</P>
        <P>Sam Shepard reported his own experience trying to master the iambic 
          pentameter of the Ghost. He ordinarily approaches a role by first attempting 
          to understand the psychology of the character he is to play. But Shakespeare&#146;s 
          meter was so insistent he had to deal with the poetry first. Eventually, 
          he worked his way through the language to the psychology and his American 
          Ghost was believably father-like&#150;and not just the sepulchral spirit 
          of most Shakespearean actors. Still, this is film and Shepard&#146;s 
          visual presence on the screen counts for more than his acting. The handsome 
          weatherworn face makes every glimpse of him memorable.</P>
        <P>Bill Murray had never done Shakespeare before and Polonius is a difficult 
          role that would challenge any actor. If this is a Jazz <I>Hamlet</I>, 
          Murray&#146;s Polonius is a wonderful improvisation. Instead of trying 
          to make himself into Polonius, Murray riffed his own persona into the 
          part. His first great hurdle was how to speak the all too familiar lines 
          of paternal advice to Laertes. Would he be a prating fool or a wise 
          father? He spoke his homily, pared down to a minimum, as if paying lip 
          service to his own hypocrisy. Establishing his character as an intrusive 
          father he helps the departing Laertes pack and secretly slips a roll 
          of bills into his coat pocket before urging him, &quot;Neither a lender 
          nor a borrower be.&quot; Then hugging his son he gives the camera and 
          the audience one of his trademark &quot;Can you believe this?&quot; 
          grimaces. This Polonius is neither wise nor foolish. He is the ingratiating, 
          but ironic, clown that has made Bill Murray a success.</P>
        <P>The same critics who think that Liev Schreiber is the only member of 
          the cast who can act pan Murray&#146;s Polonius. What I take to be patented 
          grimaces at the camera they understand as Murray searching for cue cards. 
          There is an entire dimension to this film that can be understood as 
          sophisticated and stylish or sophomoric and inept. Thus one critic complained 
          that there were too many visual distractions that took away from the 
          acting (e.g., Hamlet walking down the &quot;Action&quot; aisle of a 
          Blockbuster Video store while doing the &quot;to be or not to be&quot; 
          soliloquy). But Almereyda, it seems to me, knows exactly what he is 
          doing. Those visual distractions are both ironic and perhaps necessary. 
          Many of Hamlet&#146;s lines are spoken in voiceover, so we do not actually 
          often have the potentially painful experience of watching Ethan Hawke 
          in the act of speaking Hamlet&#146;s lines. It is as though Almereyda 
          understands that Hawke cannot carry it off if the camera catches him 
          in the very act of mouthing his lines. </P>
        <P>The &quot;to be or not to be&quot; soliloquy is the ultimate test for 
          an actor, and even a man of Branagh&#146;s talents chose to amplify 
          his performance in a hall of mirrors. Almereyda took something from 
          that. He has Hawke doing the &quot;How all occasions do inform against 
          me&quot; soliloquy while looking into the mirror of an airplane toilet. 
          But for the &quot;to be or not to be&quot; soliloquy Almereyda made 
          another imaginative reach. Before his New York Hamlet goes video shopping, 
          he watches the Buddhist Guru Thich Nhat Hanh on television. Thich is 
          talking about how to coexist with other living things in the natural 
          world&#150;or, in his neologistic phrase, how to &quot;inter be.&quot; 
          The Buddhist Guru&#146;s &quot;inter be&quot; soliloquy has all of that 
          holy man&#146;s guileless charm and humility. It is a surprising and 
          ingenious countertext of Eastern transcendence pitted against Hamlet&#146;s 
          anguished existentialism. And the action signs in the video shopping 
          venue for the &quot;to be or not to be&quot; soliloquy reverberate in 
          Almereyda&#146;s ironic echo chamber.</P>
        <P>The film also has insider moments for film buffs, as when Ophelia unpacks 
          her handbag of &quot;remembrances&quot; from Hamlet. The last thing 
          she takes out is a little rubber duck. The audience laughs at this childish 
          memento but, in fact, this is Almereyda&#146;s homage to Finnish director 
          Aki Kaurism&auml;ki, whose 1987 satire <I>Hamlet Goes Business</I> had 
          Claudius cornering the world market in bath toys. Almereyda&#146;s final 
          ironic improvisation is Robert MacNeil&#146;s epilogue. He comes on 
          after the mayhem of the last act as though it is the PBS news hour. 
