Grade: 4/5
Samuel Johnson, the English intellectual responsible for the first comprehensive English dictionary, wrote of Shakespeare that “his drama is the mirrour of life … from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world.” The hit video game series “Grand Theft Auto” — which offers players a sandbox version of Los Angeles to be blown up, robbed and generally destroyed — is also a kind of mirror for life. It is a warped mirror, to be sure, a mirror which reflects only the worst of us or the best of us, nothing in between. In this way too GTA further mimics Shakespeare, for we would all be dead by now if people died as much as they do in the Bard’s plays or in GTA games.
Through this lens, the untraditional pairing made by directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane in their film “Grand Theft Hamlet” begins to make sense. Shot entirely within “Grand Theft Auto,” the film follows their attempts to cast, direct and stage “Hamlet” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main antagonist of the film is not Polonius or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the game world itself. Random players interrupt rehearsals by shuffling Crane’s in-game character, Hamet_thedane, off of this mortal coil using RPGs and submachine guns. The game world’s erratic movement and physics system forces the actors to come up with creative ways to stage familiar scenes. In order to successfully perform the play, the filmmakers must obtain both the cooperation of the computer world and its random inhabitants.
It is in combating these difficulties that we begin to see the good side of the mirror’s warped reflection. Players actually care about Grylls’ and Crane’s project: They show up, audition and support the play in other virtual ways. One of the most enjoyable feelings in all of moviegoing is watching a group come together to achieve a goal which seems greater than them. “The Goonies” is the example par excellence, but the same feeling also undergirds “Stranger Things,” “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” and most heist movies such as the “Ocean’s” series. The best parts of “Grand Theft Hamlet” give off this same feeling — seeing each cast member’s audition, hearing them experiment about doing certain things and seeing their joy and amazement about the absolutely absurd thing they are doing. We root for them, not unlike a sports team.
The film falters when it leaves this realm of extremes and enters the real world, or, rather, when the real world gets inserted by the filmmakers into the digital “fake” one. This is done through seemingly scripted scenes performed within the game by Grylls and Crane about various “problems” they have. Some are marital, some have to do with the tribulations of Covid lockdown but all are boring.
It speaks to the nature of artistic mimesis that when the imitation becomes too real, the art loses its allure and also its value. The reason art can be, as Hamlet says, a “mirror up to nature” is because it can “show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image.” This is not done with depictions of realistic and healthy relationship discussions where both partners make up in the end. In other words, as Hamlet says to the players, “Be not too tame.”
After scorn and virtue, Hamlet says art should show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Art should portray the essential truths about the time its audience lives in. Communicating this truth necessitates liberating art from the shackles of particularity. Art must be abstract if it is to apply to all and thus hold power. This is a paradoxical reversal, only by achieving universality can the art touch each and every individual person.
In the particulars of its story, “Grand Theft Hamlet” provides something funny, novel and enjoyable. However, in the grand striving of its narrative, the attempts by a group of strangers to accomplish something hard that they don’t have to do but choose to — we find not just universal relatability but the very essence of life. “To be or not to be,” that is the question at stake here. “Slings and arrows” are, in GTA, quite literal but so too are the “arms” which Grylls and Crane take up against them and which they use to, triumphantly, oppose and end them.