"Bombast," wrote John Dryden in the late 1600s, "is commonly the delight of that audience which loves poetry but understands it not." The Restoration dramatist was referring to Hamlet, or at least to a passage he found preposterous, but he could have been writing about Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version, which really is absurd.
Although you couldn't say today's audience loves poetry, let alone understands it, the popcorn crowd does know a thing or two about spectacle, and Branagh--moving the play to the 19th century--pitches everything to them, at the expense of a fellow called William Shakespeare. Ironically, although the Bard's spirit isn't always conveyed in this hyperbolic presentation, his letter is respected to a fault. There are reasons that Hamlet is usually cut to about two-and-a-half hours, and they're not simply handed down by the marketing department. In the full version, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to a palace guard (Jack Lemmon, not really up to the job), and comes back the next night for Hamlet's pal Horatio (Nicholas Farrell, fresh from Twelfth Night), and these witnesses then rush to tell the Danish prince everything they--and we, damn it--saw. It doesn't help here that this is the most awkwardly staged 10 minutes in the entire production.
Another problem is that the female parts--which survive almost intact in edited readings--grow proportionally smaller in the full version, which means that no matter how fine Kate Winslet and Julie Christie are as Hamlet's spurned lover, Ophelia, and his hastily remarried mother, Gertrude, respectively, they become bit players in the epic. There are dramatic advantages to Shakespeare's larger structure, with political angles more fully realized and relationships more ornately tangled. The new king, Claudius (Derek Jacobi), who the prince believes poisoned his father to get at his mother and the crown, is more complicated than usual, and in this Hamlet, Britcom veteran Richard Briers plays a craftier Polonius--the king's advisor--than the pompous buffoon frequently seen.
Other casting choices are less felicitous, Michael Maloney, of Truly, Madly, Deeply, is annoying as a weaselly Victorian version of Laertes, Polonius' hotheaded son. And the addition of international stars--Gérard Depardieu as the French spy Reynaldo (you have to love Shakespeare's quaint idea of ethnic names); Billy Crystal as a gravedigger; and Robin Williams, apparently still trapped in The Birdcage, as an officer with bad news--feels like a parlour trick gone sour.
Charlton Heston isn't bad as the Player King, but--not counting the fake snow and corny earthquakes--Branagh's direction takes its first serious wrong turn during Heston's big recitation, a tragic historical poem (the one that Dryden hated, as it happens) that the director chooses to illustrate, with ancient John Gielgud putting in a puzzling silent cameo. Closer to the end, when Hamlet picks up the skull of his father's court jester, Branagh superimposes on it the face of Yorick (actually British comic Ken Dodd), frolicking in flashback with young Hamlet on his back. Alas, poor audience!
The director's taste is called into question repeatedly, and he even ruins his own beautifully conceived staging for the play's big soliloquy--surely the most famous in the English language--through excess orchestration. Any at all is too much in this case, unless Branagh actually believes that Shakespeare's dialogue needs high-decibel musical goosing (even as he drops almost all the Elizabethan songs included in the original). This, after all, is the work in which such indelible phrases as "Frailty, thy name is woman," "Brevity is the soul of wit," and "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" are sprinkled among endlessly clever turns of phrase, as when someone is dubbed "a little more than kin and less than kind".
In fact, the puns and wordplay pile up at such an alarming rate, the viewer sometimes has to scramble for air. It's only in such an overstuffed setting that one can see some of Shakespeare's own faults. There's considerable overwriting and redundancy. (No servant barks out in two lines what can be delivered in 12.) And there are some rather unfortunate leftovers from his day, as in the talk of Norwegians defeating "Polacks".
Then there's the acting. Onstage, Branagh has made many assaults on the title character, and all are included here. By turns devious, wounded, and downright ornery (he seems to be putting a Robin Williams spin on the role), he's always engaging, if incoherent, and the other actors--particularly Briers, Jacobi, and Brian Blessed (as the ghostly father)--try to keep him in line. But he is, finally, too patently in love with his own voice and visage to lose himself profoundly in the role. "You would pluck out the heart of my mystery," cries Hamlet at one point, and it could almost be the actor screaming at his director.
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