One of the latest adaptations of that mighty work is also perhaps the most esoteric cinematic version of Hamlet that I have ever seen. Set in a modern-dress world that’s as much Sartrean Hell as a recognizable version of Denmark in the 10th Century, America in the 21st, or anywhere in between, Alexander Fodor’s aggressive vision for the text isn’t satisfying in the traditional dramatic sense; as much as it’s a movie, it’s an experimental video subversion of the story, and as such is better appreciated by those with a solid knowledge of the play than those hoping to find a movie version to watch instead of reading it for class. Within that framework – I won’t call it a limitation, since it’s for this very reason that Fodor’s is the most exciting new Hamlet I’ve seen onscreen or onstage in years – the film is a marvelous, surprising variation on Shakespeare that succeeds not just as tragedy, but as a melodrama and formalist statement.
Fodor’s version of the play is heavy on the uncanny and the paranormal, and light on, oddly enough, Prince Hamlet (Wilson Belchambers). Sure, he’s still the protagonist, but in the first hour, much more focus is paid to Polonia (Lydia Piechowiak), changed from Ophelia’s (Tallulah Sheffield) crusty father to her ambitious elder sister, playing the young girl like a pawn in her attempts to snare the Elsinore royal family as a private toy, and functioning as the plot’s chief villain. The gender shift, one of two in the movie (the other is Horatio, now played by Katie Reddin-Clancy), has a seismic change to the feel of the piece; no longer is the primary sexual struggle between Hamlet and the delicate virgin he obliterates in his feigned madness (nor between Hamlet and his mother, a reading that Fodor happily avoids completely), but between Hamlet and Polonia, and the more evenly matched power between those two makes this a much more dangerous Hamlet than it tends to be; a lack of suitable antagonists being one of the play’s classic dramatic flaws.
The other significant character change – and by “significant,” I do mean SIGNIFICANT, for almost every character has been at least subtly repurposed – is the ghost of Hamlet’s father (James Frail), expanded from a figure in two scenes to a choral figure looking over the entire story. He’s not given anything new to say – adding dialogue to Shakespeare being an unthinkable artistic crime – but he is much more present, functioning as an angel of death lording over Shakespeare’s most famously death-ridden play. The ghost is also a more forceful, commanding figure than I think I have ever seen, seeming to dictate the outcome of all he observes, perhaps continuing a chess metaphor that Fodor introduces briefly in the early scenes.
The enlarged roll of the ghost suggests the tone that this adaptation takes, which is that of an otherworldly void. There’s a lot of white in this Hamlet, and the feeling that the world of the dead is about to spill into the world of the living is continuous. This gives Fodor a lot of room to work with invigorating, nihilistic imagery, sort of like if Kafka had been born late enough to direct perfume ads. Considering its strapped budget and shooting schedule, this Hamlet is a veritable font of exciting, challenging imagery, to go along with an exciting, challenging update of the text. It’s very much an update for people who know the play fairly well and don’t mind seeing it pulled apart and stuck back together in strange ways; but Hamlet is ever indestructible, and it looks as fresh in Fodor’s hands as I’ve seen it in a long time.
Partly, I assume this is because of that cheapness; movies made on a shoestring look like movies made on a shoestring. Whatever the case, it has a wonderful, washed look to the colors and perpetual graininess, and it really looks like a forgotten artifact that somebody found quite by accident and released on a whim.
That the style is so distinctive isn’t just an incidental, mind you. The story is maybe a little bit stale: Jimmy (John Ales) collects money for the local mobsters, and when he loses all that money gambling, his brother Anthony (Joe Spatoro), a seminary student, has to bail him out. Complications ensue. Feels a bit like a movie you’ve seen at some point, doesn’t it? But because it looks so perfectly like a genuine ’70s exploitation flick, the story’s clichés seem to fit better. The plot is as familiar and shopworn as the movie looks, and in those terms, it’s not a flaw, but part of what makes the film click.
As Mafia films go, “Lucky Man” whirs along nicely. It’s generally well-acted and the dialogue is as rough-and-tumble as the genre demands. It asks very little of the viewer, but it is satisfying within its modest goal: to present a quick slice of a tough guy’s life, as witnessed by a couple of brothers who aren’t all that tough. Nothing about it is startling, but it is well-made and the sort of person likely to search out a mob movie is going to find the film to be everything they’d ask for.
Oneli and cinematographer David Barkan have created, in what I am certain was not a generous shooting environment, an extraordinarily lovely visual poem of urban life. Admittedly, the whole genre of “visual poems of urban life” hasn’t been as well-traveled for a while as it used to be, and “Theo” gets a lot of points just for showing up. But that shouldn’t take away from the filmmakers’ very definite success, which is making a film in which the interplay of lights on wet pavement or the colors of cars streaming by or the shape that skyscrapers make when they’re framed just so are all absolutely breathtaking, in the abstract (these are colors and textures that form interesting patterns) and in the personal (that such beauty can be teased out of what we usually think of as the ugliness of city life).
In comparison with that, the story of Theo (Thomas Andren) and the stretch of days in his life where nothing much happens and absolutely nothing changes can’t possibly win all of our attention, which is probably why the plot takes so long to kick in – even the script knows that “Theo” is more about the world in which it exists than what happens there. By no means is it a weak script – it is more than a little tender and touching – but it is an adjunct to the imagery. If cinema is a visual medium, Oneli has figured out an extraordinary useful skill already: how to tell us everything we could possibly need to know about the hero’s ennui not by what he does or says, but by the way he sits by the water and stars at the skyline.