Hamlet (2009)

When I discovered that Doctor Who (David Tennant) plays Hamlet, and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) plays Claudius and the Ghost in this BBC-produced, Gregory Doran-directed version of Hamlet, I was beside myself with excitement. I grew up with Stewart’s Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and my wife and I have spent the last couple years catching up on (and loving every minute of) Tennant’s run as the tenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Needless to say, I was completely geeking out to realize so many of my favorite worlds had herein collided.



That dynamic duo does not disappoint here, and nor do many of their castmates: by and large the acting here is phenomenal. Tennant doesn’t flinch under the microscope of close camerawork, even when delivering the legendary soliloquies direct to camera! Stewart is in great form as Claudius, and even better as the Ghost. There is one notable miscast in my mind, but the reasons are of questionable depth, so I won’t embarrass myself with any further mention of it here. Peter De Jersey delivers a fantastic and profoundly likeable Horatio. Oliver Ford Davies is phenomenal as Polonius; he’s so believable, and totally nails the heavily comic aspects of the character.

I’ve since discovered that Davies was in three of the Star Wars movies! OK, so they were actually the prequels, but I won’t hold that against him. I just want to award Doran’s Hamlet the sci-fi alumni casting credit it deserves.


Davies as Naboo governor Sio Bibble in the prequels.


Davies was a shoo-in for the Shawn and Shakespeare Show-Stealer Award all the way through the first two and a half hours of film, then came Ryan Gage. Gage plays Osric, the court messenger sent from Claudius to Hamlet in order to set up the doomed fencing finale. It’s a pretty small role, but Gage plays the ever-agreeable, yet secretly sneaky serving man to such hilarious perfection that for my money he steals the show.

Here is a link to the three-minute video of the masterful scene in question:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/embed-player?pid=I_DElJhyUHV16p_ZmVwDAkHVUw2AIAPd&share=true&t=61-207

Speaking of performance, haters will be quick to comment on Tennant’s “silly” portrayal of the Danish prince in this Hamlet, but their impression only really speaks to the contrast between Tennant’s performance and other cinematic Hamlets of the last couple decades (notably Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson). In truth, the role of Hamlet calls for an actor of great range, someone who can go from deadly serious, to “Hamlet, you so crazy” and countless points in-between. Tennant had shown that great range in his run as the Doctor, and it just made him a perfect cast here. In short, it’s not a Doctor-ish performance; Hamlet is simply a Doctor-ish character.

Just so the haters don’t get too lonely, I will say that for all that the exceptional acting does to make Doran’s Hamlet, there are a slew of production decisions that do their best to break it. Bearing in mind that this is an attempted transfer of the successful London play to a different medium (so who knows what they were actually going for – play-film, tv-play, play-tv-film, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral), the stage-inspired film set (consisting almost entirely of one really shiny all-black room) takes the epic drama of the play and makes it feel claustrophobically small-scale. Denmark may be a prison for Hamlet, but that doesn’t mean I care to imagine it as three-by-five cell. It’s a country, not a warehouse. Unfortunately, the visuals here clearly evoke the latter.

Beyond the set itself, there is an all too frequent cutting away from the fancy movie camera film (busy battling valiantly with the set to make Hamlet look cool) to a cheesy-looking overhead CCTV camera feed. Maybe the CCTV cameras just came with the warehouse location, but no one ought to have felt compelled to use them. Though tying in to the pseudo-modern staging, this camera feed never becomes an element of any consequence, despite Tennant ripping a camera off the wall before the “Now I am alone” line. The thing is that there are three different characters in the play - Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern – who serve, almost exclusively, to establish the sense of surveillance in Elsinore castle. Those three all wind up on the wrong end of Hamlet’s revenge, so Hamlet spazzing out on the hardware is pretty superfluous if that’s all we’re getting out of the cameras.

Another glaring “did it really need to be any more obvious?” moment comes when Claudius, in the middle of storming out from Hamlet’s conscience-catching play, pauses and looks down into Hamlet’s handheld video-camera - which he’s using because now Hamlet’s spying on him (can you believe it?) – and Claudius shakes his head as if to say “I didn’t like that play, Hamlet. I didn’t like that play at all.” It’s just a bit much. We already get it by way of the whole storming out in the middle of the play: Claudius isn’t feeling it.

Just to be sure we get all the ill-advised gestures we can handle, when Hamlet later demands at sword-point that Claudius drink from the poisoned cup, we get an overly quick “Oh, well. If I have to” shrug from Stewart that is just ill-suited to both the character and the scene.

I don’t lay these off-putting mannerisms at the feet of the recently-knighted Sir Patrick Stewart. Scenes have to get shot dozens of times, and it’s up to the team on the other side of the camera (and in the editing room) to make sure that what makes the final cut works well.

Speaking of cutting, I don’t know if they needed to make some major cuts to get the running time down or what, but there is a big piece missing from the last scene: Fortinbras. Fortinbras is a Norwegian prince whose father was also killed. He serves, not unlike Laertes, as a foil for Hamlet throughout the play. Fortinbras’ father was killed by Hamlet’s father, and lost his lands as a result. Fortinbras is the dutiful, fearless man of action that Hamlet feels he should be. He is alluded to throughout this film as he is in the play. However, as Hamlet lays dying, Fortinbras should be on his way into the castle. Hamlet, about to be the final dead member of the Danish royal family, should decree that Fortinbras will rule Denmark. Fortinbras himself should come in and basically ask “What in the world happened here? Where did you guys even get all these dead bodies?” None of that happens in this film. Hamlet just dies, Horatio is distraught, roll credits. This is terribly abrupt, and scraps the crucial closure that Fortinbras brings to the table. As this film leaves things, Denmark is left a bloody, hopeless mess. There is no closure at all. Not to mention the fact that all the Fortinbras-related things that did make it into the film earlier are left looking as pointless as the CCTV cameras. He’s in the play for a reason, and they couldn’t bring themselves to cut him all the way out, so I’m not sure what they didn’t get about the big finish.

It’s too bad that the film is weighed down by these production decisions, because with such a strong cast turning in such strong performances, this version might have otherwise made its way to the top of the Hamlet heap. And while I understand that this Hamlet was made for British television, I would argue that so was the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which has remained the definitive version despite the more recent Hollywood attempt. When you have the right people on board, you just have to go big.

If all the crew wanted was a cool archive of the stage show, then it’s probably mission accomplished. But as a film, while great performances ultimately make Doran’s Hamlet worth seeing, the production keeps it from really living up to its own potential.