Discussion Topic #11

In 100 proffed words write a movie review of Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. You should read the following movie reviews to spur your imagination.


The New Statesman
By Jonathan Coe
1997

I've never understood how anyone can direct a film and star in it at the same time. If the actor is in front of the camera, I reason to myself, who's behind it? It's a slightly panicky feeling, like being on a bus and suddenly noticing that the driver has abandoned the wheel to go upstairs and start collecting fares. Also, how can anyone possibly combine two such different roles - one requiring the autocratic imposition of a personality, the other its complete effacement?

This week two very different actors take a stab at it: the American Steve Buscemi, with his debut Trees Lounge, and that old hand Kenneth Branagh, with his latest modest little starring vehicle, a four-hour version of Hamletin which an astonishing array of Hollywood superstars play second (sometimes even tenth) fiddle to his own performance as the dithering Dane.

In his introduction to the published screenplay, Branagh says that "a commitment to international casting" is one of his foremost principles when adapting Shakespeare for the screen. But this surely cannot explain why Gerard Depardieu, of all people, turns up for a good 30 seconds to play the part of Reynaldo, or why the wordless parts of Old Norway, Priam, Hecuba and Yorick - characters seen only in flashback, in scenes especially created for this film are played by John Mills,John Gielgud, Judi Dench and Ken Dodd respectively.

Come to think of it, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams don't get that many lines between them, either. Do you remember the film of Around the World in Eighty Days, made in the 1950s? It had a running joke whereby every minor character encountered by Phileas Fogg would turn out to be played by a Hollywood legend: Buster Keaton, Beatrice Lillie, George Raft and so on. All on screen for a couple of seconds, with almost nothing to say. Hamlet is just like that.

And although Branagh cropped up in Pacino's Looking for Richard recently, telling American actors that they had no need to feel inferior to the Brits when it came to Shakespeare, this sidelining of Americans rather argues the opposite, particularly when all the meaty parts are assigned to reliable old British thesps such as Richard Briers and Derek Jacobi.

Elsinore has been swapped for a wintry Blenheim Palace and the action relocated to the 19th century, but otherwise manic authenticity is the keynote here. This is the uncut text: not for Branagh those difficult, hard-fought economies practised by Olivier, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli when trying to give the play cinematic shape. To the First Folio text, in fact, Branagh has grafted on additions from the Second Quarto, thereby creating the longest version imaginable.

The audience gets a bottom-numbing first segment lasting two and three-quarter hours, a quick intermission, and then a final, much racier hour and a quarter before being expelled into the night air just in time for the last bus home.

And here's another thing I don't understand about this film: if Branagh reveres Shakespeare's words so much, why doesn't he trust them more? Why, specifically, won't he allow us to hear them? Patrick Doyle has never been the subtlest of film composers, but his score here is worse than intrusive. Whenever Branagh seems to be losing faith in a scene - usually about halfway through - this clunking great orchestra appears from nowhere, crashing across the rhythms of the verse, drowning out the performers, imposing its own emotional vocabulary, a million miles away from Shakespeare's.

Among those struggling to make themselves heard are Briers - a sly, insinuating Polonius - Jacobi and Julie Christie as the shifty royal couple, and Charlton Heston, behaving more regally than anyone as the Player King.

And Ken's Hamlet? Way over the top. An awful lot of shouting, for one thing: the "What is a man?" speech becomes a bizarre Churchillian rant, with Patrick Doyle doing some kind of Land-of-Hope-and-Glory impersonation in the background (except that it's almost the foreground), while Branagh's screaming indignation and athletic leaps render the play-within-the-play scene farcical. Nuance is not in it.

I was already beginning to worry about young Ken after his wrestling-in-Mazola antics with Robert de Niro in Frankenstein: after seeing the final minutes of Hamlet, in which his body gets laid out by worshipful mourners in an unashamedly Christ-like posture, I'm beginning to think that someone should take him aside and have a little word. But perhaps it's too late: heady ambitions and unlimited clout have already turned him into the Chris Evans of Shakespearean film.

