The Rise of CliffsNotes Cinema

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the lovelorn Ophelia famously drowns. The prince of Denmark has cruelly spurned her, her father has died, and she’s stricken with grief. If only she had realized Taylor Swift’s vision for her: In the song “The Fate of Ophelia,” the pop star imagines that she has instead been saved by a new suitor. Her version of the tragic figure, Swift sings, is “no longer drowning and deceived, all because you came for me.”

Hollywood has been making me think of Swift’s track quite a bit lately. The sparkly earworm deploys one of her favorite tricks: messing around with a literary classic for lyrical fodder. Cinema has been going through its own “Fate of Ophelia” era these past few months, with a litany of new adaptations that dramatically alter their source material. The writer-director Emerald Fennell turned Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel about obsession and social status, into erotic fanfiction. Maggie Gyllenhaal introduced audiences to a vengeful Mary Shelley in The Bride!, a chaotic take on the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. And earlier this month, a contemporary remake of Hamlet arrived, this time starring Riz Ahmed as the scion of a wealthy South Asian British family.

Updating a classic isn’t inherently a bad idea; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a dutiful adaptation of Shelley’s 1818 novel, just won three Oscars, and Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has enjoyed an excellent box-office run. Yet most of these projects have been as superficial as Swift’s single, in which Ophelia survives just by pledging “allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”—a cheeky reference to Swift’s fiancé, to be sure, but Ophelia’s problem was never really about the vibes. That reductiveness, though, works far better in a four-minute pop song than in a feature-length film. Call it the rise of CliffsNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place. These movies make the provocative palatable: Uncomfortable relationships and nuanced characterizations—essentially, what made the stories endure—get lost in the fog of showy filmmaking.

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Some of this is, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert put it, the product of a growing culture of infantilization in which “all the subtext is made too explicit, the text too flatly literal.” I suspect, too, that relying on style over substance caters to our social-media-conditioned brains, in which chunks of eye-catching fluff subdue our imagination. Taken together, the succession of oversimplified literary remakes carries a distinct whiff of opportunism in Hollywood’s ongoing search for the next reliable genre. Forget superheroes, video games, and legacy sequels—a summer-reading list offers plenty of well-known titles that could boost ticket sales.

At first glance, the unsubtlety of CliffsNotes Cinema appears to plague the new Hamlet. The director Aneil Karia shoots the bulk of the movie, which is set in modern-day London, using a wobbly handheld camera and extreme close-ups. Ahmed delivers Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy as a screechy outburst while steering a sports car headfirst into traffic. Yet the film’s biggest stylistic swings don’t overwhelm the story; by the end of this Hamlet, I found myself as captivated as ever by the tale. Karia keeps the play’s original dialogue while excising any scene that doesn’t include the titular character. His narrow aperture serves Hamlet’s tale rather than detracts from it, heightening the visual anxiety while allowing Shakespeare’s words to retain their raw power.

The film doesn’t nail the balance between innovation and fidelity until about halfway through, when Hamlet stages an elaborate dance at the wedding of his uncle, Claudius, and his mother, Gertrude. (In the original text, the nuptials occur before the play begins, and the performance that Hamlet mounts as a ploy to get his uncle to confess to killing his father is a melodramatic Greek tragedy.) The beautifully choreographed number shocks the characters accordingly but also effectively illustrates what Hamlet’s paranoia and ruthlessness have yielded. In a rare moment of steadiness, Karia keeps the camera trained on Claudius’s face as he registers his nephew’s ire. The subsequent scenes are freshly charged with Hamlet’s youthful righteousness. By throwing a lavish Indian wedding into disarray, he’s placed his family’s reputation on the line and put his despair on display when he should be most composed. Humiliating Claudius brings Hamlet satisfaction, but only for an instant.

In other words, this take on Hamlet owes its success to Hamlet itself. The source material isn’t merely a recognizable name; it’s an opportunity to explore complex interpretations of the work and embrace just how reckless Hamlet can be in his quest to avenge his father. Films that instead exploit literary classics for their familiarity limit that possibility. A key alteration in Wuthering Heights sees Fennell depict what Brontë never did: the lead characters giving in to their lust in a racy montage that dilutes the effect of their torment of and brutality toward each other. In The Bride!, Gyllenhaal’s choice to have the actor Jessie Buckley portray both Mary Shelley and the woman who becomes possessed by her spirit leaves the movie unfocused; Buckley’s many monologues come off as deliriously silly. The mayhem eventually overshadows the most potent insight in Shelley’s original tale: that a life without meaning—created only for the sake of creation—is an immeasurable pain.

[Read: A daring new take on Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy]

Works of literature endure not only because they’ve been pored over by countless students in English class but also because they provoke questions about how we live and the values we hold. Karia’s Hamlet is imperfect—the shaky cam, clearly meant to telegraph grittiness, often grates—but it exhibits restraint where such discipline is needed most. In perhaps its boldest deviation from Shakespeare’s plot, the film rejects spectacle in its final act: There is no sword fight, no accidental poisoning of Gertrude leading to Hamlet’s Pyrrhic victory over Claudius. Instead, Gertrude picks up on Claudius’s plan to kill Hamlet and snatches up the bottle of tainted wine herself to down as much of it as she can. It’s a touching and costly demonstration of loyalty to her son that exemplifies how Claudius’s hubris and Hamlet’s resentment have shattered the family. What Hamlet does next—pursuing Claudius and finally killing him—is made more visceral; it’s fueled not just by revenge but also by a renewed understanding of how much his misery has taken from him.

This type of nuance all but disappears in CliffsNotes Cinema, which often looks incredible—I’m certainly taken with the costumes in Wuthering Heights, as well as with the soaring sets in Frankenstein—but robs its audience of the chance to analyze anything for themselves. That’s largely because these movies dull the sharpest edges of their source material, aiming for obvious takeaways regardless of how nonsensically they’re rendered. Despite never giving its titular character an opportunity to explore her original identity, The Bride! gleefully insists that she has become an avatar for female empowerment. Rather than explore the book’s larger point that class is an inescapable burden, Wuthering Heights makes its central conflict about whether its protagonists can be together. These films argue that their characters act on raw emotions: lust, fury, sadness. Yet these feelings fail to linger in the audience. Unlike a Taylor Swift song that gets stuck in your head, they just fade away.