William Shakespeare’s bleak and existential play Hamlet is a perfect showcase for any performer’s talent and skills. For someone of Riz Ahmed’s caliber, playing the indecisive Danish prince, transplanted to the modern context of Britain’s South Asian community, allows him to run the full gamut of human expressions, from tortured, fearful, watchful, and vengeful to occasionally cheeky and unhinged. But even a huge fan of the British-Pakistani actor will find it tiresome to watch a semi-isolated performance of a man teetering on the edge of madness for nearly two hours, which, to its detriment, Aneil Karia’s adaptation very much is. Worse yet is the sound mixing and dialogue, which swallows up some of the immortal Bard’s words.
Full disclaimer: Hamlet is not this writer’s favourite work by Shakespeare (I much prefer Macbeth), but I went into the screening very interested to see Ahmed’s take and confident that he could pull off this choice role. As expected, he provides a compelling performance as the anguished young prince, but the director relies too heavily on his star and forgets to build up a believably corrupt and complex world around him to rail against and allow other performers to match his deliberately heightened frequency.
The camera in Hamlet seems loathe to deviate from a constant, claustrophobic close-up of Ahmed’s face, pushing viewers to watch each flicker of emotion roiling behind those enormous dark eyes. But it also suffers from occasionally too-shaky handheld work that tests viewers’ desire to keep their eyes onscreen. The film’s tunnel vision for Hamlet’s perspective and sparse inclusion of other points of view (ex. Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Polonius) feels like a waste of casting recognizable names like Timothy Spall.
There are a few highlights, however, in the film. Karia picks out some of the text’s underrated comedic moments but also skips over some of the classic scenes from Hamlet (alas, poor Yorick does not make an appearance). The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy reaches a clever and convincingly frightening climax with Hamlet driving recklessly into the night. And the play within a play, which Hamlet famously uses as proof of Claudius’ guilt over regicide/fratricide, is very striking and memorable here as a culturally specific, exuberant, and expressive dance performance.
However, the pace of the film begins to wane partway through as the story relies so heavily on Hamlet’s endlessly changing emotional extremes. This leaves other characters puzzling over his strange behaviour and unable to make much impact beyond marching toward their own inevitable, tragic, and nonsensical ends. And the inclusion of Fortinbras as a sort of anti-capitalist balm to whatever is rotten in the state of not-Denmark feels very shoehorned in. That minor plotline gets muddied by the strangely unclear power structure that Hamlet’s family has, and how little it really matters to the core plot and purpose of the story. As promising and admirable as the adaptation’s premise is, it does not prove itself a masterpiece.
