Michael Almareyda's Hamlet

Michael Almareyda has slowly but surely been creating a strong and eclectic body of work, borrowing his visual cues from David Lynch (in his low budget film, Twister, with Harry Dean Stanton) and Hal Hartley (in Nadja.) His films have been as uneven, pretentious, and snobbishly hip while at the same time innovative in his use of Pixelvision images, fast and slow motion within the frame.

With his released straight to video Trance (a.k.a. The Eternal) one got the sense that he was gradually moving away from referencing other directors and coming into his own. However, he still had weaknesses in telling the story, and his third act unfolded like a half thought out, fumbled blur.

Of course, he turned to a stronger and renowned writer for good material, and adapted what he considered to be the greatest play written in the English language tailored to his strengths as an experimental filmmaker. His Hamlet is a companion piece to Orson Welles' pared down versions of the plays, and is often shot from the Wellesian low angles, though now in tracking shots through the streets of New York City, 2000 - the skyscrapers towering above the framed characters.

As a script, Almareyda's Hamlet is pared down and tight, and finds fascinating visual techniques for familiar monologues and elements within the play. The "to be or not to be" speech is portrayed in Blockbuster video with a massive wall of videotapes behind him.

The play is no longer the thing - film and video images are the reference points here, and though there may be more faithful adaptations of this play, I doubt there has been or will be any in the near future which make full use of the medium to convey the psyche of the melancholy dane.

There are so many moments which play into Almareyda's strengths as a filmmaker, particularly during the Player's Scene, now a media project by Hamlet in a screening room showing images from silent films and computer generated graphics. The playful humor of this idea gradually gives way to something quite moving, and touched me in a way which can only be described as purely cinematic. As a motion picture, this scene worked better than any previous Hamlet adaptation in recent memory.