Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

1990 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Two fringe characters from Hamlet try to figure out their place in the universe.

Poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Not only are they so insignificant that they can't tell each other apart, but they have absolutely no control over their own insignificant lives. This movie, Tom Stoppard's only directing effort based on his own play, is a brilliant and funny look at fatalism. If Hamlet is about a guy with the fatal flaw of not being able to take action, Stoppard's play is about a couple of nobodies who have no imagination, no fear, and no doubt. Their lives are predetermined by an unseen author they can't begin to comprehend, they're actors in a play they didn't ask to be in, and they have about as much of a chance at living happily ever after as that coin has at coming up tails.

Actually, it's hard for me to see these characters as two distinct guys. I know they're played by two people--Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, both like characters in a Monty Python movie that those guys wrote when they were really sleepy. But it feels natural to take them as two sides of one coin, one representing logic and control while the other representing a more childlike willingness to explore. It might be tempting to say there's a dumb one and a smart one, but I'm not sure that's the case at all. Oldman's "dumb one" spends a lot of time accidentally making scientific discoveries after all while Roth's Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz?) and his logic never get the characters anywhere.

I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I should probably develop ideas before I write about them.

This might be the only movie I've ever seen that has a puppet show within a play within a play within a movie. It's comical as you're seeing it, but later, when you realize that we're all living lives as puppets within a play within a play within a movie, it's enough to drive you to suicide.

Who would have guessed Richard Dreyfuss had this kind of character in him? This is one fun performance as he brings the hamminess hard, just unrelenting hamminess. He and his mostly-silent (when not on the stage anyway) theater troupe, or tragedians, where they perform productions with "rapiers or rape or both" bring some chaos to this backstage world. With all of their scenes, I found myself wondering what Terry Gilliam could have done with these characters. I enjoyed watching them duel with imaginary swords, all while actors create the sound effects off stage with real swords, or skulls that leap into actor's hands with springy sounds.

Oldman and Roth have great chemistry as they engage in wordplay. Their question-tennis match, some great dialogue ("What's the first hing you remember?" "Nah, it's no good. It's too long ago."). They're good together. I even laughed a couple of times at their antics, the time I remember being after Oldman's dicking around with some hanging pots and says "Watch closely" before showing his partner something.

I really hated the music for this, a really generic synth score mostly. There was some guitar noodling that I liked, including some over the opening credits where the guitar was joined by a dog.