'Grand Theft Hamlet' Review: Good evening, sweet player one

To be an artist or not to be one? That's the question of “Grand Theft Hamlet,” a wildly funny documentary about two unemployed British actors who spent much of their COVID-19 lockdown performing Shakespeare's masterpiece on the streets of “Grand Theft Auto V.” “That version of the car theft video game is set in fictional Los Santos, an analogue of Los Angeles where even the good guys have guns and a nihilistic streak—the vengeful Prince of Denmark fits the bill. However, when Sam Crane, aka @Hamlet_thedane, spear In one of the Bard's monologues, he is often killed by a fellow player within minutes.

Crane co-directed the film with his wife, Pinny Grylls, a first-time player who functions as a kind of cameraman for the film. What your character sees, where he chooses to stand and look, makes up much of the film, although the editing team does a phenomenal job of piecing together other characters' points of view. (We never exit the game until the last 30 seconds; only then do we see someone's real face.) This is not the first time that “Hamlet” has been reused as a machinima, as in machine cinema or machine animation. , depending on who you ask: a genre in which filmmakers hijack role-playing games to depict a different plot. (You'll find a 2014 version made within “Guild Wars 2” on YouTube.) However, this is the first attempt I know of that attempts to do everything live in one go, regardless of whether one of the virtual actors falls to their destination from an airship. As Grylls says: “You can't stop production just because someone dies.”

If you don't know the tragedy that unfolds in the film, you won't be able to reconstruct it from what appears on the screen. Ofelia barely notices; Gertrude gets less than two lines. The Bard's story is only half the point. Really, this is a classic pixelated tale about the need to create beauty in the world, even in this violent world, especially when theater productions in England have closed, forcing Crane, husband and father, and Mark Oosterveen, bachelor and solitary, to kill time traveling at full speed through the digital desert. “Wheeee,” one sighs, as his four-wheeler bounces over a sidewalk. No judgment: During quarantine, I once put on an 8-bit bass fishing game just to listen to the water.

One day, their adventures take them to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Santos (ahem, Vinewood Bowl), and the sight of the empty amphitheater hits them as loudly as the monolith stunned the chimpanzees in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They have embraced an existence of laziness and violence. Now is the time to evolve. “Anything that takes away what I might cheerfully call the crushing inevitability of your meaningless life,” Oosterveen says cheerfully.

Choosing to do “Hamlet” in particular is like deciding on the first idea that comes to mind. It is so obvious that it is practically unconscious, like being told to pencil a large painting and select the “Mona Lisa.” To our (and their) surprise, the play's struggles with depression, angst, and inertia become increasingly resonant as the production and the pandemic limp toward their conclusions. When the “Grand Theft Auto” avatars of Crane and Oosterveen get into a van with an anonymous player and ask this online stranger what he thinks about Hamlet's suicidal soliloquy, the man, a real-life delivery driver trapped in home with a broken leg, he admits, “I don't think I'm in the right place to answer this right now.” Along with Shakespeare's lines about grunting and sweating under a weary life, even the non-playable background extras seem imbued with a soul.

The piano score can hit too much sentimentality. Similarly, parts of the framing narrative seem to have fallen out of the film. Crane worries whether anyone from the National Theater will see the show. Waiting? Did they really come?

Meanwhile, within the game, a day lasts 48 minutes; A conversation can begin in the sun and end at dusk. We've barely adjusted to that when the movie itself starts to ruin our sense of time. It starts with a clip from January 2020 and at one point reveals that the company has just four weeks to fix things. Okay, sure, but I thought twice after finding out that final production took place in July 2021. What's the rush? Who insists?

I'll call the film a documentary out of generosity. In truth, it feels closer to a stage-driven reality show. The big moments feel motivated, like when Crane and Grylls argue about his fixation with online gambling.

“What about the children? What about me?” he says, huffing at his avatar's spandex skeleton costume.

Fortunately, the story arc is designed to keep the chaos breaking out, most deliciously in the form of a scene-stealer named ParTeb, a Tunisian goofball who presents himself as a sassy, ​​green alien. Urged to audition for the show, ParTeb gives a moving reading from the Quran. Then he decides he'd rather shoot people from a plane.

That seems fine to me. In Los Santos, it is more acceptable to brandish a weapon than to recite verses. In the real Los Angeles, that's the other way around, but it's still hard to survive as an artist. Most of the creative people I've met in this city are low-income wannabes, so it's irritating when an Irish gamer sarcastically disparages Los Angeles as “ultra, ultra capitalist.”

I would say that both Los Angeles and Los Santos are places where people go to be able to express who they really are, or pretend to be someone they are not. They welcome freedom and adventure, whether from a newly out trans woman who seems more comfortable wearing high heels in Los Santos than with her family, or from a middle-aged literary agent who auditions using the brother avatar. of his nephew, a shirtless DJ.

However, the film's most disorienting and wonderful realization is that Shakespeare's performance can exist even within the confines of “Grand Theft Auto.” The expressionless faces of the characters are closer to Noh theater than Globe. But when the show's first Hamlet, guided by an Oxford-trained actor called Dipo Ola, delivers a few lines, it's instantly more compelling than watching ParTeb shake his butt. What a shame that Ola gets a real job and is forced to leave the play. And how funny that, as Ola walks away, he puts on a cap at Oosterveen as a farewell gesture.