Two views of Hamlet

This may be my last post for a few days depending how insane wedding planning is. It’s beyond me to predict it (despite TYG’s awesome project-planning skills, inevitably some stuff remains to be done).
Anyway … I made a big mistake recently, watching a video of Kevin Kline’s Broadway Hamlet and the film of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead on successive days: Kline’s Hamlet (he plays the melancholy Dane and also directs) is just brilliant and the Hamlet scenes in the latter film are, well not.
Kline plays Hamlet as a guy coping with his disastrous family situation (father dead, uncle on the throne, mom remarrying so fast that Hamlet mutters about the funeral feast leftovers serving as the wedding banquet), topped by Claudius’ insistence that hey, I understand you grieving but enough, time to move on, start smiling again. When the ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered, it’s a new lease on life for him as he devotes himself (albeit in roundabout fashion) to revenge.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is an absurdist take on two supporting characters in Hamlet (boyhood friends of the prince). Played by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, the two Danes try to figure out why everyone is acting as if they know Hamlet; hell, they can’t even remember existing earlier than that morning.
This is a variation of the actor’s nightmare——a dream where you’re in a play and you’ve no idea what it is or what your lines are (I’ve had that a few times). The idea of doing the same with characters has cropped up a few other places (Night Gallery: Midnight Never Ends, for instance), and it’s quite well done here, but … maybe it’s the stage-to-screen transition (something that’s harder than it looks) but while many scenes were enjoyable, they didn’t really add up to anything; the film was less than the sum of its parts.
Another way to look at the Stoppard play is as part of the genre where the author shifts focus from the stars or the A-plot to the subplots or the supporting cast.
•Cloverfield, for example, struck me as very much a Japanese style monster movie from the point of view of the screaming crowds instead of the hero.
•Astro City frequently uses this approach: In Confession, a teen sidekick has to cope with his personal issues and his mentor’s secret and never really does anything with the alien invasion going on around him (reminiscent now of Marvel’s Secret Invasion). Another story takes the viewpoint of a new arrival in Astro City discovering some cosmic battle has put himself and his family in danger and he’s no real idea what’s going on.
•In a sense, The Day The Earth Caught Fire has some of the same quality, focusing on the guys reporting the potential end of the world rather than the scientists who (one assumes) are toiling away to save it.
That’s not really what Stoppard is trying for here: His protagonists aren’t just confused about what’s going on at the Danish court, they’re confused about their existence itself. But it does have some of the same feel as everyone at court keeps treating them as if they’re supposed to understand what’s happening.
I do hope to catch the play onstage sometime and discover how much of what dissatisfied me was the original script and how much the film adaptation.