A feverish ‘Hamlet’ with Riz Ahmed'

  I’d been looking forward to Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet, a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic play directed by Aneil Karia, a director who had won an Oscar for his short film, The Long Goodbye, a harrowing take on an encounter between a South Asian family and right-wing racists.

  To set the stage, let me say that I don’t insist that Shakespeare be approached with liturgical reverence. Why not set a big-screen adaptation in an East Asian community in contemporary London? And instead of royalty, how about centering the play on corporate big shots vying for control of (ready for it?) the Elsinore corporation?

  Karia also takes liberties with Shakespeare’s dialogue, giving certain speeches to characters who didn’t deliver them in the original. I guess that’s OK. too. 

   After all, this lean one-hour and 53-minute rendition of Hamlet has been given a modernist edge that includes a foray into a nightclub where Hamlet snorts cocaine, an activity that seems superfluous for an already amped up prince who might be wobbling on the edge of insanity.

   Artistic license notwithstanding, some things in this bleary, agitated fever dream of a Hamlet seem like self-inflicted errors. Timothy Spall plays Polonius but the character's pompous cautionary speech to his son Laertes (Joe Alwyn), has been scrapped. (“Neither a borrower nor lender be.”)  

   If you're familiar with the play, you'll find other  such omissions in a work that writer Michael Lesslie adapted for the screen..

   Those who see this version of Hamlet may welcome seeing Ahmed deliver Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy behind the wheel of a BMW that’s racing on a rainy highway. It suggests that a reckless Hamlet might actually stop being at any moment. 

   But I wanted to focus  I wanted to focus on Hamlet's speech without worrying about the fact that Hamlet, at one point, takes his hands off the steering wheel while driving on the wrong side of the road.

  A dance number recreates the play in which Hamlet stages his view of the way Claudius (Art Malik) bumped off Hamlet’s dad so that he could marry his mom, Gertrude (an excellent Sheeba Chaddah),  and take over a corporate kingdom.

 Maybe it’s me, but much of the dialogue seemed mumbled, and Ahmed’s performance leans heavily on half-crazed anger. It's almost as if Hamlet is  being devoured by revenge-seeking demons.

   Karia's invention tends to de-emphasize Shakespeare’s language. And as much as anything, isn't the spoken word the point?

   Viewing this risk-riddled Hamlet can feel a bit like buying a ticket to hear your favorite musical group only to discover that it won’t be performing the tunes that made you love them in the first place. 

   You get why they wanted to branch out, but sometimes, the old tunes are better.

    

Leftovers from the old year

I'm offering brief reviews of two movies (Anaconda and Goodbye, June) to go on record about movies that I hoped might offer diversion (in the case of Anaconda) and emotional heft (Goodbye June). Neither movie did either of those things, so here's my gloss on both them:

Anaconda

The end of the year usually finds critics weighing in on some of the year's more serious offerings, movies that probably will dominate the upcoming awards season. That wouldn't apply to Anaconda. Director Tom Gormican offers the sixth installment of the series, this one starring a usually reliable comedy crew that includes Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, and Steve Zahn. The story revolves around a quartet of  old friends who reunite to rekindle the spark of enthusiasm they felt about the horror movies of their teens. Black, as a director of wedding videos, joins Rudd, as an actor with a dismal career, for a no-budget indie remake of their beloved Anaconda. Along with Newton, as a former high school pal, and Zahn, as another pal and cameraman, the principals head for the Amazon. Selton Mello appears as Santiago, the local hired as the movie's snake handler. Gormican mixes broad comedy and satire about movie cliches, but the movie's laughs may have gotten lost in the jungle, and its additions of horror seem like transfusions of gore into an already lost cause.

