This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hamlet 2000, a stealthy masterpiece adapted and directed by Michael Almereyda. It drew admirers at the time, but everything was American Beauty in 2000; it won the Best Picture Oscar, and its star Kevin Spacey, in better days, won Best Actor, playing a middle-aged lech who lusts after a teenager and is somehow noble because of it. That film seems to close the coffin on a virulent 20th-century trope, born in 1955 with Lolita, that suggested child molestation by disaffected men represented the height of avant-garde rebellion. Hamlet 2000, by contrast, ushers in a new vision of …
