Have you ever been run over by a truck and enjoyed the experience? Well...have you seen Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet?
Hamlet is a jungle of a play and, as he guides us through it, Branagh refuses to wield a machete. His magnificent, foolhardy movie gives us the text virtually uncut, with all its narrative detours, playful elaborations, obscure allusions, blatant and subtle jokes, topical gossip. Sometimes these elements enrich the play, but just as often they bring its main action to a temporary halt. Consider: during the hatching of the plot to murder his nephew, Claudius remarks that Laertes's fencing has been much praised by a Norman gallant named Lamord, and for twenty-eight dawdling lines the finer points of Lamord are discussed when all we need to know is how much Hamlet envies Laertes's skill. Derek Jacobi as Claudius treats the passage with dispatch, but it is nevertheless forty-five seconds of pure Novocain injected directly into the viewer's brain.
There are about a score of these longueurs in the movie--twenty minutes of tedium. Only twenty dull minutes in a four-hour flick? But it is precisely because this Hamlet is four hours long that twenty minutes take a disproportionate toll on the attention span.
Branagh was surely aware of the problem as he shot the movie; trying to prevent boredom led him into a problem with his own performance: he's turned the Dane into a bit of a speed freak. At times his fast tempos do capture the manic quality that the prince can legitimately exhibit (the "Get thee to a nunnery" passage works brilliantly at a furious clip), but occasionally they flatten nuances. Though the first half of "O what a rogue and peasant slave" plays nicely as a tantrum, the second half needs a transition into seething expectancy that the actor fails to give it. (But he hits the right note with the concluding couplet.) In the bedroom interview with Gertrude, Branagh is certainly angry enough, but he fails to register the subtler shades of desperation and loathing that this scene--surely one of Shakespeare's greatest--contains. The delivery of "How all occasions do inform against me" is a disaster, turning a scorching piece of self-shaming into a gung ho, up-and-at-'em marital [sic] tirade. Doubtless this was because Branagh placed his movie's intermission right after this soliloquy and wanted to give audiences a tingle just before their escape to the lobby. But Hamlet is not Henry V.
There are other mistakes, major and minor, including a badly edited final sequence in which Fortinbras's takeover is ridiculously staged as an armed invasion. Shakespeare makes the point (properly underscored by Branagh) that Elsinore has become an armed camp against Fortinbras's approach. Branagh has ten thousand enemy soldiers charge Elsinore castle across an open plain without benefit of Birnam Wood camouflage--and the sentries see nothing until the army gets within the walls! And why was Rufus Sewell, owner of the droopiest eyelids since Robert Mitchum's, allowed to turn the Norwegian prince into an oaf? And why was...
Enough! This Hamlet is the most jawdropping film ever made from any of Shakespeare's plays. Here's why.
Of all the Bard's productions, Hamlet is the one that most resists the unifying hand of the director. It's not the complexity of the hero but the bursting nature of the play itself that is the problem. Where is the center in all this abundance, in this sublime variety show of the questing human spirit? But Branagh has found a center, a unifying idea that works for him and (at least while we view his movie) for us.
This theme is in the very first image: the statue of our hero's father, old King Hamlet. The monument evokes a martial ideal: warfare as an ongoing way of life and a promotion of all the virtues warfare requires--self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, physical vigor, righteous fierceness, unity of purpose. After murdering his brother, Claudius the usurper continues his brother's preparations for war against Norway, but we can see in the soft, sensual face of Derek Jacobi that Denmark has the wrong ruler if Denmark was meant to be a Viking version of Sparta.
