And now we have the fourth version of Hamlet in the last 16 months. I don’t think I would want to review a new adaptation of the play every week, but if any play can withstand this kind of reinvention, surely it’s Shakespeare’s tragedy. This version of Hamlet is a South Asian, modern-dress one, and it’s unfortunately weaker by far than Grand Theft Hamlet, Hamnet, or Scarlet, despite some intriguing qualities that you can see as it opens in three local Cinemark theaters this weekend.
Riz Ahmed portrays the melancholy Indian Dane, who after some years abroad returns to England for his father’s funeral. Elsinore is the real estate empire that his father built, and Fortinbras is a community activist organization run by Marcellus (Eben Figueiredo) that protests against Elsinore’s predatory practices. Other characters have been cut out entirely: Many of Horatio’s lines are given to Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s business mostly falls to Laertes (Joe Alwyn) or Polonius (Timothy Spall).
The film is best when it embraces its South Asian milieu. In the opening scene, Hamlet is clearly unsure of what he’s supposed to do during his father’s Hindu funeral rites. The movie shakes off its general torpor when the ghost of Hamlet’s father (Avijit Dutt) appears to him in a back alley behind a nightclub, where Hamlet has gone to get some air. Part of the creepiness here comes from the actor’s performance, and part of it comes from his delivery of Shakespeare’s lines in Hindi, but it’s the artificial deepening of the actor’s voice that brings home the uncanny nature of this encounter.
Then, too, the play within the play becomes a traditional Indian dance number where dancers with hands stained red re-enact the murder in front of Claudius (Art Malik). Speaking of blood, the death of Polonius is the goriest one I’ve ever seen in any version of the story, and cleverly staged so that Hamlet really does think he’s killing his uncle.
Unfortunately, these bright ideas don’t add up to a clear conception of what the story means in the present day. The setting mostly translates to scenes of repressed people talking to each other in posh interiors. Hamlet delivers the “To be or not to be” speech while speeding down the freeway with his hands off the steering wheel, and the moment is both overheated and undercooked somehow. Claudius and Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) come off as thin characters, which prevents the climax — involving a wine toast instead of a duel — from being as clever as the filmmakers wish. Hamlet restoring Elsinore’s land to the poor people they kicked out is also better on paper than it is on the screen.
Ahmed playing one of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes would seem to be the main draw for this, and yet the Oscar nominee’s performance is too much undifferentiated pain. Speaking of Oscars, director Aneil Karia won one for his short film The Long Goodbye, which accompanied Ahmed’s concept hip-hop album by the same name that addresses South Asians’ place in British society. Had this Hamlet done the same thing with Britain’s greatest dramatist, it might have been a true cinematic event. Its most interesting bits point to what that might have been like.
Hamlet
Starring Riz Ahmed. Directed by Aneil Karia. Written by Michael Lesslie, based on William Shakespeare’s play. Rated R.
