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'Hamlet 2': No Holds Bard

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, August 22, 2008

I knew little about ‘Hamlet 2’ before seeing it, only that it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and told the story of a fictitious production of a sequel to the Bard’s iconic tragedy. If I had known it starred Steve Coogan and Catherine Keener, I would have been more excited. If I knew it were this funny, I would have been ecstatic. There’s surprise in nearly every frame, and though uneven, it builds to one of the best comic crescendos I’ve seen. I don’t want to tell you about this film, I want you to see it for yourself.

But write about it I must. In it, Coogan plays failed actor Dana Marschz, who if he had ever secured an agent would have been told to change his name, since no one can pronounce it, possibly not even his wife Brie (Keener). He has no talent, but he’s smart enough to know it and is content to instead inspire the students of a Tuscon, Arizona, high school, where the drama program is at risk of being shut down. He’s completely misguided about his craft — when first we see his pupils, they’re performing an ill-conceived stage adaptation of ‘Erin Brockovich’ — but he’s utterly sincere, and achieves what little he does out of the sheer force of his enthusiasm. His rivalry with the school newspaper’s pint-sized drama critic, whose opinion he values as if the pubescent boy wrote for the New York Times, produces some of the film’s best scenes.

Facing the dissolution of the drama department, he desperately completes his labor of love, a revisionist sequel to Hamlet in which he artistically exorcizes his own daddy issues via time machines, Elton John, and a special appearance by Jesus Christ. The company that will perform this play is his newly expanded drama class, which now includes a group of unreceptive inner city kids left stranded by the school’s cancellation of all other elective courses, and Dana learns strategies for getting through to them the only way he knows how: by watching ‘Dangerous Minds’.

The film hangs on a make-or-break decision for director/co-writer Andrew Fleming: to show the play or not to, that is the question. Dramatically, it’s not necessary; the story is about the putting on of a play, not the play itself. However, there comes a point where the details have been teased so thoroughly that Fleming can’t not show it, and can he possibly make it as good — or rather, as breathtakingly bad — as promised? It is the greatest testament to Fleming’s achievement that he succeeds. ‘Hamlet 2’, the play within the film, is awful, inexcusably offensive, riotously funny, and, by sheer virtue of its audacity, brilliant. We believe, top-to-bottom, that it has come from the damaged psyche of this poor, struggling artist, and that makes it also moving. I won’t describe anything in it, lest I spoil the fun, except to demand an Academy Award nomination for the original song “Rock Me Sexy Jesus”.

Dana is a pitiable character, and the treatment of such a character in a comedy is a delicate balancing act. Fleming walks a tight rope; he asks us to laugh at his misadventures, but if he shows no affection for his protagonist, it becomes the comedy of looking down our nose, the comedy of condescension, and there’s nothing more depressing than that.

Fleming succeeds more often than not, and that is due primarily to his casting and direction of Coogan in the lead role. Coogan’s performance unsparingly revels in Dana’s bumbling; at one point he has a nervous breakdown that is only taken seriously because, as his star student explains, he’s not that good of an actor. But he doesn’t hold up the character for ridicule. There’s a stubborn twinkle in his eye, an eagerness but also a knowingness; his ‘Hamlet 2’ isn’t much, he knows, but it’s his, and he’ll be damned if he lets anyone stop him from making it. Our entertainment isn’t derived from his suffering, but from his tenacity in the face of suffering. We root for him because he deserves to have his art, gosh darn it, even if it’s bad art.

Two supporting performances deserve special mention. One is by Elisabeth Shue, whose appearance in this film is almost a non-sequitur, and that’s part of why it’s funny. She plays herself, so fed up with Hollywood that she has given up acting to become a Tuscon fertility nurse instead. The other is by Amy Poehler, who arrives as a bulldog ACLU attorney who defends Dana’s freedom of speech. She has a great introduction scene in which Dana asks her if she thinks the play is good — she responds, grinning, “It’s irrelevant.”

The film is a font of profanity. Bad comedy assumes that such language is inherently funny and thus substitutes expletives for wit, story, and character. Good comedy, like this film, understands that vulgarity, like all things in comedy, is dependent on context. When Brie makes a drunken spectacle of herself in a restaurant, it’s funny not because of the language but because of how uncomfortable she makes her husband and a nearby waiter. When Poehler unleashes a stream of profanity, it’s funny as it relates to her character, whose altruistic profession belies her propensity for cussing like a longshoreman. Watching these actors, unleashed on such joyously freewheeling material, we sense they’re having a ball. The feeling is mutual.

Check out ‘Hamlet 2’ Official Site