If Branagh is cinema's Evans, what does that make Steve Buscemi? John Peel, I suppose: intelligent, surprising, subtle, self-deprecating. Buscemi's Trees Lounge has all these qualities and is the last thing you expect from the US these days - a rueful, incisive comedy of failure.


The National Catholic Reporter
Big, long 'Hamlet' plus 'Secrets and lies'
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN

Kenneth Branagh's production of the uncut text of "Hamlet" (Castle Rock) is easily the longest picture of the month -- four hours, with a brief intermission two-thirds of the way through. Many will prefer to wait for the two-and-a-half-hour version, which will open soon. Branagh shouldn't have had his hair dyed, but it's unfair to ask him to be Laurence Olivier. Besides, it's the only chance you'll ever get to hear all of Shakespeare's lines in a movie theater. This impelled my Swiss daughter-in-law to exclaim, "France and Germany have nothing like it. Racine and Goethe don't project that passion!"

As a long-time drama teacher, I salute the future classroom possibilities of this "Hamlet." One could stop the video to learn how the plot threads are connected, and ask students to decide what cuts they would make in their own hypothetical productions. But there is irony in Branagh's project. Everything makes me believe that Shakespeare himself would have dropped hundreds of lines and radically reconceived his play if he had been asked to translate "Hamlet" to the screen.

Unlike some academic drones, Shakespeare was no victim of bardolatry and was quite content to make his plays up out of bits and pieces from popular genres, in this case exploiting the fashion for revenge tragedy. He was careful not to lose contact with his unruly, popular audience. The best Shakespeare movie will surely come from directors -- like Orson Welles and Olivier -- who have developed such an intimate familiarity with the plays that they can exercise a magisterial freedom, seeing them freshly in film terms.

In contrast, Branagh is caught between a false ideal of textual fidelity and a hectic anxiety that his audience needs to be titillated by earthquake special effects or the awkward use of stars like Jack Lemmon and Gerard Depardieu in bit parts. Worse, he undermines the text he pretends to honor by quick visual inserts in the middle of speeches, pictorializing bits of exposition, including a shot of Hamlet as a child, amused by Yorick's clowning, or -- against the evidence of the text -- showing Ophelia and Hamlet in sexual dalliance.

Branagh's production succeeds, nevertheless, by making sense of the convoluted subplots of the original, always severely truncated in the theater and in earlier film versions. His own performance as Hamlet doesn't bring out the character's melancholy depth but is serviceably energetic, and his reading of "O that this too too solid flesh might melt" should encourage lazy moviegoers to attempt further decoding of Shakespearean syntax. Derek Jacobi is outstanding as the usurper, Claudius. Julie Christie and Kate Winslet are good as Gertrude and Ophelia. Billy Crystal is an enjoyable gravedigger.

I was less happy with the choice of Blenheim Castle as Elsinore even though it allowed for impressive cinematography, by Alex Thomson, in outdoor scenes and the huge hall where Claudius first holds state. One of the problems of rethinking Shakespeare for the movies is that the plays establish their shifting locations through poetry and are never circumscribed by household furniture. The 19th century furnishings of Blenheim make the tragedy seem petty and give the exaggerations of the climactic fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes a touch of the absurd. Such cavils, however, only suggest that I have an unrealizable cinematic Hamlet in my mind. I remain grateful for the ambitious gallantry of Branagh's new version.

The New York Times
Hamlet
December 25, 1996
By JANET MASLIN

Kenneth Branagh's fine, robust performance as Hamlet is the bright centerpiece of his lavish new version of the play. Heading a cast so stellar that majestic Blenheim Palace plays the role of Elsinore, Branagh holds court throughout a four-hour, 70-millimeter sumptuously appointed production that doesn't often lag.
This "Hamlet," like Branagh's version of "Much Ado About Nothing," takes a frank, try-anything approach to sustaining its entertainment value, but its gambits are most often evidence of Branagh's solid showmanship. His own performance is the best evidence of all.

