Clocked at three hours 58 minutes (not counting intermission), this most faithful film version of Hamlet should bring the Shakespeare express to a screeching halt. The teens who made Romeo and Juliet a surprise hit will likely be looking for the exits soon after Horatio's bewildering speeches in Act One. Who can blame them? There are good reasons for editing the play in performance, and this long-winded spectacle makes them brilliantly clear.
One again, Branagh seems to be measuring himself against Olivier, right down to his dyed-blond roots. The minor roles that were looped off or shrunken in the 1948 classic have been pedantically restored. But in taking pains to give Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Reynaldo (Gerard Depardieu in an inexplicable cameo) their 15 minutes of fame, Branagh has forgotten where to stand himself. He lacks the directorial invention to keep all of these parts in whirling motion for four hours; and unlike Olivier (or Ralph Fiennes), he isn't a riveting enough actor to be the focus of so much worry and intrigue.
The boyishness that worked so well in Henry V diminishes the agony of Hamlet. His mad prince seems callow and in over his head instead of menacingly smart and above it all. Barely able to control his fury, he drools when swearing revenge, more a danger to himself than to others. In every scene they share, he is overmatched by Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi as the ultimate smoothie, a gimlet-eyed politician whose soft eloquence and cool head mask his hunger for power.
Metternich, not Freud, guides Branagh's 19th-century interpretation. A hall of mirrors, laced with secret passageways, is the heart of Elsinore, as if to illustrate the double-dealing, cutthroat diplomacy behind the play. Exteriors were filmed at Blenheim Palace, where overwhelming scale and Churchillian echoes mock any attempt at simple human intimacy. In a clean break from traditional gloom, the main interiors are flooded in a silvery, northern light. But the glare lends private exchanges an impersonal tone, as though the castle were a sanatorium.
Without sex as a motive, Gertrude's o'er hasty marriage and motherly doting are puzzling. Julie Christie, who in middle age not only looks but also acts like Candice Bergen, can't fill in the blanks of this cipher. For a change, Ophelia (Kate Winslet) has a mind of her own. She won't be bossed by her brother or undone by a trifling student home from Germany. (She and Hamlet have slept together before, according to a few flashbacks.) Like Gertrude, she is brutalized by the men in her life. But she's no plaything and she doesn't die without a fight.
The more opulent the trappings have become--from the stagey versions of Olivier and Tony Richardson to the picturesque battlements of Zeffirelli and Branagh--the more the tragic power of the play has been muted. The gliding 70mm cameras here offer unprecedented soulless detail, epic scope without a point of view. By the time Hamlet and Claudius have finished their cat-and-mouse game, it is a relief to see Fortinbras and his storm troopers crash through the windows, if only because they signal an end to all those words, words, words.
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