The movies were invented to give us experiences like Kenneth Branagh’s new film of “Hamlet.” Burningly imaginative, in Branagh’s hands, Shakespeare’s great drama of idealism, corruption, revenge and death leaps to life. And so does the title hero, the tormented prince in a kingdom of murder and lies.
Perhaps you’ve seen a “Hamlet” or two before, one of its constant incarnations on stage or one of the 60 or so film versions. But never, likely, one like this.
Branagh’s movie boasts the usual British film Shakespearian virtues: a tremendous cast — topped by Branagh as Hamlet and Derek Jacobi as Claudius — magnificent settings, scintillating cinematography. But this picture has something more important: an obsessive love of Shakespeare’s work that vivifies the whole movie, a high intensity that almost suggests Hamlet’s all-consuming adoration of his dead father, the murdered King of Denmark.
Branagh, 36 — a near lifelong lover of the play, who has acted and/or directed it since his early 20s — treats “Hamlet” as a lover should, faithfully, passionately, tempestuously. He approaches it with a mix of tender mischief and reverent grandeur. He embraces Shakespeare’s text jealously. But he also lets the play breathe, grow and sweep us away.
Branagh creates, as few filmmakers but Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier have before, a world fit for the gorgeous poetry of the lines and the characters’ rich inner life. Working with production designer Tim Harvey and the great cinematographer Alex Thomson (“Excalibur”), Branagh shows us a world of splendor and intrigue, glory and rot.
Most movies severely cut the five-act, four-hour play. (Two hours for the 1990 Mel Gibson-Franco Zeffirelli film, two-and-a-half for Olivier’s). But Branagh’s film — at least in Chicago — runs two minutes shy of the full four hours.
What a banquet of riches — literary, visual, dramatic and poetic — the movie rains down upon us! The pictorial style–with the action set in Elsinore, a Scandinavian castle in the dead of winter– suggests a fusion of Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas with David Lean’s romantic epics. Outside: a desolate expanse of snow and ice. Inside: The warmly lit, disturbingly huge interiors of the castle (shot at Blenheim Palace), with its vast ballrooms and walls of mirrors.
As in most versions of the play, Branagh’s Hamlet is a man in a nightmare, at war with a system that will inevitably destroy him, consumed with a mission he can’t possibly fulfill. Death surrounds him, teases him, drowns him.
From the moment the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the dead king (Brian Blessed), charges him with the task of avenging his murder by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, Hamlet seems ensnared. The usurper of his victim’s throne, Claudius (played by Derek Jacobi, superb player of Robert Graves’ Claudius as well) is now married to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie).
Affable Claudius controls everything, including the benign-seeming but cynical old court adviser Polonius (Richard Briers), the father of Hamlet’s lover, Ophelia (Kate Winslet) and, later on, Polonius hot-tempered son Laertes (Michael Maloney) as well.
Against this genial monster, Hamlet has only his friend Horatio (Nicholas Farrell), his mother’s love and the smokescreen of apparent insanity. And, of course, his words: the glorious speech that makes him supreme lyricist in a cast of great poets.
Madman, melancholic, hero, coward: Which is he?
In his film, director-star Laurence Olivier painted Hamlet as black-clad, blond and morose, “a man who could not make up his mind” enveloped by Elsinore’s cavernous gloom. But Branagh purges the notoriously “gloomy” Dane of melancholy and neurosis. He makes him a fiery, witty subversive, crack swordsman and lover.
It’s a dubious interpretation, but Branagh makes it work. When Olivier read the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he put Hamlet precariously on a castle tower above raging waters. But Branagh puts him in a hall of mirrors, facing down endless reflections of himself.
Around him, the rest of the cast shines as well. Jacobi’s Claudius would dominate any production. His is a beautifully worked out and infinitely subtle portrayal of weakness and cruelty masked by false solicitude. Richard Briers is a transparently devious, deliciously comic Polonius. Christie, made up to look like a great beauty in decline, is a poignant Gertrude. As Hamlet’s faithless pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Reece Dimsdale and Timothy Spall (who shows his kinder side in “Secrets and Lies”) are perfectly smarmy and insincere.
Kate Winslet’s Ophelia is more bravura and modern. In this movie, Ophelia and Hamlet make love (shown in flashback), and when she goes mad, it’s in a madman’s cell and over an icy lake. (Emma Thompson played Ophelia in the 1992 BBC radio production with Branagh and his Renaissance Players — a kind of rough draft for this film — along with current movie cast members Briers, Maloney and Farrell.)
The cast makes Branagh’s Elsinore a whole, humming world of marvelous plenitude. The film also is dotted with supporting portrayals by famous actors, whose familiar personalities reinforce the richness of the play: Robin Williams as fop Osric, Jack Lemmon as loyalist Marcellus, Billy Crystal as a wisecracking First Gravedigger, Richard Attenborough as a devastated British Ambassador, Gerard Depardieu as a brutish Reynaldo, Charlton Heston as the leonine Player King and that finest ex-“Hamlet” of all, John Gielgud as the silent Priam. (Are these stunts? Not really. The only serious quibble I’d make is with Crystal — who seems too soft and boyish for the gravedigger.)
You can quarrel with the details of Branagh’s interpretation, but it’s his interpretation, his “Hamlet,” consistently and often ingeniously realized. Very few “Hamlets” give us such a sense of boundless life and inescapable, impending death. At the end, with a ferocious staging of what sometimes becomes an anticlimax — the arrival of Fortinbras on the bloody stage — the circle chillingly closes.
Branagh’s “Hamlet” is both intensely theatrical and a boundary-breaker. As with his 1989 “Henry V” (his first tilt at the Olivier legend), he takes a modern, psychological — and anti-war — view of the play. But part of Shakespeare’s greatness is his variety. He can be approached from numerous angles, none really “correct.” Shakespeare, the world theater’s first citizen, always takes on life through his players, which is what happens again here.
There is not a moment of these four hours that doesn’t throb with life and real love for the play. Branagh has crafted a film that brilliantly and exhilaratingly interprets Shakespeare for our time. His “Hamlet,” at its height, makes a stage of all the world and fills that stage with truly wondrous players.
”HAMLET”
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh; adapted by Branagh from the play by William Shakespeare; photographed by Alex Thomson; edited by Neil Farrell; production designed by Tim Harvey; music by Patrick Doyle; produced by David Barron. A Castle Rock Entertainment release; opens Friday. Running time: 3:58. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Hamlet …………………….. Kenneth Branagh
Claudius …………………… Derek Jacobi
Gertrude …………………… Julie Christie
Ophelia ……………………. Kate Winslet
Polonius …………………… Richard Briers
Laertes ……………………. Michael Maloney
First Gravedigger …………… Billy Crystal
Player King ………………… Charlton Heston
