TIFF26: Andrew Scott’s Effortful Performance Cannot Save Elsinore

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father visits the titular character, he reveals his brother Claudius’s treachery and his involvement in the plot that sets off the events of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous works. King Hamlet also bequeaths his son a very specific responsibility: “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest.” The idea of responsibility in the face of impending death appears throughout both the play and Simon Stone’s new film at TIFF, Elsinore, which stars Andrew Scott as Chariots of Fire star Ian Charleson, performing the role of Hamlet at the National Theatre in his final months before he passed away from AIDS-related causes.

The film gives the All of Us Strangers star a chance to convince festival-goers he deserves an Academy Award. However, his effortful performance does little to conceal the abyss of mediocrity that is Stephen Beresford’s script. The movie hammers home how both Charleson and Hamlet have an unyielding obsession with death over and over again, but it lacks the critical distance to connect the performer and the character to the period specificity that is the movie’s strength.

Set in 1989, Elsinore depicts Charleson from the jump as being extremely cautious and focused on his health by checking for lesions on his skin every day. By this point, HIV and AIDS are well-known throughout the LGBTQ+ community in Britain. So much so that when Charleson learns of his diagnosis, there is a network of doctors and contacts that he can reach out to see if he has any hope in the face of a disease whose diagnosis acted as a death sentence at the time. This level of community-building is the lone strength of Beresford’s writing. There’s very little summarizing of how AIDS had ravaged Charleson’s community and how Thatcherite Britain, like the Reagan-run U.S., turned a blind eye to this pandemic.

These hardened edges of Elsinore offer a spark, but the rest of the runtime focuses on Charleson’s battle to continue to perform Hamlet and the clinic he goes to. Charleson meets doctor Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman of Wicked Little Letters), the first-ever HIV doctor at the Royal Free Hospital. Johnson, as any good doctor would, is shocked and appalled that Charleson would even consider continuing to perform. But their combative relationship grows into a relationship of love and respect, even though we never actually feel that way before the film forces that dynamic upon us. While Colman and Scott are both capable scene partners, their characters’ witty back-and-forths routinely fall flat, and the so-called “one-liners” make one beg for deliverance from the scene.

Alas, no one will have to wait too long as the editing takes over. Elsinore is made up almost entirely of five or six extended montages that never let us see Charleson perform Shakespeare for more than a few seconds at a time. For whatever reason, the movie doesn’t want to show Charleson wrestling with Hamlet in the context of his life, instead focusing on jokes about how the British public only knows him from Chariots of Fire or discussions with director Derek Jarman (David Dawson) about what it would mean to openly disclose their AIDS diagnoses.

This is where Simon Stone and Stephen Beresford lose any chance of having a film that could dare to be called “heartwarming.” The debate between Jarman and Charleson happens throughout multiple montages where the issue is the latter’s lack of speaking up. Charleson’s argument—that his decision not to speak out about his diagnosis would interfere with people seeing him as an actor—deserved to be fleshed out further. The problem is not Charleson’s decision itself, but demanding a specific outcome. Rather, it’s that his justification comes across as overly simplistic and is forced into being seen as a heroic act.

With this amount of ambiguity, that leaves us with a level of insidiousness under the hood of Elsinore, as if Claudius has tricked us into a so-called feel-good movie that would’ve done gangbusters if it were released in the late 1990s or early 2000s and distributed by Miramax. Instead, the movie valorizes staying silent until you are dead, and only posthumously will you receive praise for your bravery. Like Denmark, there’s rottenness at the core of this film that no performance could ever shake.