Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead...or are they?

In my Lit class, we have been discussing Existentialism on and off for the past couple of weeks. During one of these discussions, the subject of writing from the point of view of an obscure character came up. So naturally we discussed the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I had read this play in high school and greatly enjoyed it so I wanted to watch the movie and see how the themes fate and destiny, and whether we can really ever escape it, are portrayed in the film adaptation.

The film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), directed and written by Tom Stoppard, follows the characters Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth) from Hamlet. The story is really about fate and whether we really have control of our lives because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern keep reliving their life from the beginning of their journey to see Hamlet and ends when they are ultimately hanged. The story is more focused on the idea of fate and how we are merely players in the game of life. However, the film is very playful. It is playful with its dialogue, its editing, and story. Stoppard really draws the viewer in with witty and clever dialogue, and through a surprisingly engaging story told via the point of view of two very minor and insignificant characters from one of the greatest stories of all time.

The film begins by following Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on a journey somewhere yet unknown with Rosencrantz decides to start flipping a coin. Each time he flips the coin, it lands heads. In the beginning it seems to just be a random occurrence that it lands heads so many times. But after 76 times of landing heads, Rosencrantz begins to think it means something while Guildenstern thinks it is just random. Of course the coin landing heads so many times is NOT random. At the beginning of the film it may be unclear as to why the coin never lands tails, but by the end it is evident that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are stuck in a type of limbo that affects the outcome of the coin. The coin landing heads may also allude to the fact that they both end up getting hanged.

What is interesting about the film is how it is structured. The film is linear, per se, but the transitions between scenes are discontinuous, much like how I would imagine life in Limbo to be. An example of this in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is when they are watching a travelling show and then suddenly the camera cuts to them in a castle draped in curtains that have fallen upon them. Also in the castle, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to leave the room they magically appear in only to end up at the opposite entrance of the room. They are trapped within the room because they are unable to make other choices outside of what fate had laid out for them. Even though the idea of their limbo is to try to figure out what they did wrong and change it. The editing style is definitely unique and supports the idea that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in some type of supernatural place.

The ending line of the film (“There must have been a moment at the beginning, where we could have said no. Somehow we missed it. Well, we'll know better next time.”) suggests the two are stuck in a cyclical Limbo in which they are forced to relive their lives over and over again from a certain moment. There are other lines through out the film that allude to the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, in fact, dead. For one, there is the title of the film, the fact Rosencrantz and other people keep mixing up their names, and they can’t remember what the first thing they did that day was.

The best scene in the movie is when they are playing the game, “Questions”, which is when two people keep asking each other questions and the game ends when one of the players says a statement or asks a question with rhetoric. The point of this scene, besides being very visually interesting to watch, is to play with the idea that questions are more important than answers. If you ask the right question, then maybe you will begin to better understand life and its meaning. The scene is very visually interesting because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are playing this game on a badminton court and are acting like there words are volleys. So each time they lob a question, they move across their side of the court. The scene juxtaposes a very playful game with a very serious message about life and its purpose.

What makes this film so strong, other than the script, are the actors (Oldman and Roth). Their portrayal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being stuck in some sort of Limbo is believable through their body language. Even the subtlest movement fits so perfectly in the story because each little facial tick or shrug tells just as much as what is said. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead what is said is just as important as what is left unsaid.

The film is really a brilliant adaptation of an equally genius idea to take on a story from the point of view of a seemingly unimportant character, or characters in this case, about how fate is something we can never escape or change.