Renaissance Man [1994] + Grand Theft Hamlet [2024]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, the blog series where I have beef with the Wikipedia list of Shakespeare adaptations. This week we watched Renaissance Man, the Penny Marshall-directed / Danny Devito-starring Dead Poets Society-like that according to some rando who elected to be loudly wrong on the internet was an adaptation of Hamlet.

It did have Hamlet in it, and if I'm being incredibly generous, the rap sequence, painfully and cornily 1994 though it may have been, is a summary of Hamlet. But it's not Hamlet, it's a failure-to-launch comedy about a loser helping other losers. I'm not sure how to flag that I'm not editorializing with "loser" there, that's the film's stance. Since this one isn't just one you can look up a better summary for on the Folger, I'll provide a short summary:

Danny Devito plays Bill Rago, an advertising executive for the first five minutes of the movie, who shows up five minutes late to a client meeting due to traffic and gets fired. The unemployment office assigns him to work as an English teacher for soldiers that are struggling with language and following directions at Fort McClane. There he begrudgingly meets his student group, who are all From Circumstances, and inspires them with his copy of Hamlet. The students all connect to the play in different ways and overcome their circumstances to graduate from the army. This takes two hours.

If you said "hey that sounds like kind of a non-sequitur, going from unemployed to extremely passionate and effective teacher of Shakespeare", you are right. It comes out of nowhere. If you said "hey how did they overcome their circumstances", you are right, there is no specific means by which they did; they simply did, around the 1h40m mark. If you said, "hey wait the antagonist on this seems to be the armed forces and deterioration of the social safety net that caused them to have to join the army in the first place"; yeah man. I don't know what to tell you. That is the antagonist and also the plot resolution, they gain the acceptance of the army to graduate into good soldiers. If you said "wait how does that take two hours", you are right — there's an interminable sequence where Devito has to rappel down a training tower with multiple stabs at the same "ow my balls" humor; there's also a sequence where they rap the plot of Hamlet that I was unable to determine whether it actually took an hour or if that was just my secondhand embarrassment for them that made it feel like it took an hour:

Each of the loveable fuckup students has their own little arc, which, fine, but if I were cutting this down to a more manageable 93 minutes, I'd start with "what can I lose here?" and probably end up with "the entirety of Marky Mark Wahlberg". There's just too much with eight privates each with their own storyline, and the pacing is a herky-jerky nightmare; going to see the play, to see everyone so jazzed about Hamlet, felt like it should've been the "queue up the peter gabriel, we're at the emotional climax ending" moment but there's like a full half hour left at that point.

Ultimately I think this could've been good, could be edited into something good, but it's a dud as-is. The screenwriter went on to write the third mighty ducks movie.

The other thing we watched this week was also Not Hamlet but does Stage Hamlet; to its credit, it does engage on the themes of Hamlet. We watched 2024's Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary about staging Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online.

I've never played GTA Online/GTA V — I think my last brush with the series was Vice City on Windows XP circa 2005, and I mostly just used it as a chaos sandbox rather than try to actually play — but I had very little conception of what I was turning on when I watched it other than "staging hamlet in GTA" and I enjoyed what I saw as a result. Other people, such as Ranged Touch's Cameron Kunzelman & Michael Lutz, who went in with more of a preconceived notion of what was to follow due to the marketing materials, ad copy, and general hype, seemed to have less of a good time. More on this in a second.

Moreso than being about Hamlet, the documentary is about the directionlessness people felt during the CoVID lockdown(s), especially people who had tied themselves to an institution that took a break (like west end theatres did). Now, in retrospect, I had a pretty ok time during lockdown — I was the most productive I've ever been, I found great meaning in working on art, and the extent to which the institution I was tethered to at the time asked things of me was minimal — and the degree to which institutions seem to ask their members to compromise or subjugate themselves physically, morally, spiritually, ethically, socially, (and hopefully not legally), it does not endear them to me; this was interesting to watch as a lens by which an institution is explored (GTA Online) and lack of an institution (a more formal theatre/company, a social contract that would prevent griefers from disrupting the play) navigated to produce a collaborative art.

Now, is the documentary forthcoming that it is not the only place Shakespeare or user-performed fiction has showed up for videogames? No; For instance, there's the tie-in game that was released for Windows 95 for the 1996 Hamlet adaptation. There's fiction/rp creators that are doing youtube/user-content productions about all sorts of things. In interviews Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls admitted to being inspired by Dream, a youtuber their kid enjoyed who does fiction using Minecraft; it probably would've felt more genuine to put that in the show itself. This is better covered in the Games Studies Study Buddies episode about it, although they get into the weeds of it a bit more.

Ultimately it made me nostalgic for the sheer quantity of unstructured free time I had then, that everyone had then. I don't feel like I'll ever get to retire, not actually, but the lockdowns gave me a taste of what that sort of freedom could be and to have to return to a desk in a fluorescent-lit room with a half hour drive on either side makes me feel more than a little bitter to have that taken away.

This week was a fun diversion; next week we'll be doing more fun diversions with the likely only triple week in the series, when we cover Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1990), Hamlet 2 (2008), and The Lion King 1½ (2004), which will conclude our Hamlet unit.

Next month's schedule starts our unit on The Henriad; it will go for longer than a month due to
(1) the number of plays in The Henriad
(2) the number of adaptations of those plays
(3) Me wanting to spend a little more time with each and
(4) I'm doing a thirty-one-horror-movies-in-thirty-one-days thing for October; Recaps of number four will go up on Saturdays here as part of the blog. Schedule to follow.

The Henriad schedule will be as follows:

• September 6 - The Hollow Crown, Season 1, Episode 1: Richard II
• September 13 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E02: Henry IV part 1 + The Lion King (2019)
• September 20 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E03: Henry IV part 2 + Mufasa: The Lion King (2024)
• September 27 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E04: Henry V
• October 4 - The Hollow Crown, Season 2, Episode 1: Henry VI part 1
• October 11 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E02: Henry VI part 2
• October 18 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E03: Richard III
• October 25 - The King (2019)
• November 1 - Chimes at Midnight (1966)
• November 8 - My Own Private Idaho (1991)
• November 15 - Henry V (1989)
• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977)

Wow. That's a lot. But also a long stretch of time. And seven of them are television. So maybe not too terrible.

Thank you again for reading My Year of Shakespeare, even during the weeks where it isn't.