Month: June 2019

Ophelia (2019)

Ophelia takes the initial concept of retelling Hamlet from the perspective of its most victimized (and, arguably, most tragic) character, giving her voice and agency and even some command over the plot and tries to morph Hamlet into a tale of a strong-willed young woman determined to find her way. Daisy Ridley is the title character, a girl in the Danish court who acts as lady-in-waiting to Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts). Despised by the other ladies-in-waiting due to her “low” birth, Ophelia spends most of her time alone or longing for the education in which her brother, Laertes (Tom Felton), indulges. But as we know, things are rotten in the state of Denmark. The king’s brother, Claudius (Clive Owen, in an unfortunate wig), wants power for himself and the young prince Hamlet (George McKay) wants Ophelia.

Ophelia has so much potential that it’s a shame it wastes it. Any attempt at psychological depth is abandoned for a teenage melodrama—Hamlet is a doe-eyed boy who falls madly in love with Ophelia practically the moment he sees her again. While the story does follow the basic arc of the play, there’s no screen time spent developing motivation for anyone except the villains—Claudius wants to be king, of course, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern want to . . . rape people? There’s some attempt made to develop the relationship between Ophelia and Gertrude and it’s here that Ophelia presents some of its best arguments in depicting two women at the mercy of powerful men, attempting to negotiate that in their own way.

But for a film based on psychologically complex play, there’s a remarkable degree of superficiality here. It presents Hamlet’s drive to take vengeance for his father’s murder as his “duty,” but in the absence of complex characterization, it feels more like he’s going through the motions because that’s what happens. A confusing subplot involving Gertrude’s drug addiction, Claudius’s past liaisons, and a witch in the woods tries to bring in plot points from Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and even, for some reason, Twelfth Night, still without attempting any depth characterization or, at this point, plot sense. Most maddening is that Shakespeare provides template for psychological depth, and yet Ophelia manages to render every character so superficially as to be, in places, laughable.

Ophelia also sets certain major scenes off-screen, because Ophelia (in the play) doesn’t witness them. Thus viewers are told of Hamlet’s madness and Polonius’s murder (the formative moments for Ophelia’s arc) rather than seeing them in action. The argument can’t be made that because the plot is focalized through Ophelia, the film cannot show things she does not see, for there are scenes to which Ophelia is not privy—just not the interesting ones.

If the comparisons to Shakespeare seem unfair, it’s worthwhile to point out that the film makes them as well. Ophelia takes away the language—which is understandable—but then renders Shakespearean speeches in “plain” English, resulting in Polonius telling his son to “never lend anyone money” and Hamlet shouting “go to a nunnery!”, as though the script were based on the No Fear Shakespeare version. This does a disservice to the actors, especially Ridley and Watts, who attempt to find nuance in their roles where the script gives them little.

Ophelia’s tragedy is her manipulation by a patriarchal and hierarchal structure that treats her as something to be traded—in the play, Hamlet violently repudiates her after she’s set up as bait to draw him out. Within short order, the man she loves rejects her and then murders her father, a double blow that ends with her madness. Yet these events are rendered entirely moot, and instead Ophelia’s character becomes a cipher apparently untouched by what happens around her. Hamlet is far more important than the beloved father or absent brother, and their romance makes her switch her allegiance to the point that she does not struggle with the fact that he’s murdered her father, even by accident. He’s just totally cute and that’s enough for her.

At best, director Claire McCarthy renders some lovely images as complex as Renaissance paintings, and these depictions of romantic abandon are among Ophelia’s most powerful moments. The film would’ve been better served by fully indulging in these romantic fantasy aspects. If it had been more melodramatic, wilder and romantic, it might have overcome the inherent silliness of the script to create something gorgeous, passionate, and over-the-top.

But, as a friend of mine commented, Ophelia is a fanfiction version of Hamlet, complete with plucky heroine, dastardly villains, and brooding love interest. There’s nothing wrong with romance, but the film wants too much to be taken seriously, unable to reconcile itself with its own extremity. Most problematic is its tendency to elevate Ophelia without making her more complex, as though she’s only worked on externally and has no inner life. By refuting her victimization by the world she cannot control, Ophelia actually abandons the depth of its lead’s psychology and tragedy, and removes itself from even an attempt to comment on patriarchy. Hamlet is just a bad boy that any teenage girl would love. Well, Ophelia always deserved better than Hamlet. She still does.

Ophelia comes to cinemas June 28 and VOD July 2.

Holy Lands (2019)

Holy Lands (2019)

Holy Lands is an odd, occasionally successful film about the dialogue between family, friendships, and faith. Taking place simultaneously in Nazareth and New York, the film traverses countries and faiths to try to find the heart of what unites a family. Harry Rosemerck (James Caan) is a lapsed Jew who moves to Nazareth to start a pig farm, largely as an act of defiance against Judaism itself. He particularly enrages Moshe (Tom Hollander), a local rabbi, with whom he develops a conflict-laden relationship. Harry is estranged from his son, David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a successful New York playwright, with whom he can only communicate via letter. His daughter, Annabelle (Efrat Dor), is a photographer who can barely support herself, migrating between Israel and New York to see both her parents. Meanwhile, Harry’s ex-wife, Monica (Rosanna Arquette), finds herself at a crossroads when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. The film tries to combine these disparate familial narratives, each of them shaped and influencing the other, as it interrogates the meanings behind faith, love for family, and the development of some unlikely friendships.

