SEATTLE -- Kenneth Branagh always has been brash and in a hurry. A working-class Protestant kid from Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose family fled to England during "the troubles" of the early '70s, he fell flat in love with theater when he was 15 and saw the great Derek Jacobi play Hamlet.
"I was completely struck by the power of the play," recalls Branagh, whose own movie version of Shakespeare's tragedy opens Friday in Portland at The Movie House. "It even seemed to affect me physically; I had the shakes."
Jacobi's "Hamlet" hurled Branagh out of the teen-age doldrums and into the worlds of theater and film, where he quickly became a prodigy. In 1989 came a stunning payoff: At age 28, with sheer bravado and a tottering bank balance that might have collapsed at any moment, Branagh directed and starred in "Henry V," a new movie version that audaciously set Laurence Olivier's celebrated film version of the play on its end and resparked the movie industry's pallid interest in Shakespeare.
You could call it a renaissance.
In 1990 Mel Gibson did his lean, mean "Hamlet" for the "Road Warrior" generation. Branagh soon followed with his own sunny, cheerful "Much Ado About Nothing," which wedded romance, sly humor and soaring language into a crowd-pleasing success.
The real rush has come in the last two years. Branagh played Iago to Laurence Fishburne's Othello, Ian McKellan starred in a storm-trooper "Richard III." Baz Luhrman plunked his street-kid "Romeo and Juliet" into an MTV-drenched South Florida. Trevor Nunn filmed an elegant "Twelfth Night." The Royal Shakespeare Company's Adrian Noble began work on his still unreleased "A Midsummer Night's Dream." And in one of the most fascinating films of 1996, Al Pacino searched for the soul of Shakespeare and the hunchbacked schemer Richard III in his quirky, heartfelt documentary, "Looking for Richard."
Now Branagh returns with the biggest new Shakespeare movie of them all -- a four-hour "Hamlet," with a brilliant cast that ranges from Jacobi to Julie Christie to Gerard Depardieu.
Once again, Branagh has put his emphatic stamp on Olivier territory -- a generational necessity, he insists. New cultures need to see Shakespeare through their own eyes. Besides, Branagh adds, two Hamlets are better than one. "Having the pair of them gives people the chance to compare them and sort out what they really think of the play."
Branagh's Shakespeare movies are brilliant theatrical explorations of the great plays, but they also have a Hollywood sheen that has helped rescue them at the box office from the taint of classical fustiness: If he defies the moguls by making a "Hamlet twice the length of a normal movie, he also offers a dash of marquee glitter. Legends such as John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Richard Attenborough and John Mills take tiny roles in Branagh's film, illuminating them far beyond what's ordinarily possible. In "Hamlet" and his other Shakespeare films Branagh has cast many big-name movie stars hardly known for their plummy English tones: Michael Keaton, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves, Jack Lemmon.
"Linguistic scholars tell us that Elizabethan speaking is closer to modern American, or Bristol, anyway," he says. "I get criticized about my casting by purists. They say, 'That's not authentic.' I say, 'How do you know? Were you there?'"
Bringing the Bard to people
Certainly his talent, but also his impetuousness and stubborn drive, have made Branagh, at 36, the most celebrated Shakespearean of our time. He is a fine actor, an excellent director (despite the carpings of some film zealots who don't understand the stage traditions he is adapting to the movies), a provocative analyzer of the plays. Even more, he's an entrepreneur -- the guy who has bulled his way through and got things done. Like Olivier, he is popularizing Shakespeare for a generation that didn't think it cared. And like Olivier, he is doing it through the movies.
"The possibility of connecting with a large audience is something that drives me on," Branagh says during a brief publicity visit to Seattle while on a break from shooting his newest film, "Shakespeare's Sister."
With his working-class roots, Branagh is convinced that if they try it, many people will be enthralled by the blend of politics, intrigue, passion, language and moral questioning that make Shakespeare's universe the most complex and fascinating literary creation since the books of the Bible.
At ease, and with only a string of cigarettes to betray his essential reslessness, Branagh is polite, well-spoken, drily funny and subdued. On a waning winter afternoon above the gray chop of Puget Sound, he is a russet man. His trim brown suit blends softly into his bland skin and Irish-orange hair; his face, slightly squashed and loppy, is pleasant but unremarkable.
Branagh lacks the dashing looks of Olivier, the deep purring voice of Charlton Heston (who is superb in this "Hamlet" as the shambly leader of a troupe of touring actors), the riveting sureness of Jacobi (this production's wondrously good Claudius, the usurping uncle who kills Hamlet's father and grabs the throne).
Reflecting era's moral ambiguity
So what sets Branagh apart?
He is built as much for comedy as for tragedy, and his understated drollery can expand into a rolling, caustic wit. His Benedick in "Much Ado" wore it lightly; his Hamlet uses it brutally, like a knife. The universe of Branagh's "Hamlet" is surprisingly funny, if darkly so: He has discovered in the play a mine of renegade humor that eludes most actors and directors.
