I confess that as much as I love Riz Ahmed, I found this
Hamlet baffling and frequently downright boring.
I’ll start with things I thought worked well. The play within the play, “The Mousetrap”, was really cool. It was intriguingly filmed and it was innovatively staged. I also loved the way Gertrude chose to drink the poison in the play’s fifth act. I loved the way the ghost spoke Hindi but Hamlet answered him in English.
Otherwise, however, I didn’t think this adaptation made much sense at all. We are in England but Elsinore is some sort of corporation or something, maybe a bank? And Fortinbras is the leader of a kind of occupy movement. Or something? Unclear. And anyway, the politics here have nothing to do with what happens in the story; they’re only decoration—a nod to a politics that
Hamlet itself cannot deliver (being, after all, 425 years old and concerned with politics in Elizabethan England and not the one ruled by Charles III).
This Hamlet (हेमलेट) dispenses with Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, dividing their lines up between Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. This made for confusing character development to say the least. I wasn’t sure why anyone was doing anything in this.
The screenplay is a real head-scratcher throughout. Some lines are invented from whole cloth—a fine choice, honestly, but I kept wondering why they kept any of the original text at all? The screenwriter (or director?) obviously found the Shakespeare lacking at so many points. Lines are altered, made (apparently) easier to understand (for whom? And really?). But why? Why does “the proud man’s contumely” need to be replaced by a newer phrase whereas “who would fardels bear” doesn’t? This happens dozens of times. Why replace one word or phrase but not another? Why change "when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin" to "when he himself might his quiet end make with a dull dagger"? Is quiet end so much clearer to newer ears? It's not; it sounds just as weird.
This 17th century language already doesn’t make any sense in 21st century English, so just commit to it! Or go ahead and rewrite the whole thing! Call it a translation. Set it in an England ruled by the formerly colonized. Or get a budget together and set it in the Mughal empire. Do anything you like! But this kind of patchwork Shakespeare, I find confusing. The new words don’t make the play any clearer, and to my own ears, these stray words that Shakespeare didn't write are constant reminders that what we are hearing isn’t actually the play at all.
And don't get me started on the fact that they kept in the absurd "that's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs / Nothing" joke from act three. Why? Ahmed performs this (with the help of a phallus–microphone) with the kind of hammy level of indication I'd expect in a first-year Shakespeare studio or a bad college production. Cringe-worthy stuff.
How does this Hamlet end, you ask? There’s no sword-fighting; Laertes and Hamlet just sort of look at each other and cry. There’s barely a confrontation! Why does Hamlet kill Laertes? I don’t get it.
And then, of course, the film chooses as its final words… an invented non-Shakespearean line. And a very strange one at that: the king says "I loved your father". This is the most important line in the film? It's how Aneil Karia has decided to end things? Is the implication that perhaps the king didn't kill Hamlet's father after all? Are we supposed to be unsettled with ambiguity like with the ending of Lee Chang-dong's Burning? But if so, why has the king tried (successfully) to kill Hamlet? Why did he freak out during "The Mousetrap"? I just didn't understand this.
I wish they had just taken the entire text of Shakespeare’s play and given it a rewrite. Just make a whole new script; use the plot of Hamlet and make it do what you want it to do and do that well. Instead, we get a faux fidelity to the Shakespearean original that isn't faithful at all: a no-fear Shakespeare and a nearly incomprehensible plot.