Goodbye June

And while we're on the subject of strong casts and weak results, consider Goodbye June, a Christmas movie that marks Kate Winslet's directorial debut. Winslet also appears on screen along with Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough, and Johnny Flynn. They're siblings dealing with the imminent death from cancer of their mother (Helen Mirren). Dad (Timothy Spall) seems more interested in football and alcohol than in his family. Did I mention that the movie takes place at Christmas time and reaches a sentimental conclusion when grandchildren perform a Christmas play for their dying grandma? This one is meant to jerk tears,  but if I were going to shed any tears, they would be for a cast that deserved better material. No hard feelings, though. These accomplished actors surely will triumph anew.

A potentially good story wasted

  Put Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in the same movie, and good things will follow. But wait. That's already happened. In 2021's acclaimed The Lost Daughter, both actresses earned high praise for playing the same character at different ages.

  Judging by Wicked Little Letters, a comedy also starring both actresses, the second pairing is far from a charm.

  Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters transports us to small-town England in the 1920s. Life becomes tense when residents of the coastal city of Littlehampton start receiving a flood profanity-laced letters.

   An Irish immigrant with a young daughter, Buckley's Rose Gooding immediately falls under suspicion. Her staunchly religious next-door neighbor (Colman's Edith Swann) fans the flames of mistrust, pointing to Rose as the culprit.

   Working from a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, director Thea Sharrock errs by serving up the story's big reveal after an hour, leaving 40 or so minutes still on tap.

   Sharrock also relies too heavily on the presumption that audiences will be convulsed by hearing otherwise strait-laced characters spout the profanity found in the letters, which are often read aloud.

   Some of the supporting cast seems stuck in a kitchen- sink drama. Timothy Spall plays Edith's domineering father, and Gemma Jones appears as her cowed mother. 

  It falls to a local police officer (Anjana Vasan) to clear up the mess. Her superiors want her to follow orders, much as her late father, also a cop, supposedly did. They have no interest in seeing a woman take any initiative.

   Thematically, the movie seems intent on showing the commonplace misogyny that dominated the time, but these characters aren’t deep enough to fuel the kind of performances we expect from Colman and Buckley.

  Buckley finds herself in a one-dimensional role that leans heavily on showy displays of pluck. Colman? Well, she's had better parts. 

 In an early scene, Rose coaxes Edith toward spontaneity while the feuding women, still able to abide each other, walk on a pebbled beach. We find few such relaxed moments, perhaps because the characters are often being pushed around by a plot that lays on thick helpings of drama when it's not looking for laughs.

  Sharrock eventually starts speaking the language of caper movies, a tonal shift that may reflect an underlying confusion about what this broadly drawn comedy aims to accomplish. 

   By the end, a promising story has given way to blatant attempts at crowd-pleasing and the hopes I had for Wicked Little Letters had dimmed, faded ink on another set of high expectations.

An eccentric detective at West Point

 

A great cast can't save The Pale Blue Eye, a gloomy melodramatic story about a detective (Christian Bale) who investigates the murder of a cadet who was hanged before his heart was cut from his chest. Adapting his screenplay from a novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper delivers a chilly drama that brings a historical figure -- Edgar Allan Poe -- into a plot weighted with secrets. Poe (Harry Melling) did attend West Point, but the story is pure fiction. Bale's Augustus Landor invites Poe to join him in trying to solve a crime that has the Academy on edge. In addition to Bale, the movie casts Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones as a husband and wife whose son (Harry Lawtey) also attends West Point. Their daughter (Lucy Boynton) catches Poe's eye. Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a waitress at a local pub who carries on an affair with Bale's Augustus Landor. Yes, that's Robert Duvall as an expert on witchcraft whom Landor consults. Suggestions of the paranormal waft through the wintery depictions of West Point, where Timothy Spall takes a turn as the school's embattled superintendent. A moody depiction of 19th-century life turns Cooper's movie into a mystery that's a bore or perhaps "chore" is the better word. The gothic environment Cooper creates is credibly somber but the drama feels freeze-dried.