Branagh remains a great popularizer of Shakespeare and now has the chance to speak some of the most famous lines in the English language as if they had just come to mind. He makes a dashing figure if not a terribly melancholy Dane, typifying this film's preference for bold strokes over gloomy introspection.

Sometimes resorting freely to unlikely touches, this film has earthquake special effects and a horror-film look when its ghost arrives. There are torrents of confetti when Gertrude weds Claudius, and a final fencing match on a scale that Rocky might envy.

In between, the film's many stars parade in velvet and braid through ornate chambers that are built on a cathedral scale. Alex Thomson's cinematography captures this swank atmosphere in all its gilt-edged glory.

Sometimes this visual bravado can veer toward the absurd, as when the film finds Hamlet in the foreground of a snowy landscape. There's a huge army so far behind him that the lines of soldiers look like computer-generated whiskers.

But most of this "Hamlet" is shrewder than that, with keen instincts for the essence of the play. The style here is unabashedly flamboyant, but it also works.

With a cast so big-name and polyglot that it could be assembled almost as reasonably for a celebrity roast, Branagh still gets dedication to the text, which is presented here in its convoluted, Machiavellian entirety. Of course when Robin Williams appears late in the relatively minor role of Osric, count on more than the expected number of close-ups to show Osric registering events around him.

Some of the star turns are here for blatant marquee value and stand out as gratuitous. (Gerard Depardieu and Jack Lemmon, as Reynaldo and Marcellus respectively, are here only briefly and look understandably adrift.) Blink and you'll miss John Gielgud, who has no dialogue as Priam in a flashback role.

But other casting ideas work impressively well (Charlton Heston cuts a grandly imposing figure as the Player King) or show worthwhile whimsy. Billy Crystal practically juggles skulls as the gravedigger who speaks of poor Yorick (and Branagh throws in a flashback shot of little Hamlet being amused by Yorick's clowning). But his presence suits the role and holds the attention.

Among the play's more important figures, Derek Jacobi stands out as a superb, quietly calculating Claudius, and Julie Christie makes a heart-rending Gertrude. (She looks elegant but is done up to look far older than Branagh, who himself shows off a flattering blond coiffure and lean costumes with a nicely contemporary look.)

As Ophelia, Kate Winslet gives a fervent performance that takes on even more heat thanks to the extra directorial flourish of showing flashback scenes of Hamlet and Ophelia in bed.

With a huge cast that also includes Judi Dench, Rosemary Harris, Michael Maloney and Richard Briers, "Hamlet," which opens Wednesday at the Paris Fine Arts Theater in New York, has an omnibus quality that would waver without such a strong figure in the title role. As star and ringmaster, Branagh gets to the heart of "Hamlet" and goes to admirable lengths to take his audience there, too.

"Hamlet" is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned). It includes violence, coarse Anglo-Saxonisms and a brief bedroom scene.

PRODUCTION NOTES:

Adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh; based on the play by William Shakespeare; director of photography, Alex Thomson; edited by Neil Farrell; music by Patrick Doyle; production designer, Tim Harvey; produced by David Barron; released by Castle Rock Entertainment. At the Paris Fine Arts Theater.

With: Richard Attenborough (English Ambassador), Brian Blessed (Ghost), Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet), Richard Briers (Polonius), Julie Christie (Gertrude), Billy Crystal (First Gravedigger), Judi Dench (Hecuba), Gerard Depardieu (Reynaldo), Reece Dinsdale (Guildenstern), Nicholas Farrell (Horatio), John Gielgud (Priam), Rosemary Harris (Player Queen), Charlton Heston (Player King), Derek Jacobi (Claudius), Jack Lemmon (Marcellus), Michael Maloney (Laertes), John Mills (Old Norway), Simon Russell Beale (Second Gravedigger), Rufus Sewell (Fortinbras), Timothy Spall (Rosencrantz), Robin Williams (Osric) and Kate Winslet (Ophelia)

Running time: 238 minutes, shown with an intermission.

This film is rated PG-13.