JOSÉ RIZAL (Marilou Diaz-Abaya, 1998)

Tedious, superficial biography of José Rizal Mercado y Alonso, the national hero of the Republic of Philippines whose novels about Spanish injustice, show trial and execution by Spain for political agitation (though he advocated education, not violence) inspired revolution and the achievement of independence. Rizal was, principally, a medical doctor. Apart from flashbacks, most of the action takes place in the last years of the nineteenth century.
     One interesting aspect is the interruption of the narrative with snippets of scenes from Rizal’s books. These appear in black and white whereas the rest of the film is in color. The eventual payoff of this alternation is the confrontation within the same scene, in color, of Rizal and his novelistic revolutionary alter ego: a crackling passage conjoining dream and life, fiction and history. Indeed, the film’s entire final movement, including the execution of Rizal, is very moving. The shot of the murdered hero’s hat upside down on the beach is excellent—although not quite so haunting as filmmaker Marilou Diaz-Abaya wants it to be.
     And it takes three hours to get to it!

HAMLET (Michael Almereyda, 2000)

One of the two greatest plays in the English language (the other, messier one being his King Lear), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been updated to the present semi-famously a couple of times in movies, by Helmut Käutner (The Rest Is Silence, 1959) and Akira Kurosawa (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), in both cases reorganized in and relocated to big business/industry. (Kenneth Branagh’s pointless 1996 Hamlet also is updated, but not as far.) Michael Almereyda’s version for a new century retains this dubious setting—Denmark is now the name of a corporation—while flooding the visuals with low-tech and high-tech gadgetry. What remains of the original action now takes place all over New York City, for example, outside a supermarket and inside a laundromat and a video store. As Tennyson or Dan Rather might say: “Courage!”
     Any version of Hamlet starts with the Prince, and only Kevin Kline ensures that Ethan Hawke won’t end up being the worst Hamlet of all time. He is ridiculous, but he is asked to do no more than skim the plot rather than navigate a murky fallen world. Poor Ethan mumbles his lines, is utterly lacking in nobility, and plays VHS copies of past Hamlet movies. How tiresomely postmodern!
     The first appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost is a touch, I do confess’t; but once he is no longer phantom shadow but Sam Shepard (golly!), he ceases to be of any interest, even to Almereyda, who refrains from grappling with the ambiguity of the ghost’s existence. Is it a truthful oracle or a “goblin damned”? Amereyda couldn’t care less, and neither does his Hamlet, whose delays in dispatching Uncle Claudius, therefore, must be primarily due to all the distractions of his modern urban environment. How does that help us to understand the play? But, of course, with Ethan/Amereyda, the play’s no longer the thing—a fact signaled early on by a significant change in one of Hamlet’s utterances: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (emphasis added). Amereyda’s Prince, more or less a string of voiceover soliloquies, is as insubstantial as the Ghost.
     The best performance is given by Kyle MacLachlan as a stripped-down Claudius; the worst, by Bill Murray as Polonius, whose stupid prattling here is studied in the extreme. Although Julia Stiles is inept as Ophelia, Almereyda scores points for making Ophelia’s slippage into insanity comprehensible; not only does Ophelia miss her boyfriend’s love and must suffer his abuse, but she is also being callously used by father and “King.”
     There is also another interesting slippage. Despite all its problems, the film slips into something akin to the power of the play. This is helped by the fact that Almereyda retains the Hamlet-Laertes fencing duel rather than coming up with some nonsensical substitute update.
     Not even a jerk like Almereyda can do everything wrong.