A sad journey to Land's End

 

     Watching Timothy Spall put one foot in front of the other as he shuffles through one situation after another ranks as one of the more painful sights of the year. 

     Actually, it's not Spall who's moving with so much laborious creak but Tom Harper, the aging character Spall portrays in The Last Bus, a movie that might not be the ticket for the irrevocably lonely or those dealing with recent grief. Spall externalizes Tom's internal pain and resignation in ways that represent a feat of intense characterization.

    A variety of bus trips provide the story with its spine. 

    Here's how it works: A terminally ill widower, Tom uses his bus pass to travel from northern Scotland to Land's End at the southwestern tip of England. It's clear from the outset that Tom, shoulders slumping under the weight of illness and grief, has embarked on a heavy mission.

    Most of the people Tom encounters on his journey are decent folks who try to assist him: a couple takes him in, a group of truly young people is silenced when he sings Amazing Grace. 

    On one of his bus rides, Tom stands up against a racist and earns the respect of his fellow passengers. 

    Even though he  often appears near collapse, Tom soldiers on. Sometimes, he remembers happier days with his young wife, presented in the form of flashbacks.

   Tom's journey takes him to the spot where he spent the early years of his marriage and where he and his young wife experienced a terrible loss. 

    The Last Bus is a showcase for Spall and he makes the most of it. His performance -- reserved, quiet, and stolid -- grounds a film that, at times, drinks from a maudlin cup. 

    Director Gilles MacKinnon and writer Joe Ainsworth may also have wanted to paint a portrait that emphasized the decency of ordinary folks with a bit of diversity thrown in. One wishes the world were this way, although one suspects otherwise.

   Spall's performance aside, it's difficult not to wish that the movie hadn't been so intent on sending poor Tom on quite so sentimental a journey.

Diana and deadening life among royals

 

   They eat the best foods but take no joy in dining. Surrounded by grandeur, they have become exemplars of stifling  insularity. A funereal solemnity embraces them, suggesting a form of social rigor mortis.

   These are the royals of director Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, a look at three days in the life of Princess Diana. Early on, the princess (Kristen Stewart) gets lost driving a small green sports car to Sandringham House, a mansion where the royal family plans to celebrate the Christmas holiday. With these royals, celebration plays more like commemoration.

   Larraín directed Jackie, a meditative 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain's fascination with the interior lives of iconic women pushes realism aside. Larrain introduces Spencer as “a fable from a true tragedy.”  

   No surprise, then, that Spencer becomes an increasingly  subjective chronicle of how Diana experiences the holiday with Stewart fully committing to the task of playing a woman desperate to reclaim her life.

   As Diana, Stewart talks in breathy gasps that, for me, evoked memories of Marlyn Monroe, another women locked in the gilded cage of expectation. Aside from her wardrobe and blonde  hair, little attempt has been made to make Stewart look like Diana, a move that wisely diverts attention from the external to the internal.  

   During three days at Sandringham, Diana is drawn to her old home, a now-deteriorating mansion not far from the royal estate. 

   The point, like many in Steven Knight's screenplay, becomes obvious: Diana longs to retrieve the self that she's supposed to  sacrifice on the altar of aristocratic duty.

   For Diana, everything is double-edged. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) gives her a pearl necklace. The gift puts Diana in a suffocating chokehold that evokes comparisons to Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII who lost her head. Diana reads a book about Boleyn and even hallucinates conversations with Henry’s unfortunate second wife.

   The screenplay makes only one fleeting reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s true love, but the point is clear. 

   We wonder whether Diana might have endured the burden of scripted confinement had Charles been an emotional partner rather than someone who, at least in this movie, pushes  his wife to accept a divided self. 

   Diana's supposed to project the royal image while realizing that her public posture never will fully accommodate her  buoyant personality. She must train her body to do things she hates.

   The rest of the characters reinforce the instructions Charles delivers to Diana as the couple stands on opposite sides of a large billiard table, another expression of Diana's terrible isolation.

