Telluride. A film that focuses on a real-life production of “Hamlet.” An emotional finale, driven by music, that takes place during a momentous performance of the 400-year-old Shakespeare tragedy but finds resonance in the lives of its characters. A shattering deployment of the line “remember me.” An audience in tears.
Yes, that was the scene at the Telluride Film Festival last year for the world premiere of Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.” But it was also the scene this year for the premiere of Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” another convincing piece of evidence to suggest that Shakespeare, and “Hamlet,” aren’t done with us yet.
On the heels of “Hamnet,” and the adrenalized version of “Hamlet” from Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia, “Elsinore” is both a sign of the enduring power of Shakespeare’s drama and a film about that power. And while it may have a more limited life than Zhao’s critical favorite, with its eight Oscar nominations and $100-million-plus grosses, it packs an emotional punch and showcases one of Andrew Scott’s most shattering performances.
The film takes place in 1989, when the National Theater was presenting a production of “Hamlet” starring Daniel Day-Lewis, in his early 30s and fresh off his Oscar-winning performance in “My Left Foot.” The famously intense actor had a breakdown in the middle of a performance and left the stage, never to return. (We glimpse this on monitors and from the wings, but no real footage of Day-Lewis is used.)
The film then flashes back to the previous month, when actor Ian Charleson, famous for starring in the Best Picture winner “Chariots of Fire” eight years earlier, slips some lines from Shakespeare into an audition for a nondescript action flick. “Why are you even auditioning for this stuff?” a friend asks. “You were in one of the most celebrated movies of all time!”
“Yes,” says Charleson with a sigh. “And all anyone can remember is the theme music.”
But as he tries to keep his career going, Charleson also carries a secret: He is gay and he has AIDS at a time when the disease is ravaging the gay community. “I used to look at middle-aged queens and think, ‘Please never let me get that old,’” a friend says. “Now I think, ‘Let me get to Friday lunchtime.’”
“Time’s running out,” Charleson tells another friend with an air of resignation. “I’ve wasted time. Now time’s wasting me.”
Charleson is aware of the National Theater’s production of “Hamlet”: “It’s the greatest part you can play, and in the greatest theater,” he tells a friend. “I’m f—ing jealous.” But he’s sure he’s “not posh enough” for the National, until director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) offers him the role in the wake of Day-Lewis’ departure. Charleson tells Eyre of his condition, swears the director to secrecy and vows that he can handle the enormous physical and emotional demands of the role.
Except that he can’t. His doctor, Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman in peak cranky mode) insists that he must concentrate on regaining his strength and can’t even consider it. But Charleson is obsessed, persisting through a bout of pneumonia that sends him into the hospital on the night of the show’s first preview. (In real life, the production ran its original course with understudy Jeremy Northam taking over from Day-Lewis, then restarted with new cast members that included Charleson.)
As “Hamnet” did, “Elsinore” focuses on the mortality in Shakespeare’s tragedy: the father’s ghost bidding his son adieu, the “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy as Hamlet holds a skull, the sword fight that leaves him poisoned and dying.
Even in the early stages, Charleson’s Hamlet – or Scott’s Hamlet, since no footage exists of the earlier actor’s 1989 performance – is casual, conversational and riveting. In the hands of Scott, who played the role on the West End in 2017, the words sing without ever sounding the slightest bit actory or declamatory. Stefan Gregory’s score gives scenes momentum and depth, often with nothing more than solo piano, while Stone manages to make ’80s songs like Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” and Fine Young Cannibals’ “Don’t Look Back” fit in this Shakespearean tapestry.
The film is named for named for the Danish castle where Prince Hamlet lives, but the title is deliberately evocative of the forbidding National Theater building in London. Stone and cinematographer Mike Eley shoot the Brutalist structure in a manner befitting a monument, often as not with its stark columns looming above the characters’ heads.
But this is Scott’s movie. He’s amusing one moment, tortured the next, navigating a film that has import without ever becoming pompous. As a man who knows he’s in his final days, he summons up deep wells of regret, spiked with rage at his circumstances but also at himself.
“I wanted to be in the movies, I wanted to scale heights,” he says quietly, chiding himself for his ambition. “I didn’t scale heights, though, did I?”
Does Charleson scale heights on stage at the National? It’s hardly a spoiler to say yes, since there wouldn’t be a movie if he didn’t. Does “Elsinore” get melodramatic along the way? Sure, but only in the sense that Shakespeare gets melodramatic – which is to say, gloriously so.
“Elsinore” will be released by Focus Features, which is also the company that released “Hamnet.”
