Getting Hamlet Wrong
I recently watch the Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet from way back. Jean Simmons, so lovely, played Ophelia. It had a lot to commend it, and I probably know Hamlet as well as any of Shakespeare's plays (definitely more than Lear, and quite a bit better than Othello and MacBeth). However, at the beginning of the film, Olivier has a voice-over where he says, "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." What? How could they represent it that way? It makes the play sound like watching a man decide on a burger or a chicken sandwich. I wonder if he said that as a joke about the shallowness of Hollywood (that is, that's how the Aerican film public would see it). Hamlet is about a man grieving and in existential crisis, not about indecision. Yes, he is trying to take revenge and cannot bring himself to it, talking himself out of it at various times, but it's the why that matters. Yet I like to turn plot on their heads. What if the ghost is malevolent