At my last movie night I watched the comedy Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I have seen and loved other films by director/writer Tom Stoppard, such as Shakespeare in Love and, one of my favorite films ever, Brazil. I have always appreciated these films for the incredibly detailed writing and plot structure that sets them up, so I was pleased to find a film that he created entirely himself. This film was one of the most deftly constructed comedies I have ever seen. I struggled to keep up with the jokes as they jumped from Hamlet references to literature battles of wit to references to scientific properties. The writing was the best part of the film, as it felt like an extended series of in-jokes for the viewer, who would only understand the movie if they had read the play, Hamlet. For example, one of the main jokes in the film is that the characters are constantly getting their names mixed up. You would only understand why that is if you had read Hamlet, as in the play these characters are interchangeable, appearing only in a pair. There was nothing particularly clever about the camera angles or movements, yet the cinematography succeeded by including subtle references, such as the pages that can be found in each scene, containing text from the bible, or the Shakespeare portraits that are located all around the castle. Unfortunately, towards the end the film began to feel tired as the main plots and jokes were constantly repeated while the newer jokes all just seemed to be silly slapstick humor. Overall, I thought it was an interesting picture and a more important supplement to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Grade: C+
Grade: C+