ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD is a movie written and directed by Tom Stoppard and adapted from his play of the same name. The movie stars Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz), Tim Roth (Guildenstern), and Richard Dreyfuss (the Player).
Stoppard wrote R&G ARE DEAD in 1964 and instantly became a Major Playwright. This is the reward for chutzpah for it is certainly an act of nervy pushiness to take two minor characters from HAMLET and turn them loose in a world that mixes Shakespeare, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Samuel Beckett, and the Marx Brothers in a vast, lapping sea of words. One of the boys (and even they are forever getting confused about who's on first) says: "Words! All we have are words." As sure as there are 101 keys on my keyboard, this is the *texte* of the play and of the movie. The word play is profound and silly, a literal game (played on a tennis court in one scene), as it were. It is a world designed by Escher, a world of convoluted circles, a world where R&G are the audience and the players, and a world which may or may not be enclosed or even exist in the collapsible walls of the portable theater of a troupe of itinerant players.
The players, BTW, are a delight, apparently Yugoslavian mimes (the location work was shot in Yugoslavia); one is tempted by the possibility that in this world of words gone amok it is the mimes who are in control. They are led by Richard Dreyfuss as a cross between Prospero and W. C. Fields and not a little resembling God. Dreyfuss's natural tendency to smarminess, smugness, and insufferability are handsomely and profitably showcased in this role, which reminds us once again that, Holly Hunter movies notwithstanding, Richard Dreyfuss is an actor yet.
The boys, R&G, Oldman and Roth, are show-stoppers, nonpareils, virtuosi. They are British actors, Oldman having been in STATE OF GRACE and Roth in VINCENT & THEO. Their tongues and wits are as mobile as their faces. We're never quite sure, any more than they, who is who, but still they create individuals out of two funny names. Large bits of HAMLET are mixed into R&G ARE DEAD and Oldman and Roth demonstrate the alarming ability to speak their speeches in the received Shakespearean mode even while telling each other and us that they haven't the faintest notion what any of this is about; it's as if they knew how to say two words at once. They are gifted physical comedians as well, for theirs are strenuous roles that require enormous physical efforts and not a few pratfalls.
Roth's Guildenstern fancies himself the intellectual of the pair, but in fact his intellectualism is an endless maze of Schoolman Platonisms and hair-splittings. Whereas Oldman's Rosencrantz is the one who is aware of the world, who is on the perpetual edge of one great scientific discovery or another, only to have each snatched from him at the moment of discovery. He is also the one who asks the questions that go beyond Roth's Abbot and Costello routines; he touches our hearts: "Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?"
Together they are a team of observers in the looney bin, who don't have a key or a pass, and who have no idea where the exit lay.
This is a one-of-a-kind movie. You simply must see it. Even though you may wonder in the end who you are: Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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