Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must remain in the theater.

This film is perhaps the proof that not all successful plays are good enough to work in the cinema. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two characters from “Hamlet”, by William Shakespeare, but it is difficult for anyone to remember them without being very knowledgeable about the literary work in question. They really barely matter to the action. Here, they are the main actors, and we are invited, in a way, to see things through their eyes. In theater, this is interesting. In the cinema, and for a general audience that doesn't know “Hamlet” so well, this doesn't seem like a good idea.

Gary Oldman and Tim Roth brought the main roles to life with great panache and value, and the film ends up not being an absolute waste of time thanks to these two magnificent and valuable actors, full of talent. There is a high dose of “nonsense” in the dialogues between the two, and this can become tiring, but it generally works without surprising. The rest of the cast does not have such good material and opportunities to stand out, thus leaving the film somewhat devoid of good characters other than the protagonists.

On a technical level, the emphasis is on the costumes and sets. I can't say that there is great historical rigor here: historically, Hamlet's life is located in Denmark in the Year One Thousand and what we see is Renaissance, much more suited to people and figures who would be contemporary with Shakespeare. But I didn't have any problems with that, and that's not even a problem because all of this is fiction and can be situated in time whenever you want. Much more difficult to bear is the slight feeling that we are watching a kind of recorded play instead of a film.