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The neo-Shakespeare movieOpheliais an audacious stunt.
Millais immortalized her floating corpse in a famous painting that inspired Oliviers final shot of her in hisHamlet.
Shell tell her own story, thank you very much.
This is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie, and frankly a lot of it is silly and sophomoric.
The screenwriter Semi Chellas and director Claire McCarthy play a kind of footsie withHamlet.
His command to go to a nunnery is for her protection, given the regicide hes planning.
Of course Ophelia stays.
Danger is her middle name.
But she has concocted some respectable poetic banter Shakespeare Lite.
And sometimes shes downright cheeky.
Later, Hamlet takes Ophelia to bed, after which this: Call me by my name.
It aint the balcony scene fromRomeo and Juliet, but its mundanity is part of the joke.
This Hamlet is very smart and utterly ineffectual.
He cocks things up.
Ophelia is taken aback when he complains that his mother is like all women fickle, frail.
Not all women, you Danish prat.
The female gaze is strong in this one.
She and Gertrude have a good giggle.
It seems that Hamlets father, Hamlet Sr., isnt a tiger in the sack.
Why shouldnt Gertrude and Claudius have a fling?
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 to Richard III.)
Ridley makes a fine, modern heroine, but Watts goes big and waltzes away with the movie.
She has two roles: Gertrude and Gertrudes hitherto unknown twin sister, a witch.
At junctures, Ophelia descends to the witchs subterranean lair to obtain potions for her Queen.
Yes, the witch a bitter hellion comes off as helping turn her sister into a medieval cokehead.
Wattss Gertrude, meanwhile, argues so openly with herself that Hamlets remonstrations are superfluous.
Her rages become so huge that Steven Prices music has to compete mighty hard with her.
Its a nutty, bombastic score, but anything more modest would have gotten lost in the histrionics.
No masterpiece is set in stone: Lets hear it for bold literary fiddle-di-dees.
Its nothing less than a declaration of war.