   Timothy Spall portrays Major Alistar Gregory, whose sole duty involves protecting royals from prying eyes. His face molded into an impressive scowl, Spall talks softly but makes no attempt to conceal Gregory's authority.

  Jonny Greenwood, cinema's most original composer, creates an unsettling jazz soundtrack that drapes over the movie like a shroud and, at times, makes Spencer feel like an exercise in horror. 

   The score also underlines the impression that Spencer is driven, at least in part, by Larrain’s affinity for disharmonious notes. It also mirrors what's going on inside Diana's head.

  The approach is not without costs, the primary one being a sense of airlessness. From the opening, the message already seems clear: Life's being drained from this young woman. In a sense, nothing remains but for Larraín to tighten the vice grip of propriety around Diana's delicate neck.

  Because Spencer has a gloomy undertow,  an aura of unreality pervades the movie. In works such as Netflix’s enormously popular The Crown, royals don’t always seem like figures borrowed from a wax museum. Not here.

   Only Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana’s dresser, sees the princess as a human being and Charles sends her away, depriving Diana of even momentary possibilities for intimacy.

   Diana suffered from bulimia and Larraín uses her malady metaphorically, a dubious choice, I think. She can’t stomach the royal food that nourishes so much rigid conformity. When her liberating break-out arrives at the film’s end, she  takes her sons (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently, she’s willing to give up a seat at the royal table to consume the food of the people. 

   Larrain uses his considerable skills to create a change-resistant world in which, as someone puts it, there can be no past or future, only a ceremonial sameness. I guess that makes Spencer a sophisticated movie with a simple point: No one should be expected to endure the horrors of so much suffocating  isolation.

'Party' guests are out for blood

Despite a strong cast, director Sally Potter's arch little movie takes us nowhere we haven't been before.

It concerns me to know that I’ve sometimes felt the way Timothy Spall looks in The Party, a slender black comedy filmed in black-and-white. But even at a shockingly brief one hour and 11 minutes, The Party feels as if it could have been condensed into a 40-minute short as it builds toward a nifty punchline.

Spall, who has never projected so much doom and futility, portrays a British academic whose doctor has given him a fatal diagnosis. Haggard and expressionless, Spall’s Bill seems the personification of pitiless depression.

Joining Spall's Bill in this happily bitter ensemble piece are his wife Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a variety of friends: the catty, mordant April (Patricia Clarkson), her bromide-spouting boyfriend (Bruno Ganz), a coke-snorting financial executive (Cillian Murphy), and a lesbian couple portrayed by Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer.

The group has gathered to celebrate Janet’s appointment to a ministerial post in the department overseeing Britain's health.

The movie revolves around Albee-style insults that the characters hurl at one another while harboring secrets that will be revealed as the movie builds toward its final surprise.

Part of the trouble with movies such as The Party is that they seem to ask us to feel superior to their embittered, pretentious characters while creating few points of real identification.

Directed by Sally Potter, who also wrote the screenplay, The Party's main thrust -- the celebration that goes terribly wrong -- feels awfully familiar. Clarkson deftly delivers her character’s withering lines and Spall convincingly dangles at the end of his character’s rope, but The Party passes without arriving at a consequential destination.

