The arrival of Kenneth Branagh's William Shakespeare's Hamlet (in two-hour and four-hour versions) makes one consider again the whole business of adapting the classics to the screen. Literary people persist in expecting a literary complexity when their favourite texts are filmed, and are apt to be very dismissive when they don't find it. Too often, they don't consider that cinematic complexity, which they are not trained to perceive, might take very different forms from its literary counterpart. Those trained soley in film sometimes simply consider the precursor text irrelevant, but are on the whole, less likely to lay down the law about literature than the literary are about film.
There is surely an area in which film and literature clearly overlap - above all, in matters of narrative - and those not bound to asserting the primacy of either may find a very interesting instance of "convergence among the arts", as one commentator put it. Certainly there is no sign of the current fervour abating in the matter of adapting the classics.
Audiences are promised two or more from Henry James (Agniesks Holland's Washington Square and Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove), two from Joseph Conrad (Christopher Hampton's The Secret Agent and Beeban Kedron's Amy Foster), versions of Mrs Dalloway and Anna Karenina, and three more goes at Shakespeare (Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus). Perhaps the most compelling reason for talking about adaption is just this: filmmakers seem irresistably drawn to works of literature, especially classic works, and filmgoers seem insatiably curious to "see" their favourite texts bodied forth in visual images. Filmmakers may once have felt that association with the older mode would imbue the screen version with a sort of cultural respectability, but surely the cinema has long outgrown the need for this kind of imported status. More probably, there is still some commercial mileage to be had from a pre-loved title, and, even more likely, that there is the attraction of at least a narrative skeleton which has shown itself persuasive in one medium.
Shakespeare remains a special case. He comes to us at the end of the 20th century trailing immense cultural baggage. "Shakespeare" is a commodity to inspire awe, even among those not familiar with him at first-hand, and fewer and fewer are as the oevre has to jostle for places on overcrowded syllabuses. He is undoubtedly difficult to read today when reading itself is in such competition with the visual media for our narrative attention. Shakespeare enjoins on the filmmaker the absolute requirement of making him accessible to modern audiences, and this implies not just moment-to-moment clarity but a sense of his matter having some connection with our lives. The most demanding criterion is surely: Is this intelligible/interesting to someone unfamiliar with the play on which a particular film is based? The challenges in meeting such a criterion are daunting indeed. What can be omitted? Descriptive language perhaps, if the film's visual images are doing their job. Maybe above all is the problem of securing suspension of audience disbelief when faced with the stylisation of blank verse in the intense realism of cinematic mise en scene. Simply, can we accept these characters talking to each other in iambic pentameter?
It is not the intention of this review to offer answers to any of these issues which have been brought to the forefront of the mind by Kenneth Branagh's William Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is now, unusually being presented in Australian cinemas in a two- and four-hour version, both made, astoundingly, in ten weeks, for a fraction of the cost of a run of the mill Hollywood comedy or thriller (or, say, Demi Moore's salary). It is an enterprise of great daring ("of great pith or moment", one might say), and, on the evidence of the two-hour version, it is an almost unqualified triumph: breathtaking in its imaginative sweep, hurtingly fast, greatly exciting, again and again very touching, and ending on an authentically tragic note of loss and restoration. Branagh, who instigated a revival of filmed Shakespeare with the popular success of his Henry V in 1989, here offers a vindication of the traditional approach, showing it to be as amenable to intense cinematic excitement as more obviously radical approaches - from Peter Greenway's Prospero's Books to Mercution as a transvestite in silver lame mini-skirt.
With so well-known and much-filmed a play as Hamlet, it is hard for the viewer not to wonder: How will it handle this or that scene? How will it present the Ghost? What sort of Hamlet/Ophelia/Gertrude/Claudius, etc., will it offer? Its intertextuality will include those other famous film Hamlets: Olivier's moody film noir version of 1948; Tony Richardson's 1968 filming of the London Roundhouse production with a wayward Prince from Nicol Williamson, epitomising the contemporary disdain of dissident youth for its hypocritical elders; and Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 version with a sensible, unexciting Hamlet from Mel Gibson. On the basis of the two-hour version, I should say that Branagh has succeeded in effacing these earlier competing images which some filmgoers will bring with them.
