I loved Roger Ebert, and he hated “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which poses quite a conundrum for me. The legendary film critic didn’t just pan the movie, which was directed by Tom Stoppard (based on his 1966 play of the same name) and starred Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. He gave it zero stars out of four, arguing that “as a movie, this material, freely adapted by Stoppard, is boring and endless. It lies flat on the screen, hardly stirring.”
I’ve never seen the play performed live, and Ebert did, so perhaps he got something special from that experience that could not be replicated on a screen. Regardless, I think “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is one of the funniest movies ever made… if you know the plot of “Hamlet” and like dark, nihilistic jokes.
The plot is… Well, who cares? The main gag of this movie is that the central characters are barely involved in its plot. They have no agency in the story, but are mere vessels to be acted upon. The story is that of “Hamlet,” William Shakespeare’s early 17th century play about a Danish prince who sees a vision of his dead father’s ghost and is told by the apparition that he was assassinated by Hamlet’s uncle, who has since married Hamlet’s mother and become king himself. Even worse, the seeming ghost orders Hamlet to avenge his death by murdering his uncle. It is unclear, both to the audience and Hamlet himself, whether he is really seeing these things or has simply gone mad. He agonizes endlessly on the matter, alternately scheming and monologuing, even as Norway threatens to conquer Denmark and render his family melodrama entirely moot.
The result is one of the most complex characters ever written, starring in one of the most psychologically interesting and innovative stories ever told.
Yet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have little to do with that story. In the original play, they are described as old friends of Hamlet who have been urgently summoned to court. Once there, they are told by King Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle) that the royal family is worried about Hamlet’s well-being and hope the two titular characters can spend time with him to help him feel better and learn what ails him. They do as they are told, motivated both by sincere concern and the hope of financial reward, and are ultimately tricked by Hamlet into getting themselves executed.
In other words: They serve no purpose in the story except to be manipulated by Hamlet’s suspicious uncle and then used as a vehicle for Hamlet to demonstrate his own cleverness. (He gets them killed in order to spare his own life.) Even the small task they have been assigned is quite laughable; as the two characters note, it is pretty obvious why a young man whose father dies and mother remarries his uncle might act a little strangely.
Like so many of us, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are pawns in the chess game of life. The idea of focusing on their story in a feature-length movie is on its face absurd because there is barely any story to tell. They are side characters, existing only to make a few moves on a figurative chess board before being unceremoniously bumped off. It is a lame destiny, to say the least, a fact that both characters dimly perceive. Since they are powerless to change anything, all they can do is philosophize to each other, play silly games, try to amuse themselves with the perks of being in a castle and learn what little they can about the world they inhabit. Their conclusions, naturally, are profoundly depressing, and that is why “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is so darkly hilarious.
For most of the movie, the titular characters wander around bored, occasionally glimpsing fragments of the plot but incapable of understanding their greater meaning. Ironically, this does not stop them from learning about other important things: Rosencrantz manages to reenact famous science experiments, while Guildenstern criticizes art itself as inherently disingenuous. Both sense something ominous is in their future. In the brilliant opening scene, they flip a coin dozens of times and having it always come up heads, realizing in the process that they must live in a deterministic universe.
The conclusion isn’t only unsettling because they have no control, mind you. It is unsettling because fate is clearly only marginally interested in what happens to them. Having the universe hate you is bad enough — that appears to be Hamlet’s plight — but what if your God is a writer who thinks of you as a dispensable side character? In a play or movie, you no longer exist once you’re off stage or out of frame, and so the question is unimportant. But if this was your reality, and all you could do was putter around while you waited for life to give you your next cue, what exactly could you do?
This is meta-theater at its finest, made intellectually engaging and mordantly amusing by Stoppard’s writing and the performances of Oldman, Roth and Richard Dreyfuss as a third minor character from “Hamlet,” The Player King. I will admit that it is likely inaccessible to someone who hasn’t seen the original Shakespearean play, but if you are familiar with “Hamlet” and can appreciate subtle jokes about the possibility that your entire life is pointless, this movie is a hoot.