          His lines are those of the Player King&#146;s: &quot;Our will and fates 
          do so contrary run that our devices still are our overthrown; our thoughts 
          are ours, their ends none of our own.&quot; Again the appearance of 
          MacNeil reading the poetry as news provokes laughter. But knowing the 
          lines and where they come from in the play ironizes the absurd humor. 
          If one looks closely and quickly, one sees that MacNeil&#146;s thoughts 
          are not his own: he is reading from a teleprompter. </P>
        <P>Although Almereyda gave the actors room to interpret their roles and 
          improvise, he made choices about their lines and thus their characters. 
          The two women in this New York <I>Hamlet</I> are particularly intriguing, 
          and underscore with particular force Almereyda&#146;s inventiveness.</P>
        <P>Julia Stiles was determined to play Ophelia as a strong young woman 
          rather than as the fragile victim. She is not a conventionally pretty 
          actress and she abandons any appearance of innocent naivet&eacute;. 
          Laertes still has the lines of cautionary advice to his sister on preserving 
          her &quot;chaste treasure&quot; but this petulant New Yorker does not 
          conjure up an image of virginal chastity on the screen. Her strong willed 
          Ophelia goes howling with rage into madness&#150;not because she is 
          broken by the murder of her father by Hamlet, but because it is the 
          only way she can protest what these men have done to her. </P>
        <P>Venora is also an interestingly different Gertrude. She has been stripped 
          of almost all her lines and is limited to her presence on the screen. 
          Her Gertrude is radiantly sexual, like a woman who unexpectedly catches 
          fire in her forties, and all of her heat is aimed at the conquering 
          Claudius. But then comes the famous bedroom scene with Hamlet. Many 
          Hamlets, including Olivier and Burton, brought obvious sexual overtones 
          into this bedroom wrestling match. This Gertrude is shaken to the core, 
          and it&#146;s not about sex; it is about her denial. Shakespeare&#146;s 
          play does not tell us whether Gertrude believes Hamlet&#146;s accusation. 
          Recall that she too has watched the play within the play (&quot;the 
          lady doth protest too much&quot;)&#150;did she get it? Does she pass 
          Hamlet&#146;s tirade off as &quot;the very coinage of [his] brain&quot;? 
          She has a moment of remorse: &quot;These words like daggers enter in 
          my ears.&quot; But Gertrude certainly never turns on Claudius; indeed 
          she is protective when later Laertes threatens him. And in the play 
          as written there is no reason to believe in the duel scene that Gertrude 
          knows she is drinking from the poisoned cup: &quot;The queen carouses 
          to thy fortune, Hamlet&quot; is her line. It seems unwitting; indeed 
          many directors have made Gertrude into a witless sot who is never without 
          a glass in her hand and has no idea what is rotten in Denmark. And Almereyda&#146;s 
          Gertrude also conspicuously takes to the bottle after her bedroom confrontation 
          with Hamlet. In a scene designed to underline her drinking problem, 
          she steps out of the limousine that drops Hamlet off at JFK airport 
          for his banishment to England. Teetering on high heels and holding a 
          glass, she kisses him good-bye and staggers back into the car. This 
          Gertrude&#146;s denial has been undercut by Hamlet&#146;s confrontation. 
          In the duel scene, she gives Claudius an unmistakable look of comprehension 
          before she willfully drinks the poisoned wine. She is on to his poisons 
          and her own complicity. </P>
        <P>Ophelia and Gertrude for centuries have been hapless women who go to 
          their deaths by accident in Shakespeare&#146;s play&#150;Ophelia too 
          mad to recognize her danger, Gertrude unwittingly carousing to her doomed 
          son. But Almereyda&#146;s women are made of sterner stuff. Shakespeare&#146;s 
          women are locked into tragedy, and they must die. This Gertrude and 
          Ophelia do it on their own terms. </P>
        <P><I>Hamlet </i>2000 is an unexpected delight. It may be &quot;caviary 
          to the general.&quot; But it was (as I perceived it, and others whose 
          judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) &quot;an excellent 
          [film], well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as 
          cunning.&quot; </P>
        <BR>
        <DIV ALIGN=CENTER> <FONT SIZE="3">For more film reviews by <B>Alan Stone</B>, 
          <A HREF="http://bostonreview.net/film/">click here</A> or choose from 
          a list of 
          <macro stonerevs>
          </FONT></DIV>
        <P>
          <CENTER>
            <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#808080">Originally published in the October/ 
            November 2000 issue of Boston Review</FONT>
          </CENTER>
        </P>
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