Butler's Cinema Scene

Daisy Ridley

“OPHELIA” My rating B-

107 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

Think of Claire McCarthy’s “Ophelia” as Shakespeare-lite  custom made for younger audiences…especially audiences of young women.

Like Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead,”  Semi Chellas’ screenplay retells  “Hamlet” from the perspective of one of the tragedy’s minor characters.

That it stars Daisy Ridley, the lead performer in the most recent iterations of the “Star Wars” universe, only adds to its marketability.

We begin with Ophelia’s childhood in the Danish court at Elsinore. As the daughter of the King’s adviser Polonius, little red-headed Ophelia views the castle as a sort of private playground…she’s particularly fond of the unladylike pastime of swimming in a nearby pond.  Ophelia is not allowed to study with her brother Laertes — she’s a girl, after all — but you can’t keep a smart gal from learning on the sly.

As she tells us in voiceover, she is a willful person who follows her heart and speaks her mind.

A decade later she has grown into a beauty who captures the eye of Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts) and becomes a lady-in-waiting; this despite the disapproval of the other ladies, who object to Ophelia’s plebeian roots.  But, hey, Gertrude likes having someone around who isn’t afraid to speak up.  She also likes having Ophelia read her to sleep from a volume of Medieval porn.

On one of his rare visits home from university, Prince Hamlet (George McKay) notices the all-grown-up Ophelia and  falls hard before returning to his studies.

Meanwhile, skullduggery is afoot.  The King’s brother Claudius (Clive Owen in questionable Prince Valiant wig) is making a play for Queen Gertrude.  Ophelia eavesdrops on their illicit romance and, when the King dies suddenly and Claudius and Gertrude wed, she informs Hamlet of her misgivings.

Daisy Ridley, George McKay

Fans of “Hamlet” can argue at length about whether the young prince is driven mad by his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal, or whether he is feigning madness to expose the new monarch’s guilt.  Here it is Ophelia who, recognizing that her insider knowledge makes her a target, pretends to be crazy. In a plot device borrowed from “Romeo and Juliet,” she even employs a sleeping poison to fake her own death.

“Ophelia” is a smart piece of work.  True, it lacks the genius of Shakespeare’s original dialogue (though at times, as in Polonius’ farewell speech to his son, it paraphrases the Bard’s immortal lines). Still, Chellas’ script achieves a sort of Masterpiece Theatre eloquence.

And the production is very slick, offering a setting that is half pre-Raphaelite fantasy and half 12th-century grunge.

Not everything works. Watts is double cast, also playing an unkempt witch who lives in a cave in the woods from which she dispenses dangerous potions. We’re led to believe that she is one of Claudius’ dismissed lovers…though for the life of me I can’t figure out what this subplot is meant to accomplish.

And for all the inventiveness of its plotting, “Ophelia” never comes close to the beauty, power or grim fatalism of Shakespeare’s original. How could it?

| Robert W. Butler