Almereyda wrote the screenplay, and has opted to make Cymbeline (Ed Harris), the king of Britain, into the leader of a biker gang, a conceit that flirts with silliness much more than his reimagining of Denmark as a multi-national corporation. It surely doesn’t help that this is one of the weaker plays in the canon, believed by most scholars to have been partially written by someone other than Shakespeare its only previous notable adaptation is a BBC production from 1982, starring Helen Mirren. Arriving 15 years later, Cymbeline, which reunites Almereyda, Hawke, and the Bard, lacks its predecessor’s clever zing: It more closely resembles the Macbeth-on-Mars stunt productions that frequently crop up in regional theater. At the time, the prospect of further Almereyda Shakespeare movies would have been more than welcome. Yet his Hamlet is a witty, inspired delight, riffing on the text in thought-provoking ways, and making excellent use of its ensemble cast, which includes Diane Venora as Gertrude and Bill Murray as Polonius. ( Nadja and Trance feature vampires and a bog-witch, respectively.) Shakespeare didn’t really seem up his alley. For another, Almereyda had a reputation as an offbeat filmmaker-someone who liked to explore new technology (his second feature, Another Girl Another Planet, was shot entirely using a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera marketed to children) and was partial to genre fare. For one thing, Kenneth Branagh had released an acclaimed four-hour Hamlet only a few years earlier nobody foresaw another adaptation so hard on its heels. When Michael Almereyda made his modern-dress version of Hamlet back in 2000, starring Ethan Hawke in the title role, part of the fun was how completely unexpected the project was.
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