There's always been plenty of method in Kenneth Branagh's madness, and his audacious treatment of Hamlet - a full-text, four-hour, 70-millimetre act of sustained hubris - is no exception. Essentially, instinctively, Branagh is a populist in classical clothing, a bit of cultural schizophrenia that makes him the ideal priest to preside over the marriage of movies and the Bard. To me, that marriage has never seemed as unlikely as some would contend. Shakespeare was no mean showman himself, and, these days, many of his favourite tricks are more at home on the screen than the stage. Voice-over might well have been invented to dramatize a windy soliloquy, and what better method than a stark close-up to capture a whispered aside.
Branagh understands that principle and - in the sets, in the casting, in the scenes that succeed brilliantly, even in those that flop horribly - you can see him struggling to apply it here, to delve into his own dual nature and effect a peace between the warring factions of high-brow and low. He almost brings it off. This Hamlet may not be perfect, but it is perfectly engrossing.
Let's start with the setting. It's the late 19th century in what appears to be czarist Russia - a time frame sufficiently distant to make the language seem credible, yet close enough to keep the central ideas piercingly relevant. Fittingly, Branagh mounts a towering play on a huge canvas, turning the interior of Elsinore Castle into an opulent Imperial Hall, a cavernous room adorned in checkerboard marble and completely encircled by framed mirrors. The latter are a glorious touch. In front of one, as Hamlet's tortured reflection glowers back at him, "To be" fights its ontological battle with "Not to be." Behind another, a two-way peephole, the King and his Lord Chamberlain advance their not-so-courtly intrigues. The mirrors, then, fulfill their own dual purpose, underlining the celebrated theme of ambivalence while serving as a neat correlative for the pop/classic schism in the production itself.
That schism continues through the casting. Branagh wisely reserves the plum parts for British thespians with an ear attuned to the iambic pentameters - Derek Jacobi as the ever-scheming Claudius, Kate Winslet as a libidinous Ophelia, Julie Christie as an elusive Gertrude (she's always seemed an underwritten character), and Richard Briers as an extremely dangerous Polonius. Briers's interpretation is a significant departure from tradition, and it too is hit-and-miss - we lose the comic relief that Polonius usually provides, but gain a wackload of darker resonance. Then there's Branagh himself in the title role, and he's superb. His very appearance is a study in contrasts - clad head to toe in black, yet topped by a platinum dye job. His manner, even his speech, is made to the same measure, alternating between full-throated eloquence and near-breathless pouting. It's a controlled, affecting performance - always evocative without ever floating up into tour de force bombast.
Of course, showmen invariably double as salesmen. Thus, to prime the box office, Branagh is careful to bolster the Brits with a glitzy assortment of top-draw names, mainly American: Jack Lemmon (Marcellus), Charton Heston (the Player King), Billy Crystal (the Gravedigger), Robin Williams (Osric), Gerard Depardieu (Reynaldo). But, shrewdly, he's equally careful to shoehorn the biggies into cameo parts, where they can offer maximum star presence while doing minimum esthetic damage. If you're looking for a pleasant surpise, check out ol' Chuck Heston - among the gaggle of Yanks, he's by far the best of the bunch.
When he steps behind the camera, Branagh the director isn't nearly as controlled, or as uniformly impressive. Give him high marks for bravery, yet his actual achievement falls into three distinct categories. The Good: During Ophelia's early conversation with her busybody father ("My Lord, he hath importuned me with love in honourable fashion"), flash-cuts reveal her and Hamlet enjoying a less-that-honourable roll in the hay - a sexy, subtextual insertion that neatly enhances the text, exploding her daughterly discretion. The Indifferent: The ghost sequence, set in a snowy woods laced with surrel flames, is shot like a fifties' horror flick - nice try but ho-hum. The Bad: Similar flash-cuts in the midst of Hamlet's "Alas poor Yorick" lament are laughably out of synch with the poetry of the piece. In fact, the film limps noticeably after the intermission break, and the entire last act seems a disappointment - for all the swash and buckle and chandelier-swinging, the grizzly climax is more whimper than bang.
However, the commas-and-all approach is definitely a bonus. This is no mere classroom exercise, as Branagh ferrets out every ingenious echo and haunting parallel, reminding us of the play's impeccable construction. Just consider the treatment of Fortinbras. Normally, at the 11th hour, he's simply whisked in as a benign deux ex machina. here, the guy emerges in his true vainglorious colours - a one-man Red Army, a short-fused soldier capable of making the hardest of decisions with the hardest of hearts. He's no sweet Prince, nor is he meant to be.
Big-thinkers have recently coined a word to describe the amalgamation of diverse parts into a single, vast entity, and it too involves the union of seeming opposites - urban and suburban, inner and outer, high-rise and low. The word is megacity. Well, capping this year's vogue for the Bard, Kenneth Branagh has thought really big and built pretty well. His cinematic Hamlet is a megacity, only it rhymes with audacity, and I dare you not to admire the sheer bravura of it all.
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