Kenneth Branagh's film of Hamlet looks so romantically Ruritanian that the melancholy Dane seems about to meet The Prisoner of Zenda.
All right, you can take Shakespeare just about anywhere these days, but there's something very strange about a Hamlet set down in the land of chocolate soldiers, gilt gingerbread, waltzes and Anthony Hope novels.
Branagh's excuse is that the volatile kingdoms and ever-changing boundaries of 19th Century northern Europe offer the perfect context for such a masterly tale of palace intrigue. Maybe, but it's hardly an idea bristling with metaphorical opportunities. Setting Richard III in a 1930s fascist State, as Ian McKellen did last year, made psychological sense. The motivations for a Ruritanian Hamlet, however, seem purely visual. Big, bold, beautiful pictures for spreading over 70mm and 4 1/2 hours. This is the "director's cut", which opens this week. The shorter version follows on June 12. All tastes catered for.
To be fair about the look of the film - and it's not hard - the sweep, scale and all-round big-budget appeal are indisputable. The director of photography is Alex Thompson (a former collaborator of David Lean's), whose work helps to achieve a grand, light-filled production, in which the usual stony corridors and windswept battlements are replaced by snowy, crystalline landscapes and graceful rooms hung with velvet and silk, and full of burnished surfaces. The central set, Elsinore's State Hall, is paved in black-and-white marble and lined with mirrored doors which begin, after a while, to look like a motif for the whole film.
Smoke, mirrors, showmanship and a cast so crammed with famous faces that they're almost lost in the passing traffic. Was that John Mills? Just a glimpse. And Gielgud, Richard Attenborough and Judi Dench. Branagh has even turned up the buck-toothed Ken Dodd, sighted as poor Yorick in a flashback to livelier times.
Then comes the Hollywood contingent, led by a white-faced Jack Lemmon, cast, for reasons best known to Branagh, as Marcellus, who sees the ghost (towering Brian Blessed with voice amplified to Darth Vader boom). Charlton Heston is here, too, firmly standing on his dignity. His Player King is virtually a reprise of Moses from the Ten Commandments. Robin Williams minces briefly as Osric, while Billy Crystal is surprisingly effective dispensing gallows humour as one of the gravediggers.
It's a bit like a succession of high-wire acts. Some dazzle; others die right there in front of you. Julie Christie, for instance, is served well by the costume department, yet can't find the key to Gertrude's character. Nor is she helped by Branagh, who treats her with a contempt unleavened by any of the Oedipal complexities we've come to expect from modern Hamlets.
And while Derek Jacobi catches Claudius's Machiavellian side with chilling exactitude, he is far from convincing as a figure of warm desire and lusty appetites, handicapped as he is by a hairstyle that makes him look like a peroxided bottlebrush.
Yet Polonius is boldly and intriguingly portrayed by Richard Briers as a malevolent old lecher - a manipulative presence in the lives of both his children. And Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia (a poignant Kate Winslet) has a passion intensified by love scenes drawn from Ophelia's memory.
The mad scene, though, is a mess, tricked out with the Grand Guignol accessories of straitjacket, padded cell and even a dousing with a firehose in a rough and ready demonstration of primitive techniques in hydrotherapy.
The same straining for cinematic effect colours Branagh's own performance. After his relaxed and conversational readings in Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, you might have expected him to come up with a Hamlet who has a few vague memories of what it was like to laugh. Instead he offers a whining obsessive prone to sounding off whenever he can muster an audience. As a result lines are often delivered in odd and inappropriate places. His "Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt" speech, for instance, comes as a postscript to Gertrude's and Claudius's wedding scene as he stands in a snowfall of confetti, brushing it from his shoulders like dandruff. He does not do disgust well.
His behaviours during the play-within-the-play scene is wildly hyperactive. He all but thumbs his nose at Claudius with a "Yah, boo, sucks. You did it," and the soliloquies are such rants that you start to cringe when you see one coming. You may also begin to think nostalgically of Mel Gibson's intelligently understated work in Zeffirelli's film of Hamlet.
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