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It's a nice sentiment. But despite Shakespeare's renewed popularity -- the runaway success of "Shakespeare in Love," for example -- there's still a prevailing sentiment that you need all kinds of special keys to unlock his meaning. What's often amazed me is how frequently Shakespeare is held away from everyone. It's all well and good for academics to tell everyday people -- in other words, those of us who aren't scholars -- that Shakespeare's plays are about the richness of the language, first and foremost. The language is wonderful once you understand it. But there's something tyrannical about the purist view that the language of Shakespeare is the almighty key, because there are times when it can be dauntingly difficult. You could easily find a much more proficient Juliet than Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann's "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." But you'd be hard pressed to find one who's as touching.

Hamlet Directed by Michael Almereyda Starring Ethan Hawke, Liev Schreiber, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles and Diane Venora

Watching Luhrmann's passionate but flawed movie, it struck me for the first time that the best way to keep Shakespeare alive, and for everyone, isn't necessarily through the most careful and proper line readings: that visuals and imagination and gut feeling all have to count for something too, all without going for modernization simply for the sake of novelty.

Michael Almereyda's somber, gorgeous, darkly glittering "Hamlet," set in New York in the early days of the 21st century, is so perfectly modern, and yet so mindful of the tradition of the play, that it seems to exist in two worlds at once. There's no sense that the narrative texture had to be jazzed up in order to make the material seem relevant to a modern audience. If anything, Almereyda's "Hamlet" is a meditation on the timelessness of the material. It's deeply inventive within the framework of the story, and it's funny in unexpected places. Every actor involved rises to the challenge of the language (Almereyda has streamlined the play for the screen but hasn't updated the text), although not every performer comes at it in an expected, or officially sanctioned, way.

But oddly enough it's the picture's visuals -- its mournful, glassy Manhattan high-rises; its limos and Town Cars with their mirrorlike flanks -- that make it feel most like "Hamlet." The picture carries a slight pall over it; the overarching sense that something is terribly wrong hovers in the air like a swarm of muted surveillance helicopters. It's as much a tone poem in honor of "Hamlet" as it is a raw interpretation of it, but it shines as both tribute and treatment.

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Why has it taken so long for movies to come around to addressing Shakespeare in such bold visual terms? Even a spectacle as lush as Kenneth Branagh's 1996 "Hamlet" -- a picture that brought me closer to this dense, staggeringly beautiful play than I'd ever felt before -- is still more like a filmed stage play than a visual reimagining of the material, as Almereyda's "Hamlet" is. Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" was gorgeous, touching and messy: The director was perfectly in control of the picture's images, but less sure-footed in guiding its pacing and narrative drive.

But Almereyda's "Hamlet" could be considered a foot soldier of a new era, heralding a time when even Shakespeare purists accept that visuals can be enlisted in the service of the language, and not at the expense of it. Even New Yorker film critic David Denby, who claimed with characteristic fustiness that he loathes "anyone mucking about with the classics," has taken to this "Hamlet." Perhaps that's because there's no self-conscious artiness in Almereyda's approach, or in the approach of his actors. The picture was shot on a tight production schedule in super 16 millimeter. Every camera angle (the movie was beautifully shot by John de Borman), as well as every line of dialogue, exists only to move the action along and build the picture's dusky mood layer by layer, like storm-cloud stripes of agate.

Next page | Young Hamlet plays out his personal misery against a bank of video screens