It's an art-house crowd-pleaser that shows us how an actor turned the chance to play Hamlet into an assertion of life in the face of death.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of LFF “Elsinore,” named for Hamlet’s castle, opens on a production of that Shakespeare play at the National Theatre in London — but we see it from the bored, amused vantage of the backstage technicians, who get seriously jarred when the doddering actor playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father keeps forgetting his lines, and the actor playing Hamlet gets so pissed off that he stalks off the stage in mid-performance. The year is 1989, and that fiery young actor is Daniel Day-Lewis. (Walking off that stage, never to return to the production, is the first famous thing he did that seemed…extreme.) At first we think: Is this some weird theater biopic in which the young Daniel Day figures in? Yes and no.
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