Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Year: 1990
Rating: PG
Length: 117 minutes / 1.95 hours
While there are plenty of perfectly fine adaptations of William Shakespeare plays, I can appreciate the ones that take a different approach than just recreating the source material. Whether it’s making it into a musical like West Side Story (1961) did to Romeo and Juliet or shifting the setting to feudal Japan like Throne of Blood (1957) did to Macbeth, these plays are deep enough to allow for creative interpretations. Case in point is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adjacent adaptation of Hamlet.
Most people know the events of Hamlet but few consider what these characters are doing when not in the presence of the main character. This movie tries to remedy this by following Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth) as they discuss a variety of intellectual concepts—most of which might just come off as absurdist humor. Covering such ideas as probability, gravity, and logic, these two characters don’t end up doing much of anything interesting when “off stage.” Yes, it might answer the question about what they were doing when Hamlet (Iain Glen) was setting up his plan, but I don’t think many people were asking that question.
Ultimately, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is still an adaptation of Hamlet. The problem is, there’s so little of the original play there that you start to realize that without it, anything else is mostly just boring. Sure, you get some fantastic performances from Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss, but is it worth it when they don’t really have anything to do but talk in circles? This movie is great as a thought experiment when considering the lives of minor characters. That’s the problem, though—they’re minor characters.
A somewhat amusing Hamlet-adjacent story, I give Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
