Whenever any film is shot in 70mm it seems to come loaded with statistics. Released in two versions, one of four hours (in 70mm), the other two and a half hours (in 35mm) Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet is no different.
The press notes even give an account of how much fake snow was used to create a bleak midwinter at Elsinore - 12 different kinds of environmentally-friendly artificial snow were laid around the location, Blenheim Palace.
Lining the walls of the main hall were a series of mirrored doors which would have been a nightmare for filming since the cinematographer (Alex Thompson) would have had to constantly monitor the reflections of the camera crew as the scenes unfolded.
Statistics aside, this proves to be one of the great virtuoso technical feats in the film because, to invigorate some of the static scenes, Branagh has the camera pan 360 degrees, picking up the reflection at every turn but managing to avoid the camera crew in all of them. This hall of mirrors is also a metaphorical device, for all is not what it appears to be in rotten Denmark.
The great problem in reinterpreting Shakespearian theatre for the screen is the different emphasis on word and image. One medium relies overwhelmingly on language; the other upon pictures.
Branagh is uncompromising about the language in this production. In Shakespeare, on the stage or screen, the word's the thing. They must be spoken, explored, revealed and made to come alive. It is refreshing indeed, particularly in the four hour unabridged version, to hear the words spoken with fluidity and naturalness; where the lines mean something rather than becoming a verbal exercise in sonority. The language lives again in this production brought to life by faultless casting.
Kenneth Branagh was courageous to have insisted on the primacy of the word over the image. The easy route would have been the one Baz Luhrmann chose in his commercially successful but sealed down version of Romeo and Juliet, which replaced Shakespeare's language with largely comic-bubble dialogue.
Hamlet is big in every sense, with a large cast of name actors from both sides of the Atlantic. The British get the big parts - Branagh himself as Hamlet, Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude, Richard Briers as Polonius and Kate Winslet as Ophelia. Small parts are played by big names from America like Billy Crystal as the First Gravedigger, Charlton Heston as the Player King, Jack Lemmon as Marcellus and Robin Williams camping up the role of Osric.
In acknowledging the primacy of Shakespeare's text Branagh has reinvented Shakespeare for our fin de siecle. His text is longer than any other, combining both the First Folio of the play and passages from the Second Quarto.
The consequent digressions and asides and the amount of screen time devoted to characters other than Hamlet, who dominates most abridged versions of the play, evokes the milieu and breathes life into what is usually a social and political void. We see the context within which Hamlet operates and we are given a feel for the life he lives - the manoeuvrings of the court, the jesting with friends, the diplomatic intricacies, the off-narrative Hamlet who mixes with the hoi polloi, and a Denmark which is surrounded by an encroaching military struggle in the form of Fortinbras, the man of action who sweeps to power upon the fall of the house of Claudius.
This is not the Freudian Hamlet of Laurence Olivier, it is more complex and richer. This Hamlet attempts to explore what it is to be a man, not just an interior, self-reflexive man isolated from others but a part of the fabric of his time. A man who has friendships and antipathies, strengths and failings, humour and melancholy, hesitance and forthrightness, tenderness and violence.
All the dichotomies that contribute to character.
The film is not without fault. The faux Mahler soundtrack can be cloying and the swashbuckling, chandelier-swinging ending seems out of place with what has gone before. The special effects in the forest scene where Hamlet speaks to his father's ghost are overwrought. With too many shaking trees and smoke pumping from the ground, it leaves an audience not quite shaking enough. And despite the vigour of the lines it remains largely conventional in approach and somewhat limited in emotional range.
But Branagh has found an effective space to allow Shakespeare's language
its full expressiveness. His film is a major achievement, illuminating,
expansive - if only a little dangerous.