Hamlet (director and star Bruce Ramsay) contemplates his bleak future in streamlined version of the Bard
HAMLET (Bruce Ramsay, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 10
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
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Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.
Told with the surreal flair of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8½, the dark, witty cynicism of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry, and the psychological intricacies of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a masterful epic about an Italian writer looking back at his life as he turns sixty-five, and not liking what he sees. Toni Servillo gives a sparkling deadpan performance as Jep Gambardella, a deeply sarcastic and intentionally hypocritical journalist in Rome who scored a huge success with his first novel, The Human Apparatus, but has been unable to write a follow-up for decades, instead spending his time attending wild parties, sleeping with woman after woman, and sharing his unique views on the sociocultural, political, and religious nature of modern-day Rome. He is surrounded by sycophants, jealous writers, a mysterious neighbor, a culinary cardinal, bizarre performance artists, an aging stripper, a magician, and many more hangers-on (played by Isabella Ferrari, Roberto Herlitzka, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Verdone, Massimo De Francovich, Pamela Villoresi, and others who appear to have come straight from a Fellini set), but the only person who truly understands him is his diminutive editor, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). “You’re a spectacular woman,” he tells her. “You’ve had the career you deserve.” She responds, “But you haven’t had the career you deserve.”
Over the years, Joel and Ethan Coen have created a slew of offbeat protagonists and antiheroes who trudge through surreal life experiences, from the McDunnoughs in Raising Arizona and Tom Reagan in Miller’s Crossing to the title character in Barton Fink and Anton Chigurth in No Country for Old Men. But they have come up with their most despicable — and most believable — main character in Inside Llewyn Davis. The previously little-known Oscar Isaac gives a career-defining performance as Llewyn Davis, a selfish wastrel who mistreats everyone he meets. A broke singer-songwriter in 1961 Greenwich Village whose former partner (voiced on record by Marcus Mumford) killed himself, Davis loses a mentor’s (Ethan Phillips) cat, curses out his agent (Jerry Grayson), impregnates a married friend (Carey Mulligan), makes fun of the husband’s (Justin Timberlake) new song, avoids visiting his ailing father (Stan Carp), insults a portly jazzman (John Goodman) — essentially, he meets every situation by insulting someone, then turning and walking away, without even the slightest hint of regret. And the beautiful thing is, the Coens aren’t about to offer him redemption. Inspired in part by the life of Dave Von Ronk and with sly references to such other musicians as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Tom Paxton, Dr. John, Doc Pomus, and Jim and Jean along with music impresario Bud Grossman and Gerde’s Folk City, Inside Llewyn Davis is a bitingly funny black comedy about a nasty man living in his own egocentric world, refusing to share any part of himself with anyone else, through his music or face-to-face, even though people keep giving him opportunity after opportunity. And the audience is in on it too, wanting him to succeed despite his myriad offenses. The soundtrack, overseen by T Bone Burnett, who previously worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou? brings it all back home, with such highlights as Isaac’s performance of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” Timberlake, Mulligan, and Stark Sands teaming up on “Five Hundred Miles,” and Timberlake, Davis, and Girls hunk Adam Driver all having fun with an updated version of “Please Mr. Kennedy.”