The film opens on the film's title on a stone wall which then gives way to a long shot of Blenheim Palace, which stands in for Elsinore in the exteriors at least. (The Duke of Marlborough is thanked in the credits; one hopes his home was left as it was found, after a lot of very violent action.) Superb use is made of the vast snow-covered grounds by Alex Thompson's camera, tracking through leafless woods in pursuit of the Ghost, when fires flare up and the earth seems to open as the characters run, and elsewhere achieving a Turneresque mistiness which renders the landscape dangerous. In fact, the disposition of the film space is persistently intelligent in the way it works to create an Elsinore of brilliantly-lit interiors only just separated from the potentially dangerous world outside its echoing corridors. For all its grandeur, Thompson's camerawork makes it look exposed and isolated, open to affray, and when the final attack from the Norwegian army arrives it achieves a sense of disruption the greater for being built on these earlier frissons. This is a long way from the debilitating pictorialism of Zeffirelli's lush green seagirt Elsinore. Inside the palace (interiors were filmed at Shepperton Studios, Middlesex), dazzling use is made of the splendour of state rooms (for Claudius and Gertrude's initial scene of wooing the court, while Hamlet in black remains hidden in a corner); or mirrored halls for emphasizing introspection ("To be or not to be..." is done in such a way as to insist on the duality of the issues Hamlet is weighing up) or duplicity (when Hamlet forces Ophelia to admit they are being watched by Polonius and Claudius); and of the stairs and balconies for the final duel, staged with startling ferocity.
This is not to suggest that the film's merits are confined to its manipulations of space and to kinetic effects. Very strikingly for much of its length, there is a powerful sense of domestic melodrama in full cry, and why not? The text offers anger over inheritance, adultery, murder in the cause of passion and power, and the blocked oedipal drama of the son whose unresolved feeling for his mother prevents him from carrying out his dead father's injunction to revenge. All this is rendered with accurately-judged awareness of its potential for pain, and gains enormously from Derek Jacobi's brilliantly tense and duplicitous Claudius (with cropped Prussian officer's haircut) and Julie Christie's very interesting and touching delineation of Gertrude as a sensual but light and silly woman brought face to face with horrors. Purists will perhaps not care for the representation of sexual love between Hamlet and Ophelia, and it is not clear what the drama gains from this - it really seems no more than a sop to late-20th century movies.
But while the film functions with melodramatic vigour in its first half, it undoubtedly deepens its tone to the authentically tragic not as it moves toward its denouement of the loss of one who:
Was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal.
The grief of Horatio (beautifully played by Nicholas Farrell) guides our feeling here as he farewells his friend and Rufus Sewell's Fortinbras is persuasively forceful as he claims his rights in the kingdom and orders full military honours for the dead Hamlet.
Shakespearians will - reasonably - want to know how the verse fares on the lips of the most star-studded cast since the heyday of the MGM musicals. The answer is, very well indeed, from the point of view that it makes dramatic sense rather than opting for an outmoded mellifluous musicality. One is constantly struck by the sensation of actors' thought and emotion impelling what and how they speak. And it is not only those like Jacobi, who are experienced in Shakespearian performance, but other who, like Julie Christie, Billy Crystal (the gravedigger) and Robin Williams (Osric), emerge with credit in this respect. For the most part, the potentially dangerous incongruity of declaiming poetic drama in a realist ambience is successfully skirted. Actors in closeup have to talk; they can't recite, and Branagh's adventurous (perhaps opportunist) casting is a gamble that pays off again, as it did in his Much Ado About Nothing.
Finally, of course, none of the foregoing will matter at all if the centre of the play - that is, Hamlet himself - is unequal to the task, or even if the audience feels the actor tells it nothing it didn't already know about the role. If Branagh's is not unequivocally a great Hamlet, it is still one of the most compelling I have ever seen: it is a violent, dangerous, sexual, witty, intelligent Prince. With his hair dyed blond and with moustache and imperial goatee, he invites and does not suffer from comparison with any of his famous precursors. He copes equally with the physicalities of the role: haring up and down stairs and through the woods, haling Ophelia through the mirrored corridors, hurling his mother to her bed and with the quieter more reflective moments, most notably and affectingly in the penultimate scene with Horatio when he confesses "how ill all's here about my heart".
As it happened, I saw the shorter version first (a report on the longer version will appear later) and it is likely to be the one most people will see. It deserves a wide audience because it is a fine, vigorous, cinematically-aware film.
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