Against that comic edge he balances one of his greatest strengths as an actor, his sense of calculated reserve -- a reserve always at the point of flying into something fierce or giddy. It suffused his Henry V, and his guarded Hamlet is deeply aware of the political consequences of his personal, moral dilemma.
His intelligence jabs out like pins on a porcupine. His voice is quick and piercing, locating the plain urgency and natural flow of Shakespeare's words.
But most of all, Branagh seems to embody the complex moral confusion of the postmodern age -- a time that has tumbled out of the horrors of the midcentury and into a new, smiling cynicism that preaches action over thought, exploitation over stewardship, greed over ethics, going along to get along.
For the self-examining hero -- the kind that fascinates both Shakespeare and Branagh -- this creates a dangerous moral and intellectual terrain.
Can one resist the age's gathering forces without being dismissed as a crank? How does Branagh defend Shakespeare, the master of forming words into thoughts and philosophies, when the deconstructivists who dominate the universities have declared that words have no meaning? Can private and public ethics be separated? In an age of extreme ethnic strife and corporate global opportunism, what is a nation? In a time of aggressive individualism, what does duty mean? How do we reconcile conflicting moral duties, such as defending the right to life and the right to free choice?
Exploring texts, contradictions
These are questions foreign to the "Die Hards" of our public entertainment, but just below the surface of our age. And they are the meat of Shakespeare's plays.
Branagh's ambiguity and measured irony seem made for our times: They are both weapons and defenses against its excesses. While his characters seem to have heightened awareness of their circumstances, they are also caught in them. In the movie "Swing Kids," Branagh played a cultured, considerate Nazi officer -- a good/bad man. While Olivier's idealized "Henry V" celebrated British nationalism, Branagh's dragged the king's troops, and the audience, through the bloody muck of war. In obeying a private morality, Branagh's Hamlet drags down a kingdom.
While exploring these complex men, the actor also explores the important contradictions of our time. Branagh is a great Shakespearean not because he's the best Shakespeare actor -- Jacobi and Ian McKellan can lay at least equal claim to that crown -- but because he's a bulldog about fully exploring the texts. While other actors and directors try to simplify the plays so audiences can get an easy handle on them, Branagh revels in Shakespeare's complexities. He doesn't answer questions so much as illuminate confusions; he is the Shakespearean of our day because he won't be pinned down.
A conflicted, not mad, Hamlet
Maybe that's why Branagh insisted on a full-length "Hamlet" rather than a honed-down, uni-motivated one such as the 1969 movie version, a mad exhilarating rush dominated by star Nicol Williamson's majestic bile.
"I wanted him to go many ways," Branagh says. "I didn't want to play a specific Hamlet; I've come to believe he was a man of contradictions."
As actor and director, of course, he still had to make decisions, and many of those were in deciding what his Hamlet would not be.
"I did not feel in the end that he had ever gone mad," Branagh says. "He came close to it. I don't believe he had an Oedipal complex about his mother. And I don't think he's ordinarily brooding. He's a man of some humor who finds himself in an extraordinary situation."
The situation is made more extraordinary by Hamlet's unwillingness or inability to share his thoughts fully with anyone.
"Shakespeare's pretty interested in the impact of power on people and the way they react to both the privilege and the isolation," Branagh says. "I think he's interested in loneliness."
Branagh's brash intensity
So is Branagh. In "Beginnings," his comic and contentious memoirs (written when he was 28; talk about a man in a hurry!) Branagh describes how, as a young and impetuous actor, he arranged to meet with Prince Charles to get a feel for what the inexperienced and isolated Henry V was going through when he took over the country. Branagh emerged with a deep fondness for the king-in-waiting and a respect for the pressures that royality must endure from a morbidly fascinated public.
"We want to know the warts and all of presidents, of royalty, because we know they're flesh and blood," he says.
"Larky" but disciplined
The brashness that allowed him to interview the world's most embattled prince is part of Branagh's compulsion to find whatever he needs for a role, and undeniably part of what made him noticed very young. As an anonymous student actor worried about how to play Chekhov, he dashed off a letter to the famous Olivier, seeking insights. ("If I were you," Olivier replied in part, "I should have a bash at it and hope for the best -- which I certainly wish you.")
Since then, Branagh has been having fun having a bash at it -- but also working extremely hard. John Cleese, the former Monty Python who worked for Branagh on "Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,'" said he had "never been on a set that was so silly and so disciplined."
"Larky, and then focus," Branagh sums up.
That combination of work and play may help Branagh assemble his casts of extraordinary actors, many of whom work for far less than their ordinary fees. As good an actor as he is, he may be an even better director -- not for any whiz-kid stunts but for the exhilarating breadth he brings to the likes of "Hamlet."
"You might describe my set as a benign dictatorship. I can't deny I was the boss. But you simply try to bring out the best in everybody."
Good advice for any director. Hamlet, the unhappy prince of Denmark, might have profited from it, too.