Let us not underestimate the magnitude of the task Kenneth Branagh has set himself - or the astonishing degree to which he succeeds in pulling it off. To commit oneself to sitting through a full length theatrical performance of William Shakespeare's Hamlet is rather like marriage: not to be entered upon lightly or ill-advisedly. Not many stage directors have risked keeping audiences in their seats for over four hours, and some of the cuts have become almost orthodox. Who, for instance, has ever seen Reynaldo receiving his instructions from Polonius or the second grave-digger? Well, in this film, Branagh has spared us nothing and the result is pretty remarkable: a film considerably longer than Laurence of Arabia or The English Patient, and much more entertaining than either of them.
My review of the two hour version praised it as a "fine, vigorous, cinematically aware film", which deserves a wide success with a big popular audience. Nevertheless, one had misgivings about the uncut version. Perhaps it would be just too much of a good thing. Perhaps the star-spotting, with several big names unglimpsed in the 2 hour job, would reveal mere opportunism at work. Perhaps there would be revealed good reason for the usual cut scenes. All right, four hours is a long time, even with an intermission, and there are some miscalculations, but those studying Hamlet or those who think they know all it can possibly have to offer should certainly take advantage of the brief season it is being given.
What does this longer version contain that the two hour one doesn't? The play's opening scene for one, in which Nicholas Farrell as Horatio gives an intense, intelligent, intelligible account of the officers of the watch of the details of the warlike Norwegian Fortinbras' ambitions in Denmark. As a consequence, Rufus Sewell's Fortinbras, most often in close-up, sometimes with wonderfully composed shots of his army in the snow-covered background, becomes a more ominous presence in the film, and the sense of strife beyond the Danish borders is intensified, complementing the disruptions within the court at Elsinore, and adding new power and meaning to the way in which Fortinbras takes charge at the end. Many productions simply omit Fortinbras and, in doing so, lose a whole political dimension of the play, as well as a telling contrast with Hamlet himself. Here is a young man who will do what he must with uncomplicated expedition, and Sewell is a finely-glowering foil for Branagh's Hamlet.
The two inserts of John Mills as the old King of Norway may not add much, but they are not irrelevant, which is what the sudden appearances of John Gielgud and Judi Dench are as Priam and Hecuba. These are no more than characters mentioned in a speech from a play quoted by the Player King (an imposing Charlton Heston). It is hard to justify their appearance: they are not presented as characters in a play, but as if we are suddenly flashed back to actual battle in ancient Greece. Dench and Gielgud could never be less than eloquent, riveting to watch and, when given anything to say as they are not here, to listen to, but even Branagh stops short of inventing Shakespearean verse. Hamlet's dealings with the players, given in full, are moving in what they reveal of his capacity for pleasure and genuine affection.
Others in the ranks of the famous who make it only into the longer version are Richard Attenborough, who delivers his half-dozen lines as the English Ambassador ("The sight is dismal", he sums up the final carnage) with dignified gravity, and, most outrageous of all, Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo. In none of the fifteen or more Hamlets I have seen on stage or screen has Reynaldo ever appeared, but with Depardieu, looking a little like Oscar Wilde, it is impossible to overlook him here. In fact, this whole scene in which Polonius sets Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes in France, works superbly in this film: its importance to the narrative as a whole is in the way it enunciates the theme of watching and being watched which is central to the plot's development. (Claudius and Polonius watch Hamlet with Ophelia; Hamlet and Horatio watch the King during the play-acting; and so on) Depardieu's charismatic stillness seems to force Richard Brier's Polonius to elaborate his arguments and to meet them with scarcely concealed contempt.
One would have supposed the second grave digger to be entirely superfluous, and perhaps he is, but Simon Russell Beale makes him an engagingly rotund presence and a fit sparring partner for Billy Crystal, who gets the better lines as the first. And so one could go on, noting other such inclusions. More important, some of the film's thematic preoccupations come over more potently in the longer version: as well as the watcher-watched binarism, there is a piercing sense of contrast between the hedonism of Claudius' court and the pain of Hamlet's grief and disillusionment; between the violence of Hamlet's bursts of action and the thought which freezes action, most notably in the soliloquies in which their sheer reflective weight seems to stop him in his tracks; between his apparent cruelty and the tenderness of his affections. All of these contrarities are rendered with a passionate sense of their incompatibility, which cinematic practice reinforces in the alternation of intimate close-up and echoing long-shot, or of glittering interiors and bleak landscape.
Not all the wild and whirling camerawork serves a useful purpose, and sometimes in Branagh's own performance in the longer version there can seem too much physical ferocity, but these are essentially quibbles in assessing a film in which so much is achieved with breathtaking confidence. Branagh appears often to have been subjected to the tall-poppy treatment in Britain: this can only make one ponder the old adage about prophets in their own country, for in this vast enterprise he has created a fast, busy, witty, moving, hugely entertaining version of a play which is all too easy to emblam with reverence.
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