A Review of Riz Ahmed's "Hamlet"

This movie places Hamlet within the context of a wealthy South Asian family in London who own a real estate empire called Elsinore. When Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns to Elsinore for his father's funeral, he is shocked to learn that his mother will be marrying his uncle. Then, when he is visited by his father's ghost, he learns that his father was murdered by his uncle, and he is given the task to avenge his father. It's a familiar story put in a modern context.

Disclaimer: I'm going to spoil Hamlet the original play, but I'll try not to spoil the big changes from the movie specifically.

There are many things that this movie did right. I'm not a movie critic, but I enjoyed the time I spent watching it. The acting was fantastic, particularly by Ahmed himself. The best part was by far the play to catch Claudius with a performance by some remarkable dancers.

Following the style of Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Juliet, this movie puts Hamlet in a modern age while using language from the original. I respect this as a style choice and didn't mind it except for the fact that it was an abridged version of the play. Of course, you can't completely blame them for this; Hamlet is a very long play. But I question some of the choices they made to cut down on time.

There was a Horatio-shaped hole in this movie. Personally, I just like the guy and missed him. But I've read retellings that don't include Horatio and haven't hated them. In this case, his absence was so obvious because they had to give his lines and scenes away, mostly to Ophelia. In fact, her introduction is entirely stolen from Horatio, which I immediately recognized and thought meant they were turning Horatio into a woman. A somewhat cowardly choice, all things considered, but not one that I'm entirely against. Then Joe Alwyn (who I already knew to be Laertes) walks in and calls her sister and I'm immediately thrown out of the moment. If you know the play, it's jarring. Horatio serves an important role as Hamlet's singular friend and confidant as well as the audience's access point to an otherwise erratic and unreachable character. The writers of this movie acknowledged the importance of that role and then still decided to dance around it.

Horatio was not the only poor guy to get the cut. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are replaced by vague, unnamed henchmen and Laertes. The gravediggers are written out, and there is no poor jester's skull for Hamlet to monologue over (not that he could anyway, with his scene partner missing). I want to be clear: the problem with all of these cuts were not just that they were made. The problem was that structural aspects of the play were discarded with no plan for a replacement. It made the resulting story feel like it's missing something.

If changes were going to be made anyway, I wish they could've found a way to build out Fortinbras, because I was actually really fascinated by the changes they made there. This is where I felt most restricted by the adherence to the original Shakespearean language. There's no room to build out Fortinbras any further than he already is, which means there's no room to entirely change what Fortinbras is and its relationship to Hamlet and Elsinore either. This was a shame, because I found it very compelling.

My other problem with the way the play was abridged was that it felt like we took out a lot of Hamlet's character. It doesn't feel like he's stalling, so when he chastises himself for it the impact is gone. His madness feels simple because we don't get to see him best his intellectual opponents (or be matched, in the case of the missing gravedigger). The result is quick and to-the-point but hollow. Hamlet is more depressed and on the brink than calculated and manic. It's not wrong, perse, but a weaker depiction.

That's not to say that Riz Ahmed's version of Hamlet wasn't portrayed well. It's a version I don't fully agree with, but the actor did a great job with it. And despite my issues with Hamlet, he was the only character that felt properly built out other than maybe Gertrude. Everyone else was just there to move Hamlet forward towards the key plot points; it didn't feel like they were unique character with their own motivations.

I also felt like the final duel was rushed (and was desperately missing a certain Antique Roman, but we don't need to belabor that point any further). I won't get into it too much to avoid spoilers, but I will say that original-Hamlet wouldn't have been bested like that.

Overall, this wasn't a bad movie, but I didn't feel like it was a great adaptation of Hamlet either. It proved that it understood the big picture moments while misunderstanding or outright ignoring the smaller details that support that final product. Although, if we're being honest, I probably would've liked it more if I wasn't super opinionated about the original play.