out of
Grade: out of
By Jay Stone
Published on January 27, 1997
Brevity is the soul of wit but you wouldn't know it from Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh's four-hour interpretation of Shakespeare's best-known tragedy. Filled with famous stars, famous lines and Branagh's famously accessible staging of Shakespeare, Hamlet doesn't seem a minute too long even though it takes the better part of a night to view.
Unlike the truncated (and modernized) recent versions of Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, Branagh's movie is the full play with the full script and without any references to the Second World War or rap music videos. This is no-holds-Bard film-making and, as Branagh showed in Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, he has the talent to put on classic versions that, leavened with casts of well-known actors and informed by a deeper understanding, bring the old words to life again.
Those movies were just the warm-up for Hamlet. This film positively sprawls, in its cinematic scope (it's shot in 70mm), its length and its portrayal of the fullness of Shakespeare's vision. It is all intact: the ambiguities, the passions, the overwhelming emotions. If you settle in for it, there's not a dull moment in Hamlet and much of it, particularly in the performances of veteran Shakespearean performers like Branagh and Derek Jacobi, are positively thrilling.
Hamlet, for those who got in late, is the story of the gloomy Danish prince who has been told by the ghost of his recently deceased father, the king, that he was in fact murdered by his ambitious brother Claudius (Jacobi), who then married the widow Gertrude (Julie Christie). Hamlet (Branagh) embarks on an indecisive path of revenge that ends in the deaths of his true love Ophelia (Kate Winslet), her brother Laertes (Michael Maloney), Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet and others. And you thought Lars von Trier was a melancholy Dane.
Someone once said that Shakespeare wasn't so great because all he did was string together a bunch of famous sayings. To a large extent that is what Hamlet sounds like. It is not only the repository of many of Shakespeare's most famous speeches, including the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and the "What a piece of work is a man" speech. You will also hear the birthplace of many of the sayings that are the foundation of the language: Frailty, thy name is woman, and Neither a borrower nor a lender be, and This above all: to thine own self be true (the latter two from the same speech), and Brevity is the soul of wit, and Though this be madness, yet there is method in it, and The play's the thing, and The Lady doth protest too much, and I must be cruel only to be kind, and Hoist with his own petard.
This is more, however, than a collection of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits or an illustrated etymological dictionary of phrase and fable. Hamlet comes to life as an overwhelming tragedy about the nature of humanity in the delicate path Branagh walks between staying true to the play and making it a visual experience as well.
It is set in a timeless 19th century that allows for some eccentric but interesting set decoration. The longer speeches are sometimes difficult to follow, and Branagh opens them occasionally with short flashbacks showing Hamlet and Ophelia together in bed, say, or Fortinbras gathering his army.
Occasionally, he luxuriates. A scene near the beginning, when Claudius and Ophelia walk out of the court showered with flower petals while Hamlet, dressed all in black, stands there alone and brooding, is just one of a number of brilliant visual flourishes. Once you get past the short prologue, in which Jack Lemmon's embarrassing Marcellus makes you wonder how you'll live through 238 minutes of this, Hamlet opens into a magnificently complex court, filled with mirrored rooms, hidden chambers and secret passages. Branagh the director lets the camera swoop around this a bit but he's not afraid to just sit there and let the language work on you.
It soon does, thanks to the confidently underplayed readings of Jacobi and the bravely theatrical emotion of Branagh's prince--both to be expected--but also because of fine work from unexpected quarters. Julie Christie, in her first Shakespearean film, gives the difficult role of Gertrude a deeply felt sense of inevitability. Charlton Heston is surprisingly strong as the Player King, delivering his lines with a perfect ring of divine authority. Winslet, who showed in Jude that she had no trouble with Thomas Hardy, gives the same no-nonsense sexuality to Ophelia, although her final-act madness rings as melodramatic as it is written.
In a couple of the more off-beat casting decisions, Billy Crystal lends a note of twinkly-eyed mischief as the First Gravedigger, although his appearance so close to the end of the play, when all is falling apart, always seems out of place, a fault I trust Mr. Shakespeare will correct in subsequent work. There's nothing even vaguely Shakespearean about Crystal, but it's the kind of playing (like Michael Keaton's in Much Ado) that seems true to the spirit of the vulgar Shakespearean clown. Robin Williams, on the other hand, is an overly-mannered Osric. Williams is a character who is straight out of Shakespeare anyway, but here it appears as if he just wandered in from the set of The Birdcage.
Withal, this is an engaging Hamlet for those willing to make the commitment of time and attention. It's not likely to be a very palpable hit at the box office; it is, it must be repeated, four hours of Shakespeare. But it will do, it will do.
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