Michael Almereyda brings Shakespeare into the present and makes scientific lives an opportunity to rethink how a film tells a story. We value the curiosity, though his devices do not always help the drama.
Fi1m perspective
In Hamlet (2000), Almereyda relocates Shakespeare to corporate New York. He asks an old play to make sense among contemporary forms of power, an approach we find worth pursuing even when the fit is awkward. Ethan Hawke stars, one of three films he has made with the director. The Shakespeare adaptations make the attraction and the difficulty plain. With the biker-gang setting of Cymbeline (2014), too, the updating can become more conspicuous than the play.
The experiments began before the Shakespeare films. His first feature, Twister (1989), was a comedy about a dysfunctional Midwestern family; Nadja (1994) followed with vampires and scenes shot on Fisher-Price Pixelvision. These early independent features give little indication that he intended to settle into one kind of filmmaking. Miscommunication, memory and technology recur more reliably than any particular kind of story.
Deadwood (2004) earns our strongest recommendation here, though Almereyda’s contribution needs keeping in proportion: he directed one episode, ‘E.B. Was Left Out’, in 2005. We were absorbed by its struggle to make people live together, because the programme makes that effort as compelling as the violence. Ian McShane is extraordinary, though the elaborate speeches occasionally make us wish somebody would interrupt. Our enthusiasm for the series cannot establish how much of that is Almereyda’s doing.
His later films give science and technology more space. Experimenter (2015) tells Stanley Milgram’s story while breaking the fourth wall, and Marjorie Prime (2017) considers memory and artificial intelligence. Tesla (2020) continues the unconventional approach to biography with Nikola Tesla, but feels overloaded with ideas. The reservation is familiar from the Shakespeare updates: a device can attract attention without helping us understand the people, and his willingness to take chances does not excuse every distraction. Start with Hamlet if a modern setting makes Shakespeare more inviting; allow for the moments when the relocation seems to matter more than the words.
Biography
Michael Almereyda is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 7 April 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, he studied art history at Harvard University before dropping out after three years to pursue filmmaking.
His feature films include Hamlet (2000), Experimenter (2015), Marjorie Prime (2017) and Tesla (2020). He also directed an episode of the HBO series Deadwood (2005). Marjorie Prime won the Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance, and William Eggleston in the Real World (2005) received a Gotham Award nomination for best documentary.
Almereyda's younger sister is the actress Spencer Kayden. He lives in New York City.