Aardman again achieves its goal — silliness

Generally, I’ve liked the work of Britain's Aardman Animations, the folks who gave us Wallace & Gromit. Aardman’s Early Man follows the studio's Shaun the Sheep movie (2015) with a story built around a shamelessly ridiculous notion. Hapless cavemen from the Stone Age face off in a high-stakes game of soccer with a Bronze Age championship team. You probably didn’t know that soccer — football to the Brits — was invented during the Stone Sage, but fell out of favor with cavemen who never were able to win a big game. Time passed and the sport was taken over by the more advanced Bronziacs. As usual, voice work in an Aardman movie hits the spot. Tom Hiddleston provides the voice for Lord Nooth, a greedy Bronze nobleman who wants to gobble up all the bronze he's able to obtain -- legally or otherwise. Eddie Redmayne gives voice to Dug, the movie’s hero, a cave dweller who tries to whip his unruly cohorts into a bona fide soccer team. Timothy Spall does duty as the voice of Chief Bobnar, the aging head of the caveman clan and director Nick Park goes vocal as Hognob, the cheerful pig companion of the cavemen. As the creator of Wallace & Gromit, Park knows his way around this kind of animation and there are clever bits, many of them arriving as asides. Not as funny as expected or quite as wild as it might have been, Early Man boasts some of the trademarks of Aardman characters, bemused figures with hearts as big as their oversized chompers. Score this one as “amusing.”

Portrait of the artist as a troll

Mike Leigh's Mr Turner introduces us to a character without a single patrician impulse.

When the painter J.M.W. Turner dies at the end of director Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, we feel a sense of vacancy, an acute absence that's not to be confused with sadness.

The reason for this lack of familiar emotion may be twofold: To begin with, Leigh has no taste for melodrama. Just as important, Timothy Spall's performance as Turner has been so full of grunts, muttered-asides and vivid physicality that it dominates nearly every scene, even when Turner's listening to someone else talk.

Spall creates a Turner who's part troll, part genius, and part emotionally crippled creature who was capable of incredible callousness. In short, Spall so fills the screen with his portrayal of Turner that when the great painter breathes his last breath, we almost feel the air escaping from the screen.

The director of movies such as Another Year, Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy and Secrets and Lies can be spot-on or off-putting. In Mr. Turner, he's both.

Masterfully acted, Mr. Turner is no cinematic museum piece: It's an interpretive portrait of a man who lived in harsh times -- and seemed entirely up to the task.

Falling into provocative mode, Leigh shows us that great art (of which we see too little in the film) can spring from a harsh, even boorish source. Art and exemplary character do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, Mr. Turner leads us to believe. An artist can commit many sins, so long as delusion about his efforts is not one of them.

When we meet Turner, he's already a well-regarded artist. Upon returning from a trip to the Netherlands, Turner sets to work, and his household begins adjusting to his presence.

Turner's jovial father (Paul Jesson) has retired from his business as a barber so that he can fetch paints for his son and provide a hardy form of love and companionship.

Turner's even more devoted servant (Dorothy Atkinson) waits on him tirelessly, hoping that the great man might one day leave a few crumbs of affection on her meager plate. Occasionally, she serves as the target of Turner's sexual aggressions.

Turner also has an embittered former wife (Ruth Sheen) who cannot persuade him to acknowledge the two children he's had with her.

Turner's most normal relationship arrives when he travels to the seaside town of Margate. There, he strikes up a convivial affair with his landlady (Marion Bailey). He's actually kind to her. In return, she cares for him when they're together and at the end of his life. Think of it as a twilight alliance.

Bailey's Mrs. Booth doesn't seem to understand Turner's art, but she displays a natural acceptance of the man, no small feat. Turner died at the age of 76.

The movie doesn't so much advance a plot as it gathers scenes. At one point, Turner is visited by Mary Somerville (Lesley Manville), a woman whose scientific inclinations and observations about color fascinate him.

He sometimes visits the Royal Academy of Art, where he seems on amiable -- if gruff -- terms with his fellow artists, aside from John Constable (James Fleet). In on of the movie's best moments, Turner one-ups Constable in a major way.

Turner's also pestered from time to time by a financially challenged artist Benjamin Haydon (Martin Savage), a painter of lesser talent. Haydon rages against his misfortunes by condemning those who refuse to exalt his work.

Although the movie covers about 20 years, Leigh does little to mark the passage of time. He simply moves from one scene to the next. It's Spall -- with his harsh and grunting ways -- who gives the movie a center.

