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Hamlet 2
Expectations respected, but subverted
2008
Review: August 29, 2008
Director: Andrew Fleming
Starring: Steve Coogan, Joseph Julian Soria, Elizabeth Shue, Catherine Keener
Sure.
THE SETUP:
Delusional drama teacher writes and stages a sequel to Hamlet.
DISCUSSION:
There have been so many comedies lately with such high expectations, like Pineapple Express [that generally lived up to them], Tropic Thunder [which didn’t really, for me at least], and this, which succeeded for me by going off in an unexpected direction—the exact reason my friend couldn’t get into it.
You can sense the low-key tone before the first image even appears on screen. We have this quiet guitar music, and a voice telling us about the eternal magnificence of drama, while we see two commercials and one episode of Xena that Steve Coogan’s character, Dana, starred in before giving up and teaching drama at this high school. There he is known for staging adaptations of popular movies, in this case, Erin Brokovich. I wonder if he included my favorite line from that movie: “Oh! I made a bundt cake!” Anyway, his play is panned in the school paper—and there’s a little laugh when we see that the drama critic is this snide 15-year old.
At home, he is married to Catherine Keener as Brie, who outright hates him and is not shy about making that fact known. She wants a baby, and blames Dana for having defective sperm. They have a boarder in David Arquette, who has at most five lines of dialogue in the entire film.
At school, Dana finds his class suddenly full of Hispanics who are there because all the other electives were cut. Luckily the movie just sidesteps the whole tedious issue of getting them to actually participate and care about drama. He’s also got two white students that have been with him through every play, closeted gay Rand and uptight Epiphany. He finds out that drama will be cut at the end of that quarter.
That day, he meets Elizabeth Shue as a nurse at the fertility clinic—she got sick of dealing with the business of acting and the people she had to deal with, and just quit. Dana decides to write an original work, stays up all night, and finishes with Hamlet 2. Most of the rest of the movie is made up of him and the kids staging it.
There are numerous setbacks. Some of the kids’ parents won’t allow their kids to be in such a blasphemous play, which, in addition to the characters from Hamlet, includes the Bush administration, Satan and Jesus, among others. Familiar tropes from movies like this are hit; like him wanting to give up but his students making an inspiring speech and bringing him back, and the whole ACLU case alluded to in the trailer, but none of them really pan out and go anywhere—they just happen, or are hinted at, and we move on.
This very point became the divider for me and the friend I saw it with. To him, it had a fatally lifeless rhythm and threw out all these directions that it never, or very minimally, followed through on. To me, this was exactly the movie’s strength. Largely because the movie telegraphed that it was blunting expectations on purpose—simply by so pointedly refusing to follow through on them or hammer points home to the degree we’ve come to expect in movies aimed at the mainstream. For example, at a certain point a character abandons Dana at a crucial point and in a very despicable way—but never comes back contrite, and is never redeemed. Elizabeth Shue seems to be there as an example, rather than someone who believed in herself and made it, as someone who realized it wasn’t worth it and gave up. After seeing the production, she is inspired, and calls her agent and says she wants to act again! ...And he doesn’t remember who she is. Pointed “message” moments are also handled delicately. At one point during the final production a bunch of earnest Christians rush to the front to pray for these sinners, when one of them says “Oh, I get it—Jesus is kicking Satan’s ass.” Someone in the audience behind them says “But it’s still disrespectful!” …and that’s where the movie leaves it. The big ACLU freedom of speech suit doesn’t result in a big courtroom scene or moving message—it just kind of fizzles out and comes to nothing.
To my friend, this was all unforgivably careless. There are other points of basic unrealism that he mentioned—like where did the money for this production come from and how ludicrous it is that a major actor who had left could come back to the play on the night of the production—but these things didn’t strike me as careless, and didn’t bother me, because it seemed to me that the movie was gleefully flipping the bird to any kind of realism and any expectation of what movies should do. So, I guess you either appreciate that or you don’t.
The movie’s big laughs are fairly few and far between, and again, one’s viewpoint on how this is going influences how one feels about that. To me, the overall air of absurdity carried through and made even the dry moments amusing, while to my friend they were just dead spots and not enough laughs. So there you go—there are many ways to look at it! It is rather boldly non-commercial for a big mainstream comedy [and their strategy of opening smaller and then spreading wide seems destined to fail in this case], but if you can let go of the idea that movies should, you know, make sense or supply the expected beats and resolutions, it’s an amusingly daffy little comedy.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
You’ll definitely live if you don’t, but if you’re prepared to just take it for what it is and see where it goes, I think you might like it.
