The last 30 minutes of Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 contains the staging of a funny, if not entirely realistic, musical featuring (among other things) a time machine, Albert Einstein, a bi-curious take on a Shakespearean character and a rollicking performance of the song “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” Pity about the first hour.
Steve Coogan (seen this year with Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder) stars as Dana Marschz, a failed actor teaching drama in Tucson, Ariz., the town where, “dreams go to die,” according to the film’s haphazardly inserted narrator. When his new play, an adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 movie Erin Brockovich, starring his only two students (Sklyar Astin and Phoebe Strole from the original cast of the Tony winning Broadway play “Spring Awakening”) is torn apart by the school paper, the principal threatens to shut down the drama department due to lack of funding, Marschz writes a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, complete with songs and dance interludes, and must inspire his class of new and disinterested students to star.
This is all very funny in theory, but the theory and practice of comedy are two very different things.
One can hardly blame Steve Coogan. Largely unknown in the United States, he has been underserved by bigger Hollywood ventures in the past undeserving of his comedic gifts (see Around the World in 80 Days). Coogan abandons all sense of shame or self-consciousness, fully committing to the screenplay’s demands.
After Focus Features acquired Hamlet 2 at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a few overzealous film prognosticators drew comparisons to past Sundance films, most notably the recent successes of Juno and Little Miss Sunshine.
While this film aspires to the sentiment and quirky self-awareness of those past independent features, it ultimately fails to pull off the mixture of sweet and sour elements that made them both successful.
Where as the central conceits of Juno and Little Miss Sunshine allowed the audience to cheer on characters in embarrassing situations, much of what befalls Coogan’s Dana Marschz in Hamlet 2 seems downright malicious on the screenplay’s part. He is humiliated to such a degree over the course of the film that it becomes cruel and, worse for a comedy, unpleasant to laugh at his many predicaments.
Take, for example, a scene in which Coogan slams into the side of a parked truck while drunkenly roller-skating down the highway. The filmmakers clearly mean for this to solicit laughs, only the audience has just seen his wife (Catherine Keener of Being John Malkovich) tearfully leave him and his sobriety thwarted by a bottle of Peach Schnapps.
This imbalance of tone is what ultimately derails what must have once been conceived as a biting deconstruction of the ‘Inspirational Teacher Movie’.
As it is, the screenplay lacks the finesse to pull this off, opting too often for exaggeration and easy sight gags.
There are glimmers of cleverness shining through the cracks.
The performance of the musical from which the film derives its name is an inspired bit of irreverence, featuring a mock crucifixion of a time traveling Jesus and overly earnest performances.
In a bit of inspired casting, Elisabeth Shue gets her best role in years as a fictional version of herself. She has given up acting, instead working as a nurse.
Not many actresses would have had the guts to play a scene in which a room full of teenagers feigns ignorance at her existence, but Shue is more than rewarded for her guts, embracing the more outlandish elements of the screenplay to great effect.
It’s a pity Hollywood hasn’t found anything for her to do recently. If Hamlet 2 proves anything, it’s that Shue is more than up to the challenge.