Everyone else becomes a kind of bit player, small planets revolving around Turner's glaring sun. John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) championed Turner's work, but comes off as an effete snob who has taken cultural superiority to appalling extremes.

Relying on the exceptional cinematography of Dick Pope and the careful production design of Suzie Davies, Leigh creates a period piece that takes us from the high point of Turner's success to a time when his work -- which began breaking the ground for Impression -- was derided by the public, his colleagues and even Queen Victoria.

True to his contradictory nature, a sales-conscious Turner bequeathed many of his paintings to the British public, turning down a major sum of money for them.

Pope's images of seascapes and landscapes suggest Turner paintings, and the movie makes it clear that Turner was a great student of light -- although it doesn't necessarily do justice to the remarkable sense of drama Turner brought to what were called his "marine" paintings.

I wish Leigh had spent more time showing us how Turner's artistic vision developed, but he seems to want to meet Turner on his own ground and without explanation. He compels us to spend time with an often disagreeable fellow.

I suppose that makes Mr. Turner a movie with a pugnacious attitude: It juts out its jaw, as if loudly to grunt, "Here he is. Make what you will of him."

An unexpected coming-of-age story

Elle Fanning sparks complex coming-of-age story, Ginger & Rosa
In Ginger & Rosa, British director Sally Potter delivers a story that relies as much on character as on burnish and style.

Putting aside the dizzying style of movies such as Yes and Orlando -- the director lends her considerable talents to a complex coming-of-age story that's bolstered by its political backdrop (the world trembles in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis) and its principal performance, an open-hearted look at troubled adolescence from the gifted Elle Fanning.

Fanning allows us to peek behind the walls of adolescence, to see a girl who's struggling with a boatload of issues.

No point being coy: Fanning's Ginger must come to grips with the fact that her iconoclastic father (Alesandro Nivola) refuses (in nearly every way) to conform to the contours of parenthood.

Nivola's Roland seems to regard fatherhood as a socially imposed inconvenience. He became a conscientious objector during World War II and went to prison. Now, he tries to encourage every spark of radicalism he sees in Ginger. As played by Nivola, Roland comes across as sincere -- if keenly lacking in self-awareness.

It's hardly surprising that Roland doesn't get along with Ginger's beleaguered mother, nicely played by Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame. She's the one who has had to hold down the fort while Roland lives by principle.

In the early going, it seems as if the story is going to focus solely on the friendship between Ginger and Rosa (a convincing Alice Englert). The girls both were born in 1945, and their mothers went into labor at the same time.

They're bonded British babies in the age that began with the explosion of nuclear bombs in Japan, an event Potter uses -- somewhat portentously -- to start the movie.

Fanning and Englert play teen-agers who are forced to think about the seriousness of the world's situation while trying to navigate choppy adolescent waters. At one point, they soak in a bathtub together, reading tabloids and trying to shrink their jeans into form-fitting tightness. Ginger fancies herself a poet. Rosa's less inhibited, more of a free-spirit.

Both girls essentially are rudderless, but they deal with their drift in different ways. Ginger seeks solace from her mother's gay friends (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt), a couple that's visited by a staunchly political American buddy (Annette Bening).

Absent a father in her life -- he split long ago -- Rosa becomes infatuated with Ginger's dad to a disastrous and disturbing degree.

Roland moves out of the house he shares with Hendrick's Natalie and sets up shop in a garret. He never seems to understand that his devotion to principle masks a stunning level of irresponsibility.

All of this builds to the inevitable dramatic blow-up, which hits like that early-picture nuclear explosion, a histrionic blast set off by the conflicts Potter implants in her story.

It's difficult not to wonder whether Potter's screenplay hasn't put a little too much on both its and Ginger's plates. The threat of global annihilation coupled with a host of daddy issues suggests nothing if not an over-reach. But a strong cast keeps Ginger & Rosa from losing its moorings, and Fanning gives the movie an emotional life so credible, it's safe to call it a rarity.