“Daddy! Daddy wasn’t there!”
I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The little boy you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet’s theatrical release.
Hamlet past his bedtime
I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting – or buying.
My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.
Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked my own little prince. Hamlet’s speech to the Players about the right way of acting was perhaps more amusing than Shakespeare intended, taking account that Branagh loves nothing so much as a speech that lets him – literally – spit out his lines. But in contrast to, say, Olivier, Branagh gives me a Shakespeare I can believe and become involved in.
As with the exceptional Henry V and the delightful Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh’s staging and direction are superb. He is redundant in the way of Hollywood – dialogue, action, scenery and music all saying the same thing at the same time. In normal Hollywood films this is often – always? – insulting, but the Bard profits by it, since dialogue four hundred years old can use the boost. Again, Cameron is the proof: He was able to glean meaning from the comic relief of Polonius, putting him one up on Gertrude.
This is me on 2/8/97, when I saw Hamlet at the cinema:
This is how Kenneth Branagh takes his Intermission from Hamlet:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
This is from Act IV, Scene IV, rather late in the show to give the audience a break. The natural break is Act III, Scene IV, dragging out the body of Polonius. Branagh picked this because it’s the most dramatic point in the story, and, for me, he could just as well have ended the movie right there. He himself is very strong in this speech, as strong as he was in the Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V, and but for Ophelia’s burial and the duel with Laertes, Shakespeare never gets back to this pitch. At the end of this speech, I was left simply stunned, my breath gone, my eyes uncloseable.
Because I’m about to quibble around, I want to start by saying this: Branagh’s Hamlet is exquisite. Branagh does for Hamlet what no other filmmaker has done: He makes a film of it. Too much filmed drama is filmed stagecraft, and the stage is a medium unsuited to film. Film is not about motion and gesture, it’s about expression and reaction. Film is about face-acting as the drama never can be, because we can never come close enough to see the eyes of the actors on the stage. This is what Branagh does in abundance: He shows us eyes and mouths and saliva raining out of the mouths of exercised players and delicate wrestlings for attention. He takes Shakespeare, all but perfectly literally, and makes a movie of it, a real movie, not a play stuffed into a suitcase.
In the same respect, he makes Shakespeare accessible and understandable. There are times when I want to rush him past his elaborations, but I have to conclude that his consideration is well considered. In particular, his willingness to get the comic relief characters to their sometimes difficult pay-offs is admirable. By leaving the text alone, he gives Claudius a humanity he never gets anywhere else; Derek Jacoby is very fine in this role. I could wish that Gertrude were more obviously a vain and useless creature, and Julie Christie takes her too far the opposite way, for me, after Polonius’ death. Kate Winslet’s Ophelia is a little to ingenuish for me, but her foiling turn at madness is quite fine. Branagh’s Hamlet is incomparable. He goes over the top, frequently and with abandon, but that’s a part of the Branagh show. But in his pantomime of madness he is superb, as he is in his interactions with Horatio, with the traveling actors, and, especially, with the ghost of the dead king.
In smaller roles, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio was quite good. Charleton Heston as the Player King was amazingly good; he wasted himself on all those Hollywood movies. Billy Crystal was okay as the grave-digger-originally-from-the-Bronx, and the rest of the big name actors in bit parts were more distraction than attraction. In particular, Robin Williams as Osric was just awful.
Not as awful as Keanu Reeves in Much Ado About Nothing (although he was quite convincing as the Hal-analogue in Your Own Private Idaho, which is Henry IV Part II with narcolepsy and sodomy). But also not nearly as good as Michael Keaton’s Constable in Much Ado About Nothing. In truth, I don’t understand the comic relief in Shakespeare (in truth, I don’t understand much about Shakespeare). In Hamlet, while the comic relief does break the tension, it seems to do it at precisely the moments when the tension is most brutal, when to break it is to betray it. In Much Ado About Nothing, the comic relief provides exceptionally funny material in a play that is already very funny. I don’t get it.
I don’t get the back story in Hamlet, either. This is Branagh’s press cachet for the film – complete and uncut. Thus we have all of the machinations between Denmark and Norway, with Poland thrown to the dogs of war, and there is no reason for it whatever. It lends credence to the idea that this is a kingdom, not a domestic drama – that this is Shakespeare and not Ibsen. But it doesn’t actually do anything except get in the way and stretch things out by a lot. It gives us that speech above, but that is the very last we will see of the ambitious Fortinbras until Act V, Scene II, the very last few words of the film. Shakespeare establishes that, by dithering, Hamlet cost himself his father’s vengeance and failed to prevent all those other many tragedies. This resulted in the loss of all his father had won from Norway, plus the loss of Denmark itself, but that seems almost trivial in light of the many tragedies that immediately precede Fortinbras’ appearance at Elsinore.
Near the point: Branagh’s handling of Act V, Scene II is by turns excellent and incomprehensible. The high drama of the duel and its many attendant deaths is excellent. The simultaneous invasion by Norway makes no sense to me at all. The film ends much better than did Henry V (in which Emma Thompson is permitted to giggle away the dignity of Harry carrying the dead boy through the mud of Agincourt; Shakespeare be damned!, this is where that film should have ended). Laertes’ redemption is affecting, as is Hamlet’s funeral.
Now that I’ve quibbled all this much, I want to reinforce the original point: This is a thing of great fineness and beauty. Branagh has done masterfully, as has his cast. The sets are exquisite, and Branagh of course makes fine use of the outdoors. This is the lightest, brightest, most beautiful Hamlet ever, and even in his brooding, even in his often comic faux madness, Branagh never lets Hamlet trip into despair. Into rage, very effectively, but never into that simpering self-absorption that was Mel Gibson’s sole contribution to the canon. Visually exquisite and Branagh makes full use of his 70mm filmstock. The music is very good, very tellingly appropriate. The ordinary bit-players are better (by a lot) than the big-star bit-players. Even the small things I’m quibbling about were better than all but the best of Hollywood. This film is a wonderful thing, and you ought not miss it.
