Last year saw two extremes in the adaptation of Shakespeare to the big screen. On one hand, Baz Luhrmann's disastrous Romeo+Juliet treated the original like the big studios might treat a green screenwriter. (Great ideas, kid. But we're gonna bring in a rewrite team to gussy it up a bit -- you know, make it more accessible to the 18-35s.) The only words Luhrmann seemed to care about was the "William Shakespeare" that he got to put in his title. The rest were treated like obstacles that stood between Luhrmann and the ultimate highbrow action flick.
On the other, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet takes such a purist approach to the text that Branagh wasn't so much the project's screenwriter as he was the curator. Indeed, not only did he not cut one line from the play, Branagh conglomerated the two best versions -- the 1604 edition and the one found in the 1623 collected works -- to produce a Hamlet that offered essentially every last jot the Bard set down about the man in black.
Branagh's editorial decision pushed the running length of the final product to over four hours with intermission. A brave move, considering how much grief filmmakers receive from their bottomline studios when the final cut is anything near three.
More often than not, his cast is up to the task of delivering on the promise that such an epic undertaking sets out. Derek Jacobi (Claudius), for one, turns in a performance to be marveled at. Jacobi, who would have at least been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in an industry less fixated on pretty faces, inhabits the King's lines remarkably. Like all great Shakespearean actors, he is so comfortable with the words that he often takes on the extra role of tour guide, leading the audience through the halls and catacombs of Shakespeare's exquisite language.
Branagh also gives a reading to be remembered, probably the best movie rendition of the title role ever. (Branagh's competition, however, is not as stiff as it might seem. Laurence Olivier's Hamlet seems motivated by anemia more that any ghost or antic disposition, while Mel Gibson has never looked more spooked than in his 100 some-odd onscreen minutes in Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet.)
Unlike Jacobi, though, Branagh's courtier is mired in himself so much as to blunt the great tragedy's political edge. No doubt, Hamlet is the stage's great intellectual, but he also knows what's going on around him, and even the words in his state of "madness" are not just poetic babble, as Branagh's reading would indicate.
Part of the problem here may be in Richard Briers' Polonius. The right hand of the Danish monarchy, Polonius is an industrious spy and Machiavellian manipulator. J. Edgar Hoover without the frock. In an ideal production of the play, Sonnet 121 ("...why are frailer spies/Which in their wills count bad what I count good?") could be tossed in as Hamlet's lost missive to the old counselor.
Yet Briers falls into the trap of taking Polonius merely for a doddering old fool. So when he delivers his famous "neither a borrower nor a lender be" schpiel to his departing son Laertes, it's a thoughtful gesture by a kind-hearted, if a tad overzealous, father. However much of a mess Zeffirelli's Hamlet may be, at least Ian Holm's Polonius captures the inherently duplicitous and politically shady nature of the character.
Minus some of the more political elements of the drama, then, Branagh's Hamlet is in toto probably the best romantic production put to film. Appropriately enough, Branagh transported the action from the 11th century to the 19th. And while the transformation may leave some aspects of the drama behind, it adds some wonderful elements to the film as well -- most notably those of the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras, whose scenes with the invading Norwegian army become nothing short of Napoleonic spectacle.
Branagh's directorial sense is generally sharp, though as in previous films he tends to take his shots on too many wild and whirling trajectories that encircle the action like a pack of wolves.
Brian Blessed as the ghost, Julie Christie as Gertrude and Charlton Heston as the player king also do spendid work, with the remaining big names in the cast -- Kate Winslet, Jack Lemmon, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal -- rendering fine if not spectacular performances.
Ultimately, the production's reverence for the words themselves is its greatest asset. Branagh knows how to make music of the script, and -- Patrick Doyle's invasive musical score notwithstanding -- Branagh delivers symphonies where previous directors could only do minuets.
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