August 18th, 2008
1-3. Throne Of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Ran (1985)
Throughout his career, the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa brought East and West together by fusing their storytelling, cultural, and filmic traditions. Never was that in greater evidence than in his three loose adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, which constructed wholly original and visionary worlds around the sturdy dramatic backbone of the Bard's work. Transposing the basic storyline of Macbeth to medieval Japan, and staging it in the classic Kabuki tradition, Kurosawa's Throne Of Blood sends two warriors into a dark, foggy forest to hear an old woman's horrific prophesy, which naturally bears out in tragic fashion. The Bad Sleep Well cleverly reimagines Hamlet within the world of modern corporate intrigue, casting Toshiro Mifune as a young man seeking revenge for his father's death within the confines of a corrupt Japanese company. Not all of the characters correspond to Shakespeare's play, but the core values of Hamlet's character—his thirst for vengeance and justice, and his crippling inaction in finding it—are in place. Kurosawa's career-capping 1985 classic Ran was originally conceived as a historical epic based on the folk stories of Mori Motonari, but as the years passed, the director found so many similarities to Shakespeare's King Lear that he actively incorporated it. Both Ran and King Lear concern an aging warlord who splits his kingdom among his three children, creating a fractious and ultimately tragic situation. Though Kurosawa identifies strongly with the Lear character, he breaks from Shakespeare in suggesting that the cruelty by which he built and ruled his kingdom is coming back to haunt him.
4. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
On the surface, the plot of 10 Things I Hate About You hews pretty closely to that of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew: in order to win the hand of the sweet, lovely Bianca, her two potential suitors must first find a boyfriend for her older sister, the strong-willed, quick-witted Kat, by any means necessary. But certain things are bound to be lost when turning The Taming Of The Shrew into a late-'90s high school romantic comedy featuring the musical stylings of Save Ferris—like, say, the idea of marrying someone for the dowry, not to mention the idea of "taming" one's wife. In 10 Things I Hate About You, the "dowry" becomes a $300 payment Andrew Keegan gives to Heath Ledger to date Julia Stiles, so he can then date her younger sister (Larisa Oleynik). But Ledger doesn't "tame" Stiles, like his Shakespearian counterpart, Petruchio, did. Starving, controlling, breaking, and emotionally abusing a girl into being your girlfriend is generally frowned upon these days. Instead Ledger serenades her on the football field, takes her to play paintball, talks and listens to her, drives her home when she's really wasted, buys her a guitar with his bribe money, and in the process falls in love with her as she falls for him. In the end, it's more Wooing Of The Wary, Feisty Girl rather than Taming Of The Shrew.
5. Hamlet (2000)
Like The Bad Sleep Well and Aki Kourismaki's 1987 film Hamlet Does Business, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet updates Shakespeare in a corporate environment, but unlike those two, it doesn't dispose of the text. Much of it is a mess, with Shakespeare's story awkwardly conceived to accommodate the boardroom treachery of a New York outfit called Denmark Corp. And the self-conscious American cast mangles too many of the playwright's words. Yet there are ingenious touches as well, including a scene where Hamlet's father materializes in front of a Pepsi One machine, another where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss their devious plot with Claudius over conference call, and a staggeringly brilliant conceit to stage the "To be or not to be…" soliloquy in the middle of a Blockbuster Video store.
6. Forbidden Planet (1956)
"Shakespeare… in space!" is a ridiculous sell-line for a film, but Forbidden Planet made the most of its premise, by becoming a science-fiction classic—and made very little of its source material, by failing to acknowledge Shakespeare's inspiration in the credits. In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, a magician and his nubile daughter live in exile on an island, attended only by the captive "airy spirit" Ariel and the monstrous, hateful witch's son Caliban, until the magician raises a storm to shipwreck the men who exiled him, and bring them to his island as well. In Forbidden Planet, the island becomes the world Altair IV, the "magician" is a scientist (Walter Pidgeon) with access to phenomenally powerful alien technologies, and the shipwreck survivors are a starship's crew, come seeking survivors from Pidgeon's ship. Strictly speaking, the helpful servant Robbie The Robot is meant to be Ariel and the unseen monster that killed Pidgeon's crew is meant to be Caliban. But the monster works as Ariel as well, given that it's an invisible, seemingly magical force that flits around acting out Pidgeon's desires. Anne Francis' role as his daughter comes straight out of the play, though—while Forbidden Planet is more about eye-popping effects and eerie, groundbreaking electronic music than about all the complexities and multitudinous plotlines of Shakespeare's play, her coming-of-age story as a woman suddenly meeting her first men after a lifetime alone with her father remains intact.
7. My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Inspired by a screening of Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight, Gus Van Sant decided to rework his in-progress script for My Own Private Idaho—a movie about gay hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in Portland—into a partial modern-day take on Part 1 of Shakespeare's Henry IV. The changes mostly affect Reeves' side of the story, with the actor garbling his way through the Prince Hal character while William Richert's rotund vagrant stands in for Falstaff. The curious thing about Van Sant's film is that it includes chunks of Shakespeare's dialogue quoted alongside contemporary street talk, with little regard to how these incongruous elements might work together. The result is a movie split conspicuously in two.
8. Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
By the time the restlessly brilliant Tom Stoppard took a crack at it in 1966, actors and directors had been trying to find a new angle on Hamlet for over 350 years. Stoppard's approach was both astonishingly simple and devastatingly effective: all he did was take two of the play's minor characters—Hamlet's college friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, now in the employ of Queen Gertrude to figure out what's ailing her son—and tell the entire story from their extremely limited perspective. Or, as Richard Dreyfuss as The Player puts it in the 1990 film version, "We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off, which is a kind of integrity, if you look upon every exit as an entrance somewhere else." This simple shift in the play's dynamic allows Stoppard to create a witty and profound meditation on identity, language, and the nature of fiction. The film version has its problems: Stoppard directed it himself, and his technical abilities are glaringly obvious. And while Dreyfus is plenty game in a role originally conceived for Sean Connery, he's alternately over the top and out of place. But it retains the play's scintillating, hilarious dialogue (and adds a few funny new bits, including Rosencrantz's inadvertent physics experiments) and features two perfectly realized performances in the title roles by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. (Or is it Tim Roth and Gary Oldman?)
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