Going Pro - Sundance Film Festival

Film Comment, March, 2000 by Gavin Smith

Ingeniously and divertingly updating Shakespeare to corporate New York (Denmark is now a multinational company, Elsinore a hotel), Michael Almereyda's Hamlet benefits from playfully iconographic casting: Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, Bill Murray as Polonius, Sam Shepard as the Ghost of Hamlet's father. These might sound like semi-parodic one-liners, particularly if you share the widespread dismissive estimation of the admittedly callow Hawke, but the performances are memorably etched and Almereyda plays things straight, even when Ophelia is calling MovieFone or Hamlet is bundled into a cab to be greeted by a recording of Eartha Kitt telling him to buckle up. In contrast to the in-your-face pop culture riff of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo Juliet, Almereyda opts for a more cool, detached mode and a clean visual luxuriance, staging things in long, fluid takes, beautifully realized by DP John de Borman. Like Luhrmann, he situates Shakespeare firmly in the realm of media and technological overload -- cell phones, TVs, wiretaps, comical product placement -- but goes a step further by linking modern urban malaise and fragmentation with Shakespearean morbidity. Hamlet's soliloquies are presented in playback as self-absorbed Pixelvision video diary musings, and most audaciously, the "To be or not to be" speech is reinvented through dispersal, preempted by a Tibetan spiritual teacher on TV talking about the nature of being, begun as a video recording, completed as Hamlet wanders the aisles of Blockbuster. Still, despite the indie rock soundtrack, the customary Almereyda distracted poetics and visual asides are muted -- the film lacks the spark of wonder and strangeness that animates his other films, with their Martian-eye view of human interactions and the workings of the human heart, and his inspiration falters altogether in the climactic duel between Hamlet and Laertes (Liev Schreiber). Although Shakespeare adapts well to a world of penthouse suites, press conferences, limousines, and watchful bodyguards with ear pieces, ultimately the conjunction of original text and modern setting doesn't resonate or yield new insights into either.

Maybe the final word should go to one of the original indies, still going strong. Alan Rudolph's Trixie is a delightful mystery/conspiracy thriller genre pastiche, full of his customary inversions, mirrorings, and visual mischief. Emily Watson plays a plucky private investigator who comes to a Northwestern resort town to provide security for a casino. Encountering a typical gallery of Rudolph eccentrics -- jaded, booze-soaked lounge singer (Nathan Lane), inept lothario (Dermot Mulroney in the Keith Carradine role), boorish real estate tycoon (Will Patton) -- she picks up threads of crime and coverup that lead all the way up to a lecherous, cant-spouting senator (Nick Nolte, pulling out all the comic stops as only he can). To keep things lively, Rudolph gives his heroine a speech disorder that mangles her every utterance with richly comic malapropisms ("Why does everybody have to beat a dead horse to death?"), making a mockery of the hardboiled dialogue and situations. The genre elements (sex scandal/blackmail/murder/shady real estate deals) remain notional, indefinite, teetering on the verge of abstraction. But through the layerings of sentimentality, irony, burlesque, and wordplay, in his own idiosyncratic way Rudolph critiques the debased civics and incoherent politics of the Clinton era, where everybody is on the make and has sex on the brain. It's all brought off with such consummate ease that Rudolph's modernism is starting to look classical. And it ought to be the last word on American independent film's receding infatuation with the noir/crime movie genre.