Hamlet: Shakesperean tragedy. Starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlen, Diane Verona, Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, Bill Murray, Steve Zahn and Sam Shepard. Music by Carter Burwell. From the play by William Shakespeare. Screenplay and direction by Michael Almereyda. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

The big screen’s done pretty well by William Shakespeare.  The rich, vivid poetry of his language has visually inspired many filmmakers across the years: Olivier’s Hamlet, Richard III and Henry V.  Orson Welles’ MacBeth and Othello. Kenneth Branagh’s various turns at the plays. 1995’s Richard III, done as a black comedy in an otherworldly 1930s England overrun by Fascism. His plays are so full of action and drama and so sturdy that it’s hard to make a complete wreck of it.

But sometimes they do botch the Bard. 1999’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is one example, a film so mild-mannered, I think it ‘twas but a mild dream that I saw it.  This year, it’s the newest version of Hamlet, which was the closing night feature at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.  Starring Ethan Hawke in the title role, it is a production that, except for a handful of performances, I found profoundly misguided.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda, who made a fascinating and respectable variation on Dracula’s Daughter called Nadja (1994), has not only updated this tale of royal intrigue and a troubled Danish Prince to modern day high-tech steel and glass skyscrapers of New York, he’s changed everything but the language.  The royal Kingdom of Denmark is now the über-Capitalist Denmark Corporation.  Claudius the King is now simply Claudius (Kyle MacLachlen) head CEO of Denmark who now sits in the Corporation’s big chair after the death of its former chairman and almost immediately marries his predecessor’s widow Gertrude (Diane Verona).

This sudden betrothal stirs the suspicions of Gertrude’s son, Hamlet  (Ethan Hawke), played here as a disaffected Gen X slacker film student in a stocking cap. And when the Ghost of his father (Sam Shepard) appears Hamlet’s seething suspicions appear all the truer. But not true enough. The decision to take revenge on his father’s murderer is fraught with peril, moral ambiguity and Hamlet’s doubts about his own sanity.

In leaving the language untouched Almereyda may actually have made a mistake, because the power and the beauty of Shakespeare fails to take root in this sterile modern setting. Good intentions notwithstanding, this postmodern updating of this great tragedy feels like a postgraduate stunt by way of Greenwich Village.  It winds up being merely absurd, like the 1991 attempt to refashion MacBeth into a gangster film called Men of Respect starring John Turturro and Rod Steiger.

Performances are wildly uneven with Liev Schreiber as Ophelia’s brother Laertes and Diane Verona managing to show some anguished passion.  Kyle MacLachlan seems too young for Claudius.  Bill Murray scrapes the bottom as a smirky Polonius (director Paul Bartel, who appears as Osric, would have been better casting). Everyone else thrashes around in the middle. Ophelia, always a difficult role, is not made anymore memorable by Julia Stiles. Sam Shepard as the ghost of Hamlet’s father seems more like an actor playing a ghost then a real ectoplastic creature.

Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, is simply weightless and pulseless. With him Hamlet comes off as immature and sullen, rather than tormented and enigmatic.  His modern urban monotone makes him sounds like a droning slacker you’re forced to share a table with at a coffeehouse. (“To be or not to be . . . like whatever man!”) Because of him I never really believed in Claudius’ guilt and found myself hoping he’d be proven innocent.

Hamlet has a few clever touches, like the use of fax machines in place of human messengers and Hamlet’s staging of the play within the play done as an experimental video. Hamlet also throws away his “To Be or Not To Be” speech while walking the aisles of Blockbuster, a move whose significance escapes me (Is it a slam at the triumph of lowbrow contemporary culture or an example of the triumph of product placement? Or both? That is the question!). 

What finally undoes this adaptation is the unbridgeable gulf between the sleek steel chrome texture of the movie and Shakespeare’s poetry. In this secular rational setting, the supernatural elements so crucial to Shakespeare’s texture, are hollowed out. Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine’s Richard III of a few years back worked better as a modernization because 1930s England is far enough in the past and that film’s conception of England under fascism is so fantastical that Shakespeare’s words feel comfortably rooted in the surroundings.

On the other hand Almereyda may have set himself an impossible task: stripping out the language would have only left the plot and plotting was never really Shakespeare’s strong point. (Try telling Hamlet’s plot sans any mention of the poetry or Shakespeare and see what kind of looks you get: “A ghost!? Yeah, right, his father comes back as ghost and tells him he’s been murdered . . . .”)

In this film, Shakespeare’s poetry is like beautiful flowers cut and transplanted in dead soil. Like the red rose that occasionally appears in the film, it withers and dies. This Hamlet is so much for our times that its universal qualities all but disappear.