I'll confess that Hamlet has never been one of my favorite plays. It's an overwrought tragedy that makes me giggle every bit as much as Romeo and Juliet. I think it's funny when Hamlet and Laertes get into a grief-contest at Ophelia's grave. I think it's funnier still when Hamlet soliloquizes with such intense desperation. But I think the funniest line in the play occurs near the very end, after practically all the main characters have died in one big heap at Elsinore. Hamlet and Gertrude and Claudius and Laertes are all dead--and yet it still isn't quite enough. Shakespeare can't resist giving us just a bit more death. So into the charnel house of Elsinore comes an English messenger bearing the message that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead--as if anyone cares.

Tom Stoppard adopts that line as the title of his own alternative version of Hamlet. He does not give us a sequel or a prequel, but a play that happens at the same time as Hamlet, a play that is told not from Hamlet's point of view, but from the perspective of two of the most perfectly superfluous and absolutely interchangeable characters in the history of literature. In doing so, he gives us so excellent a play that I'm tempted to categorize it as better than Hamlet. But the moment I do that, you will roll your eyes and skip the rest of the essay. So in the interest of maintaining my credibility, I will say that the play is almost as good as Hamlet (even though I really do think it's better).

Those familiar with Hamlet will recall that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are friends of Hamlet's from the prince's youth. When Hamlet returns to Denmark from his studies to find his father dead, his mother married to his uncle, and his uncle installed on the throne that should have passed directly to Hamlet himself, Gertrude and Claudius have the unmitigated gall to be puzzled by Hamlet's sullen behavior. They send away for two of his childhood friends to find out what's bothering Hamlet even though the problem couldn't be more obvious. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in other words, are almost beyond superfluous. Even though they appear as flesh-and-blood characters in Hamlet, they're even more difficult to believe in than the ghost of Hamlet's father. Their purpose--to find out what everybody already knows--is scathingly and self-obliteratingly absurd.

And yet there they are, like a couple of detectives hired to find out whether the Empire State Building is in Manhattan after all. What's more, they have no depth. Shakespeare is quite remarkable for giving characters--even characters with only a handful of lines--distinctive personalities that allow us to see them as courageous, brash, clever, self-involved, or pusillanimous. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't even manage to distinguish themselves from one another, much less from the rest of the characters in the play. Stoppard uses this fungibility to his advantage by making a running gag out of the inability of everyone in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves--to tell which one is which.

The surreal humor of their conversations about what it means to be "sent for" and what it is like to "be dead, in a box" are reminiscent of the conversations between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. But there is an exuberance to Stoppard's wit that we simply do not see in Beckett. For instance, Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman), despite coming across as the dumber of the two, makes a series of practical discoveries in the play. He begins by inventing the sandwich, but goes on to discover the principle of the steam engine. He stumbles upon the pendulum, is struck on the head by a falling apple, and makes the sound of a foghorn for the sheer anachronistic joy of it. In his zeal to share his discoveries with Guildenstern (Tim Roth), he invariably overdoes his presentations so that they don't work.

Rosencrantz's practical mindset is offset hilariously by Guildenstern's cold but useless logic:

Guildenstern: If it is [morning], and the sun is over there (his right as he faces the audience) for instance, that (front) would be northerly. On the other hand, if it is not morning and the sun is over there (his left) . . . that . . . (lamely) would still be northerly. (Picking up.) To put it another way, if we came from down there (front) and it is morning, the sun would be up there (his left), and if it is actually over there (his right) and it's still morning, we must have come from up there (behind him), and if that is southerly (his left) and the sun is really over there (front), then it's the afternoon. However, if none of these is the case--

Rosencrantz: Why don't you go have a look?

G: Pragmatism?!--is that all you have to offer? You seem to have no conception of where we stand!

R: I merely suggest that the position of the sun, if it is out, would give you a rough idea of the time; alternatively, the clock, it it is going, would give you a rough idea of the position of the sun. I forget which you were trying to establish.

The most elaborate device that Stoppard uses in R & G is to move quite effortlessly and unapologetically from the scenes of his own composition to the scenes from Hamlet in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear. It's really quite stunning to see him weaving whole scenes from Shakespeare into his own play.

Although the film version of R & G was Stoppard's first attempt at cinematic direction, there are touches of brilliance throughout--not the least of which is the opening image of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as tiny black dots on horseback against the stark white backdrop of a chalky cliff face. Of equal interest is Stoppard's decision to have Hamlet (Iain Glen) voicelessly mouth the most famous words from Shakespeare's play ("To be or not to be").

Oldman and Roth will always and forever be two of my favorite actors on the basis of their performances in this film alone. Even Richard Dreyfuss turns in a stellar performance as the Player--perhaps because the part calls for an absolute ham.

Stoppard gives us something profound and something humorous in virtually every scene in the film. Questions about fate (the possibility that our lives have already been written in some great book) are underscored by the constant drifting of pages of text through camera shots. There is a puppet show within a play within a play within a movie that tends to undermine the Player's assertion that actors "are the opposite of people."

Like the rest of us, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are rather fond of the idea of having been sent for. It gives them a sense of purpose. But their meditations on the meaning of life and the finality of death undermine that sense for them and the audience as well. Perhaps life is nothing more than a preordained mess--in which case laughter is all we have to pin our hopes on. And perhaps that is why Stoppard delivers laughter in such abundance in this extraordinary film.

Recommended: Yes