Some of us love Tom Stoppard's work; others don't. If you're among the latter, you ought to skip this film. If you admire Stoppard, you've got to see it. This is the first of Stoppard's brilliant plays to make a splash. It interleaves scenes and dialog from Shakespeare's Hamlet with an LSD flavored dialog and plot of Stoppard's invention about Hamlet's two friends who are "summoned" to Elsinore to spy on him and report back to the King and Queen. That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can't remember which of them is which is merely the beginning of Stoppard's comic conceits. The wordplay between Stoppard's script and Shakespeare's immortal classic are one of the verbal wonders of the world, a kind of literary Taj Mahal. The players whom Hamlet employs to "catch the conscience of the king" also figure prominently in the script, speaking Stoppard's words at times and Shakespeare's at others. Stoppard, who also directed the film, introduces a lot of visual comedy that cannot be duplicated on stage. Gary Oldman and Tim Roth do a great job as the title characters and Richard Dreyfuss is at his (very different) best as the leader of the players. My wife, who's not a great admirer of Stoppard, thought the movie was terrible. You see what I mean.
