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Opheliais the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie.
Take that, you Stratford prat.
Ophelia stays, of course.
Danger is her middle name.
But she has concocted some respectable poetic banter Shakespeare Lite.
And sometimes she goes in the opposite direction, making the characters plainspokenness downright cheeky.
Later, Hamlet and Ophelia have a bit of romantic dialogue: Call me by my name.
It aint the balcony scene fromRomeo and Juliet, but the mundanity is the joke.
This Hamlet is self-consciously poetic and utterly ineffectual.
He regularly cocks things up while complaining that his mother is like all women fickle, frail.
Ophelia registers this with dismay.
Not all women, you Danish prat.
The female gaze is strong in this one.
She and Gertrude have a good giggle.
Its not as if she thought hed turn around and poison his own brother!
(Really, though, she should have expected it.
Owens Claudius, with his lank, black locks, is halfway toRichard III.)
She actually plays two roles: Gertrude and Gertrudes hitherto unknown twin sister, a witch.
At various junctures, Ophelia descends to the witchs subterranean lair to obtain stimulating potions for her queen.
It seems that this bitter hellion is trying to turn her royal sister into a medieval cokehead.
As Gertrude, Watts flies into rages so towering that Steven Prices music has to compete to be heard.
Its a nutty, bombastic score, but anything more modest would have gotten lost in the histrionics.
If nothing else, it makes people like Harold Bloom and me uncomfortable.
