Mad World, Kings, Composition!

ONCE AGAIN, HAMLET ON-SCREEN

As an actor, Ethan Hawke often projects a glum yet entitled air that can make you want to slap him. The same goes for Hamlet. So who better among today's leading men to portray Shakespeare's most exasperating hero, a medieval graduate student given to moping around his parents' house? While hewing to Shakespeare's text (with heavy editing), director Michael Almereyda has put the play in a contemporary setting: Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) is now the head of the Denmark Corporation, the whole family is ensconced in a steel-and-glass Manhattan hotel—the Elsinore— and Hamlet leaves his repeated "Get thee to a nunnery"s as a series of hang-up messages on Ophelia's answering machine. This all plays better than it probably sounds; indeed, the jokes are the best part of a Hamlet that is sometimes wuuvmvmg it/oa as uiania 111a.11 ao a vuiiiiiiwiuaij wii wnai i imagine must be the skull-pounding frustration any director would feel when confronting this play and hoping to come up with something fresh. Hawke, goateed and greasy-haired, makes a superb Gen X Hamlet; if he doesn't always convey the character's wit, he's got the tortured self-absorption down cold. Julia Stiles, with her beautiful, baby-fatted fouryear-old's face, is a game and affecting Ophelia, especially in the way she seems to get the hang of the poetry right before your eyes. Bottom line: Can you argue with a Hamlet that's over in two hours? (Rating: *) -BRUCE HANDY