When Holy Lands succeeds, it’s a moving, humorous film; when it fails, it’s difficult to follow or to invest in. The result is a curious, imbalanced narrative that would have been better for one or two fewer plot strands. Yet each of the strands also feels essential to an understanding of the others, and it would be hard to claim that you could lose any character or actor and maintain the same meaning. Most entertaining is the contentious and charming relationship between Caan’s irascible Harry and Hollander’s equally immovable Moshe. As the pair circle each other and spar over matters of practicality and faith, Holy Lands finds its most comfortable footing. There’s a sense that director Amanda Sthers knows that this is the story to be told, and that the others, as interesting as they are in places, are really ancillary to it.

However, Rosanna Arquette’s equally intense performance should not be lost. As Monica comes to accept her approaching death and attempts to reconnect with both her children, who love her but also find her difficult to handle, Arquette gives one of her finest, most nuanced performances. She’s multitudinous and sympathetic but also impossible, and her adoration of her family and equal inability to connect to them bears the soul of Holy Lands. But her narrative feels too independent in itself, and Holy Lands isn’t quite able to integrate her story with that of her children or her ex-husband.

Amanda Sthers writes and directs from her own novel, which explains Holy Lands’ sense of the personal combined with its undoubted messiness. The film is in need of restructuring and development, with an eye to creating a more stable narrative that allows for rising and falling action. An hour and forty minutes simply does not have the fluidity that a three hundred page novel does, and the result is an imbalanced work that never quite hits the right notes. Sthers appears to want to tell a story about generational conflict and separation, but also about the interaction between faith and culture, but also about a Jewish man trying to raise and sell pigs in Israel. The result is that none of the stories receive the attention that they warrant, even though buried within each are some fantastic characters and emotional beats.

Holy Lands is not a bad film by any stretch, and at times it even aspires to greatness. But it misses its mark too often and loses coherency in attempting to move between the stories, integrate them together, and succeed in doing justice to all the characters. The film just doesn’t quite work, yet it is also an admirable attempt, and reveals a director and writer that bears watching.

Holy Lands officially releases on June 21.

Ghost Light (2019)

Ghost Light (2019)

There’s a cliché that Shakespeare is the most adapted playwright in the world and, like many clichés, it’s probably true. His work has been transposed in multiple languages and across multiple platforms, inspiring new interpretations on stage, in art, in print, and on the screen. He’s also a remarkably meta-narrational playwright: his plays invite commentary on theater as theater (or cinema), integrating plays within plays, actors playing multiple roles (and referencing the roles they’re playing), and self-referentiality. Ghost Light, from director John Stimpson, plays further with Shakespearean meta, as he brings in traditions and superstitions to interact with the story of an acting troupe putting on the most ill-fated of the Bard’s plays.

Ghost Light utilizes the curse surrounding performances of Macbeth – excuse me, The Scottish Play – as a Shakespearean troupe arrive to perform the play in a charming Massachusetts village and find themselves in the midst of ghostly, horrific happenings. The troupe is complete with character types: a former soap actor and all-around ham leading man Alex (Cary Elwes, having the time of his life), his wife and Lady Macbeth Liz (Shannyn Sossamon), Thomas (Tom Riley) a jealous second-lead/understudy playing Banquo, the long-suffering director Henry (Roger Bart), and a deliriously extreme fading dame of the theater Madeline (Carol Kane). Thomas and Liz tempt fate and the theater gods when they invoke the play’s curse by shouting “Macbeth!” in the empty theater. With some very Shakespearean theatrics from nature, the curse begins to take hold and transform the relationships of the members of the troupe into the play itself.

Ghost Light takes a little while to find its feet, summoning a sense of menace from the start but with little initial payoff. The characters are certainly types—they’re meant to be, especially as they begin to morph into their own versions of their Shakespearean roles. The film draws together elements of theatrical traditions and superstitions, and not just surrounding Macbeth: the presence of the stage’s “ghost light,” the use of the phrase “break a leg” rather than “good luck,” the various contortions that one has to go through to break the curse of the Scottish Play. Ghost Light occasionally veers too far into the silliness of its premise and undercuts the elements of menace that both the play and its own plot conjure. At the same time, the film does pay off its premise, and the final act is a fantastically entertaining, horror-laden farce that brings all the elements of the narrative together.

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most humorless tragedies, so it’s interesting that it has also been the one most often adapted into a black comedy. Ghost Light shares the stage with Scotland, PA, another story about Macbeth in the North American countryside. But where Scotland, PA adapted the story, Ghost Light adds another layer, making the superstitions that surround Macbeth are as important as the play itself. This means that the characters are fully aware they’re beginning to embody their parts—there are lines in which characters acknowledge that they’re acting like their on-stage roles and seem incapable of breaking out of the cycle. As a result, though, some of the minor parts unfortunately get left by the side in favor of the central narrative of Tom and Liz. But all the actors are game for their roles, enjoying the Shakespeare, both good and bad, that they get to perform.

The film does occasionally slip into the hokey and predictable, particularly at the beginning and before the final act transition to the night of the performance. Luckily, the final show is so enjoyable that it’s easy to forget some of the hokeyness and simply indulge in the slightly blood and very clever fun. After all, Shakespeare himself wasn’t above some amateur theatrics.

Ghost Light will drop on VOD on June 18.