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jennariaSo some time ago, I picked up a copy of the recent David Tennant HAMLET. And then utterly failed to find the time to actually, y'know, watch it.
This weekend, we finally got around to it.
To be fair, we had spent several hours blitzing through BACCANO, which is incredibly violent and fun and kinda brain-breaky (but still in fun ways!). HAMLET was intended as sort of a palate cleanser, so I didn't spend the rest of the weekend wandering around in an anime haze. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
I'll be the first to admit that I have definite Ideas about HAMLET. It's a big complicated play, and tends to lend itself to Ideas, which is not necessarily a good thing. But it's still possible for a new idea to come along and hit me hard enough that I'm all like, oh, hey, that should totally become head-canon.
But still. First and foremost, Hamlet needs to be extremely charismatic. He's the lynch-pin around which the whole play wheels. If he's charismatic, interesting, catches your eye, then you can understand why Horatio's reaction to the ghost is we have to tell Hamlet, why Claudius is publicly declaring Hamlet his heir so quickly, why Ophelia has recklessly thrown herself head-over-heels for a guy more absorbed in his own grief than in her.
If he isn't? If he's a self-absorbed twit? ...you have David Tennant.
You could see him trying. But he was chewing the scenery from the first soliloquy, and I never felt any subtlety beyond that. I lasted as far as the 'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I' soliloquy, skipped ahead to see how slashy the 'give me that man who is not passion's slave' scene was or wasn't (to which the answer was a resounding 'meh' - would have been more slashy if they'd let themselves linger even a heartbeat longer, rather than the near-panicked immediate jump to 'Something too much of this!'), and then to the 'to England!' scene, as that's one of my favorites and dammit, it's really hard to wreck it. Still is: Tennant's self-absorbed Hamlet could still be snarky, and I did like his plaintive reminder to the running guards that 'He will stay til you come!'
But after that, we gave up and turned off the DVD. It wasn't just Tennant's acting: really, it was more than that. It was that I did not care about any of the characters except in a vague, mild sort of way, certainly not enough to watch them continue on their way to their inevitable destruction. Gertrude was giving skeevy mother/son incestuous vibes long before we hit the closet scenes. Polonius was boring and tendentious, which is a viable reading of the character but not one that either amuses me or keeps me interested, at least not bouncing off this Hamlet. And while Ophelia seemed to have the potential for some backbone, they dressed her all wrong for her body type and then didn't allow her really meaty interaction with anyone except Laertes. (Seriously, her valiant attempt at pitiful weeping after the nunnery scene read really fake: how much of that was the actress and how much her Hamlet is another question.) Even Claudius - dammit, I *know* Patrick Stewart is capable of life in the role, I love him in the Derek Jacobi recording. Instead, he seems to have gone for subtlety, which would work better if he weren't stuck carrying the whole thing, and if he weren't the supposed villain of the piece. Heh.
I may give it another try, at some point when my head isn't still full of BACCANO and cheerful bloodshed. I'm a completist, after all, and I haven't seen all of it: maybe things really turn around after the Mousetrap scene. But I am long past the time of 'oooh, HAMLET, shiny!' so I am not optimistic.
This weekend, we finally got around to it.
To be fair, we had spent several hours blitzing through BACCANO, which is incredibly violent and fun and kinda brain-breaky (but still in fun ways!). HAMLET was intended as sort of a palate cleanser, so I didn't spend the rest of the weekend wandering around in an anime haze. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
I'll be the first to admit that I have definite Ideas about HAMLET. It's a big complicated play, and tends to lend itself to Ideas, which is not necessarily a good thing. But it's still possible for a new idea to come along and hit me hard enough that I'm all like, oh, hey, that should totally become head-canon.
But still. First and foremost, Hamlet needs to be extremely charismatic. He's the lynch-pin around which the whole play wheels. If he's charismatic, interesting, catches your eye, then you can understand why Horatio's reaction to the ghost is we have to tell Hamlet, why Claudius is publicly declaring Hamlet his heir so quickly, why Ophelia has recklessly thrown herself head-over-heels for a guy more absorbed in his own grief than in her.
If he isn't? If he's a self-absorbed twit? ...you have David Tennant.
You could see him trying. But he was chewing the scenery from the first soliloquy, and I never felt any subtlety beyond that. I lasted as far as the 'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I' soliloquy, skipped ahead to see how slashy the 'give me that man who is not passion's slave' scene was or wasn't (to which the answer was a resounding 'meh' - would have been more slashy if they'd let themselves linger even a heartbeat longer, rather than the near-panicked immediate jump to 'Something too much of this!'), and then to the 'to England!' scene, as that's one of my favorites and dammit, it's really hard to wreck it. Still is: Tennant's self-absorbed Hamlet could still be snarky, and I did like his plaintive reminder to the running guards that 'He will stay til you come!'
But after that, we gave up and turned off the DVD. It wasn't just Tennant's acting: really, it was more than that. It was that I did not care about any of the characters except in a vague, mild sort of way, certainly not enough to watch them continue on their way to their inevitable destruction. Gertrude was giving skeevy mother/son incestuous vibes long before we hit the closet scenes. Polonius was boring and tendentious, which is a viable reading of the character but not one that either amuses me or keeps me interested, at least not bouncing off this Hamlet. And while Ophelia seemed to have the potential for some backbone, they dressed her all wrong for her body type and then didn't allow her really meaty interaction with anyone except Laertes. (Seriously, her valiant attempt at pitiful weeping after the nunnery scene read really fake: how much of that was the actress and how much her Hamlet is another question.) Even Claudius - dammit, I *know* Patrick Stewart is capable of life in the role, I love him in the Derek Jacobi recording. Instead, he seems to have gone for subtlety, which would work better if he weren't stuck carrying the whole thing, and if he weren't the supposed villain of the piece. Heh.
I may give it another try, at some point when my head isn't still full of BACCANO and cheerful bloodshed. I'm a completist, after all, and I haven't seen all of it: maybe things really turn around after the Mousetrap scene. But I am long past the time of 'oooh, HAMLET, shiny!' so I am not optimistic.