Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" is as bold as its hero is, famously, irresolute. There's nothing sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought about this production. It's the first movie "Hamlet" that has dared to play the full text (i.e., the First Folio plus bits of the Second Quarto) of Shakespeare's most richly ambiguous tragedy; the running time is nearly four hours. And the visual style is equally ambitious: the picture has been filmed in 70 mm., on gigantic, ornate sets and in the imposing grounds of Blenheim Palace. The best previous English-language film version was Laurence Olivier's, in 1948, which took a far more austere approach: Olivier cut the text severely, shot in black-and-white, and produced a beautiful, spectral abstraction of the play. Somewhat defensively, he called his pared-down rendering "a study in 'Hamlet.'" Branagh's "Hamlet" is no study: this is the huge, unwieldy thing itself, staged with exhilarating clarity and force.
The gargantuan scale of the production is, of course, partly intended to seduce the uninitiated with action, color, and spectacle. There's a similar popularizing impulse behind the casting of movie stars--Jack Lemmon, Gérard Dépardieu, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams--in small roles. And Branagh's direction rarely passes up an opportunity for a big visual effect: when the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father appears to him, the smoke and flames of Hell erupt from beneath the ground; after the murder of Polonius, a dizzying overhead shot shows us a great dark pool of blood; in the climactic scene, Hamlet's sword flies through the air, in closeup, and lodges in Claudius's back; when Fortinbras's soldiers invade Elsinore, they burst through doors of mirrored glass. Viewers who consider themselves sophisticated may be put off by the stunt casting or by the brazen coups de théâtre or simply by the director's obvious eagerness to please every segment of the audience; they may even mistake Branagh's intelligent showmanship for vulgarity. But those of us who are thoroughly familiar with the play aren't necessarily an ideal audience, because for us the virtues of a new production can be drowned out by the static of helpless connoisseurship.
This production, despite its flash and occasional grandiosity, is entirely innocent of intellectual posturing. In every important respect, it's nakedly traditional: it exposes itself to the most pitiless kind of comparative scrutiny. Branagh's approach to "Hamlet" is audaciously straightforward: in each scene, his aim is to make literal, material sense of the play's complex action and of the characters' often confused motivations. For a practical man of the theatre like Branagh, the real challenge of "Hamlet" isn't to explicate the play but merely to perform it, in such a way that its maddening, stop-and-start narrative maintains some semblance of momentum and in such a way that Shakespeare's dangerously unstable mixture of violence, metaphysics, morbid lyricism, and bitter wit doesn't explode in the spectator's face. The critic Kenneth Tynan once argued that "Hamlet" is fundamentally unplayable: "It is too long, and its length is spun out of frayed and trailing nerve-ends, growing wispier, as time passes, and less relevant." He conceded, however, that the tragedy's "very complications tempt us to act it and make physical sense of its contrariness."
Branagh yields to that temptation enthusiastically, with the wholehearted intensity of someone who doesn't know that his task is impossible. Maybe it isn't, after all. In this "Hamlet," Branagh himself plays the unhappy Prince, and so lucidly that every shift in the volatile character's mood seems perfectly natural. He's a startlingly normal Hamlet: neither a madman nor a neurotic, self-absorbed egghead. This likeable, regular-guy interpretation could perhaps be seen as a concession to a movie audience's desire for a hero it can identify with. But a full-length production, which attenuates almost unendurably the suspense generated by the hero's inability to consummate his revenge on his father's murderer, requires a Hamlet who isn't narrowly conceived--whose reluctance to act can't be dismissed as clinical insanity, cowardly rationalization, or foppish intellectual fastidiousness. The beauty of Branagh's performance is that it demonstrates an extraordinarily sympathetic awareness of how reasonable Hamlet's scruples are. If "Hamlet" is (among other things) the greatest revenge tragedy ever written, it is surely because in the hero's agonized deliberation we feel the full, awful weight of even the most justifiable act of murder. Branagh shows us a man who takes death very seriously, and who knows, besides, that to be designated its agent is to inherit a responsibility too large and too terrible for human reason to bear.
This is one of those revelatory Hamlets in which the actor's own best qualities merge with the strengths and weaknesses of the character and draw them together in an unexpected unity. Branagh has played the role before--on the stage, in 1988 and 1992, and in a radio production, which he co-directed, in 1992. A lot of actors give "Hamlet" one shot, put it on their résumés, and then abandon it forever, but Branagh, clearly, is determined to get it right. The honesty and dogged intelligence that fuel this impulse, and inform the whole movie, are also qualities that suit the character surprisingly well: what makes this Hamlet tragic (and appealing) is that he's so rigorous in evaluating both his bleak circumstances and his contradictory thoughts and actions.
That exacting spirit is the dominant characteristic of Branagh's "Hamlet," the source of its power and its grace. It can be felt in the acting style of the company, which is distinguished by an unusual dedication to emotional realism and narrative intelligibility. A few of the actors don't seem entirely comfortable--Michael Maloney, as Laertes, is particularly bad--but those who do respond to Branagh's forthright approach give remarkable performances. Richard Briers, a youngish Polonius, natters but refrains from doddering, and refreshes this often tiresome role with a welcome touch of the sinister. Nicholas Farrell, who plays Horatio, manages to be appropriately steadfast without being deadly dull. Derek Jacobi, as Claudius, applies his formidable Shakespearean technique to the creation of a memorable villain: a charming, superficially impressive man who does evil in order to conceal the weakness of his soul. And, as Gertrude, Julie Christie, who has never played Shakespeare, matches Jacobi's intricate effects with her own haunted simplicity: her Queen is sensuous, vain, shallow, and extremely moving.
Branagh's "Hamlet" should prove beyond doubt that this tragedy, even at its full, unruly length, is anything but unplayable. Its meaning may be unfathomable, but good actors know enough not to play philosophical concepts anyway; their job is to play creatures of flesh and blood. Branagh attends to that job with terrific ardor and an odd humility. He surrenders to the play's mysteries and instead attacks the specific, practical problems of its baffled characters; and he persuades us, finally, that Shakespeare's intimate tragedy deserves nothing less than the grand-manner treatment it receives here--that the patient exploration of human behavior is itself an enterprise of great pitch and moment. The energy and animal vitality of Branagh's "Hamlet" actually make the play seem not less but more suggestive, because in this production action is meaning, and embodies mysteries deeper than any the hero's mind, or ours, can imagine.