And, in fact, Branagh and his designers give us an Elsinore that evokes the Hapsburg dynasty in its late nineteenth-century decadence. Military uniforms are everywhere in the court but they seem to be only fashion statements--even Ophelia wears one. Young men are constantly practicing swordplay within the palace, but it is the sort of fencing employed in private duels, useless on the battlefield. Polonius is a stern paterfamilias with his children but sleeps with prostitutes on the sly, and his servant Reynaldo is clearly a pimp. There are sliding doors, secret passages, and two-way mirrors in the palace: an Elsinore where courtiers must be so busy outmaneuvering each other that they have no time to strategize against the Norwegian foe. So much for self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, martial vigor, unity of purpose.
And so, in this context, when the ghost summons Hamlet it's not just a call for personal vengeance but a demand that the son restore the martial integrity of the state. But, as Branagh portrays him, is the prince the right man for the job? Branagh, both as actor and director, makes us understand clearly why it is a "cursed spite" that Hamlet was born to set the times right.
I have found some fault with the star's performance but, at its best, it is a successful portrait, not of a man paralyzed by indecision or an oedipal complex, but of a mettlesome, high-pitched nature sent zig-zagging out of control by the fury coursing within him. And it's not just fury that deprives this Hamlet of his internal compass. There's too much life in the man for him to be an agent of death. When he should be detaching himself from events long enough to plan strategy, he instead savors the nuances of the moment. Using the beautiful lower range of his rather limited voice, Branagh speaks the first soliloguy, "O, that this too, too solid flesh," with a delectation of sadness that warns us that this man will never take the necessary steps to end that sadness. In the graveyard, Branagh's hushed appreciation of the passing of all earthly joy gives us a vivid look at the self-thwarting nature of the prince. A man aware that death converts all flesh, whether Caesar's or Yorick's, into dirt fit to "stop a beer barrel" might very well be a good ruler. (Frederick the Great and Winston Churchill surely had this awareness.) But any man who too keenly savors such awareness will probably never rule. Like Elsinore itself with its hectic military preparations, Branagh's Hamlet aspires to the sword in vain. The kingdom, under Claudius, is waylaid by its corruption; the prince by his sensibility.
How well Branagh understands and cinematically exploits the two-track nature of the play, the parallel unfolding of melodramatic action alongside mental frenzy and exaltation. We see the prince about to murder the praying Claudius, and he does!--a sword thrust right through the skull. But, wait, no, that was only a visual leap into Hamlet's mind. The very next shot pulls us back into reality and the prince's doubts. Let Polonius ploddingly read Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia aloud to the king and queen and we hear only a stylized piece of whimsy ("Doubt thou the stars are fire"), but when Branagh intercuts the recitation with a glimpse of Hamlet and Ophelia making love, we experience the heat of passion beneath the rhetoric.
To praise the cast justly would require another article. Suffice it to say that I found Kate Winslet frighteningly believable as the mad Ophelia burbling obscenities and endearments. Richard Briers undercuts our standard notions of Polonius by endowing the old man with shrewdness and venom. Nicholas Farrell is a burning Laertes. Derek Jacobi's Claudius is a supreme study of the connection between evil and weakness, while Julie Christie's Gertrude explores the callousness that can grow out of sexual infatuation. Michael Maloney creates the best Horatio I've ever seen: a commoner warily treading amidst aristocartic skullduggery. And, with the exception of Robin William's cutesy-poo Osric, all the celebrity guest-starring pays off, especially Charlton Heston's First Player, the very model of a magniloquent actor-manager, and Jack Lemmon's Marcellus, making every syllable of the "bird of dawning" speech poignantly pierce.
Underpinning all this acting and the aptly lush costuming (Alex Byrne's) and photography (Alex Thomson's) is the eclectic score of Patrick Doyle, which employs clever pastiches of Brahms (the final funeral hymn) and Bernard Herrmann (the duel) to excellent effect.
The poet Karl Shapiro once wrote that being reviewed by the critic Randall Jarrell was like being run over by a truck that didn't hurt him. After being run over by this four-hour epic, I rose quite unbruised from my seat and felt like shouting, "Run me over again, Branagh! Run me over again, Shakespeare!"
Back to Hamlet reviews.