While it isn’t carving out enough new territory to set it apart from other similar updates of Shakespearian material, director Aneil Karia’s Hamlet does a fine job of understanding the basics of interpretation. While Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie (who provided the script for Justin Kurzel’s memorably energetic version of Macbeth) find an interesting cultural shift that offers diversity and some keenly observed changes in family dynamics, this version of Hamlet isn’t all that different. It’s still a faithful adaptation of Hamlet, just dressed in some new clothes. It’s not pushing its changes far enough, but as a well performed take on a classic, one could do far worse than this. It’s a mid-tier take overall, but one with some major bright spots worth noticing.
Instead of a royal family in Denmark, Karia and Lesslie’s Hamlet centres around a wealthy, well connected South Asian family in London. Prodigal son Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) has been called home after the death of his father (Avijit Dutt). To preserve the family’s cultural standing and property development empire, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius (Art Malik), is set to marry his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Hamlet sees the ghost of his father and learns that dad was actually murdered by Claudius, setting him on a path of revenge that will end badly for everyone involved.
The cast of Karia’s Hamlet is largely comprised of South Asian performers and people of colour, save for the related supporting characters of skeptical “royal advisor” Laertes (Joe Alwyn), his ineffective father, Polonius (Timothy Spall), and slowly spiralling and lovesick sister Ophelia (Morfydd Clark). The shift in cultural perspective is welcome, and allows a cast of actors not normally called upon for Shakespearian roles to showcase a deeper range of their capabilities. And the swapping out of modern decor and settings (a suburban McMansion instead of a castle, the clever use of an urban banquet hall for a wedding) bring the material down to Earth a bit more. But outside of those touches, a nifty idea to make Fortinbras symbolic of all of those trampled on by shady real estate developers, and some newly minted subtext suggesting that Hamlet is really cheesed off that he didn’t inherit the family business, it’s just a classic slightly removed from its original formatting. There’s not much elevation and reinvention here. There’s a very good variation on things that have been done plenty of times before.
The changes put in place for Hamlet come across as largely cosmetic; as if no one involved here wants to mess to strongly with the words on the page, or there’s a fear that altering the text in any way will cause audiences and critics to take it less seriously. The modern urban setting isn’t used as a way to speed things up, but to give things a contemporary sheen meant to disguise the calculated pacing of the play itself. The only time Karia manages to make the film visually dazzling comes when cheeky, intoxicated, and angered Hamlet alters “the play” that unfolds at Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding; the most culturally deep and affecting moment in a work that’s otherwise hewing close to its original scripting.
Karia doesn’t help his case by bobbling the film at the very end, reducing the material’s grand climax into a murky looking, mundanely staged, and muted take on of the greatest tragedies in the history of theatre. But before ending on a somewhat sour note, Karia has made his project into something expressly designed for the big screen and not just another stage production. The change in scope makes things more cinematic even in its current state of refinement. The actors are allowed room to react with more subtlety and normalcy than if they were on stage projecting to the back row. Karia is attempting to bring Hamlet back down to Earth, and the cast goes a long way in helping that cause.
Leading that cast is Ahmed’s tremendous work as Hamlet, a performance that exceptionally captures the character’s mental unravelling and mounting despair. It’s a turn that hearkens back to Ahmed’s early years and side career as a hip-hop artist. In addition to knowing every emotional beat of Hamlet inside and out, Karia’s film benefits from having Ahmed’s ability to turn a phrase in unique ways. This is a studied and layered performance of the character rife with unique choices and changes of style that the rest of the film appears scared to approach. The paranoia, cunning, insomnia, and righteous anger buried within some of Shakespeare’s most well known soliloquies comes to new life in Ahmed’s hands. And while “the play’s” very much “the thing” here, Ahmed’s leading turn is more than enough reason to take notice of this version of the tale.
Hamlet is now playing in select theatres.
