Ophelia (2018)
A review of Ophelia (2018), directed by Claire McCarthy.
In high school classrooms, especially in the United States, we are often gifted a school copy of Shakespeare’s plays. And, usually, Hamlet almost always is one of them along with Romeo and Juliet. Ophelia is a tragic figure in Hamlet, often forced to take the burden forced upon her by the men surrounding her. Many have often reclaimed her story in recent years, turning her into a feminist icon that defeats the fate that was originally forced upon her. She is a young girl who was originally doomed to be insane and suicidal, a tragic fate for a woman not yet a woman.
This film is another one of my Netflix finds, something I watched in order to satisfy my desire to watch one film a day. It is yet another reimagining of the classic Shakespeare play, one in which Ophelia is focused on. This film is an attempt to play on feminist themes, but it kind of falls short. Let’s dig deeper into why.
Content
From the get-go, the camera’s lens is focused on a young Ophelia, who is in favor of Queen Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet. Ophelia is rebellious and lacks a mother figure in her life, which explains her “out there” behavior and unwillingness to truly comply with the standards imposed by the court. But, as the beginning progresses into the love story between Ophelia and Hamlet, this retelling begins to lose steam as it deviates from the original narrative of Shakespeare’s play. The characters are more hollow and don’t really seem to come to life as you’re watching, while it seems to descend into a soap opera with the teenage romance going on.
I’m a really big fan of reclaiming Ophelia’s narrative from the original text, but this film just didn’t do it right to me. This is kind of difficult to avoid spoilers, and I am trying my hardest, but the only redeeming acting in this film tended to be the performance Daisy Ridley pulled off for the titular character. I don’t think this film needed to appeal to a trendy modern girl boss remake that they seemed to think we wanted—when you’re using source material that has such a dedicated fanbase and academic research put into it, you tend to have a lot of people who get annoyed if you deviate too far in a way that isn’t, well, good.
The film also lacked authenticity—I get that there’s this modern sense of wanting to put diversity into the royal courts of European monarchs in film, but is it truly helping if you’re depicting a false sense of reality? This is a hot debate and I won’t dig too deep into it, but I think that we need more BIPOC tales rather than rehashing the same European tales and weaving BIPOC into them.
Overall Thoughts
I think an attempt was made, but the screenplay just needed to be better. I don’t know if at times if it was the actors or the actual writing itself, but this had to be an excellent performance overall for it to appeal to a mass audience. And, judging from the reviews, this did not appeal to a mass audience. When you’re rehashing classic content into a more feminist take, I think there needs to be something completely fresh about it and you’re going to need some standout acting to bring the hype to it. This film ended up lacking that, unfortunately.
