Hamlet. - movie reviews

Commonweal, March 28, 1997 by Richard Alleva

Have you ever been run over by a truck and enjoyed the experience? Well...have you seen Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet?

Hamlet is a jungle of a play and, as he guides us through it, Branagh refuses to wield a machete. His magnificent, foolhardy movie gives us the text virtually uncut, with all its narrative detours, playful elaborations, obscure allusions, blatant and subtle jokes, topical gossip. Sometimes these elements enrich the play, but just as often they bring its main action to a temporary halt. Consider: during the hatching of the plot to murder his nephew, Claudius remarks that Laertes's fencing has been much praised by a Norman gallant named Lamord, and for twenty-eight dawdling lines the finer points of Lamord are discussed when all we need to know is how much Hamlet envies Laertes's skill. Derek Jacobi as Claudius treats the passage with dispatch, but it is nevertheless forty-five seconds of pure Novocain injected directly into the viewer's brain.

There are about a score of these longueurs in the movie - twenty minutes of tedium. Only twenty dull minutes in a four-hour flick? But it is precisely because this Hamlet is four hours long that twenty minutes take a disproportionate toll on the attention span.

Branagh was surely aware of the problem as he shot the movie; trying to prevent boredom led him into a problem with his own performance: he's turned the Dane into a bit of a speed freak. At times his fast tempos do capture the manic quality that the prince can legitimately exhibit (the "Get thee to a nunnery" passage works brilliantly at a furious clip), but occasionally they flatten nuances. Though the first half of "O what a rogue and peasant slave" plays nicely as a tantrum, the second half needs a transition into seething expectancy that the actor fails to give it. (But he hits the right note with the concluding couplet.) In the bedroom interview with Gertrude, Branagh is certainly angry enough, but he fails to register the subtler shades of desperation and loathing that this scene - surely one of Shakespeare's greatest - contains. The delivery of "How all occasions do inform against me" is a disaster, turning a scorching piece of self-shaming into a gung ho, up-and-at-'em marital tirade. Doubtless this was because Branagh placed his movie's intermission right after this soliloquy and wanted to give audiences a tingle just before their escape to the lobby. But Hamlet is not Henry V.

There are other mistakes, major and minor, including a badly edited final sequence in which Fortinbras's takeover is ridiculously staged as an armed invasion. Shakespeare makes the point (properly underscored by Branagh) that Elsinore has become an armed camp against Fortinbras's approach. Branagh has ten thousand enemy soldiers charge Elsinore castle across an open plain without benefit of Birnam Wood camouflage - and the sentries see nothing until the army gets within the walls! And why was Rufus Sewell, owner of the droopiest eyelids since Robert Mitchum's, allowed to turn the Norwegian prince into an oaf? And why was....

Enough! This Hamlet is the most jaw-dropping film ever made from any of Shakespeare's plays. Here's why.

Of all the Bard's productions, Hamlet is the one that most resists the unifying hand of the director. It's not the complexity of the hero but the bursting nature of the play itself that is the problem. Where is the center in all this abundance, in this sublime variety show of the questing human spirit? But Branagh has found a center, a unifying idea that works for him and (at least while we view his movie) for us.

This theme is in the very first image: the statue of our hero's father, old King Hamlet. The monument evokes a martial ideal: warfare as an ongoing way of life and a promotion of all the virtues warfare requires - self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, physical vigor, righteous fierceness, unity of purpose. After murdering his brother, Claudius the usurper continues his brother's preparations for war against Norway, but we can see in the soft, sensual face of Derek Jacobi that Denmark has the wrong ruler if Denmark was meant to be a Viking version of Sparta.

And, in fact, Branagh and his designers give us an Elsinore that evokes the Hapsburg dynasty in its late nineteenth-century decadence. Military uniforms are everywhere in the court but they seem to be only fashion statements - even Ophelia wears one. Young men are constantly practicing swordplay within the palace, but it is the sort of fencing employed in private duels, useless on the battlefield. Polonius is a stern paterfamilias with his children but sleeps with prostitutes on the sly, and his servant Reynaldo is clearly a pimp. There are sliding doors, secret passages, and two-way mirrors in the palace: an Elsinore where courtiers must be so busy outmaneuvering each other that they have no time to strategize against the Norwegian foe. So much for self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, martial vigor, unity of purpose.

And so, in this context, when the ghost summons Hamlet it's not just a call for personal vengeance but a demand that the son restore the martial integrity of the state. But, as Branagh portrays him, is the prince the right man for the job? Branagh, both as actor and director, makes us understand clearly why it is a "cursed spite" that Hamlet was born to set the times right.