M O V I E S
In Branagh's full-length "Hamlet,"
cheesy showmanship gradually
wins out over good diction
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shakespeare's movie directors have always viewed the texts of his plays as a foe to be approached cautiously, wrestled to the ground and pacified or vanquished. Once, this verse was a rich conduit of imagery that flowed from actors on a near-bare stage to listeners whose ears found it fresh and throbbing. But today's moviemakers don't know what to do with it. After all, they're the storytellers; they're the ones with amazing tools for making images. Why bother with these pages and pages of magnificent iambic pentameter when you've got a 70 millimeter camera, a big production budget and modern editing tools? This is understandable; words have never held a very essential role in the world of cinema. But when a Shakespeare play is turned into a movie "property" it is, of course, his words that are bringing value to the enterprise — they can't be dismissed entirely. So Shakespeare movies have traditionally cut and rearranged the plays as if they were so much word-processor fodder. Kenneth Branagh's new "Hamlet" has many faults, but it offers one real triumph: it is the first modern Shakespeare movie that finds a real accommodation with Shakespeare's verbiage. Branagh cuts very little, and respects much of Shakespeare's sequencing of scenes. (This makes the movie over four hours long, with an intermission, but hey — it's a good story.) More importantly, Branagh's "Hamlet" doesn't feel like it's fighting the words or running away from them; it seems to accept that these great slabs of chewy verse are an essential part of the material it has to work with — at least as important, say, as the lighting. Branagh may not be the heir to Olivier that he was once cracked up to be — he's neither as audacious nor as magnetic an actor — but he knows, as well as any actor alive, how to get his mind and mouth around a speech and drive it home. His springy Hamlet, hair dyed blond, is aggressively, fearsomely articulate; he uses words as daggers and shields, lures and nets. Listening to him trade barbs is a pleasure in itself — maybe too much so. Branagh's ease as a performer undercuts the very difficulties that make "Hamlet" such a perennially popular dramatic case-study. As has become increasingly evident, Branagh is an artist who made it big young and doesn't seem to have too many wrinkles in his soul. As a result, perhaps, his is a Hamlet without much depressive pain or existential torment — a chummy and hearty and rather extroverted prince, without a neurosis in sight. His "To be or not to be," spoken into a two-way mirror with his enemies spying on him from the other side, is pleasant to listen to — but is that what a contemplation of suicide should be? In the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" soliloquy, Branagh places extra weight on a not-so-famous line: "It cannot be but I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter." This "Hamlet" lacks gall; its oppressions go down easy. If Branagh hadn't directed himself but rather chosen a director with some counterbalancing angst, this "Hamlet" might have achieved some measure of the definitive status it plainly aspires toward. Branagh's own choices as a director, here as in his popular "Much Ado About Nothing," go oddly awry. This "Hamlet" is set in a fuzzy early-Victorian Nowheresville. Blenheim Palace, a Versailles-like sprawl of classical splendor, serves as an unusually bright Elsinore, with vast black-and-white tile floors and long balconies lined with white balustrades. The costumes tend to gold braid and sashes and epaulets; there's much sipping of cognac and smoking of cigars; one might be in a remoter duchy of Austria-Hungary. There is in fact an ersatz touch of Mozart in Patrick Doyle's intrusive score — and in this "Hamlet's" conception of its ghost (Brian Blessed), who appears as an armored statue come to life. As if that weren't enough to make one think of "Don Giovanni," Branagh has fake-looking cracks in the earth appear amid much fire and steam as part of the supernatural visitation. This casual rejection of medieval gloom in favor of a hodgepodge of classicism and romanticism has limiting consequences that the movie never recovers from. While it allows some creative touches — like putting Kate Winslet's mad, straitjacketed Ophelia in a padded room out of "Marat/Sade" — mostly it confines "Hamlet" to a tamer, milder universe than the one Shakespeare imagined. The motley cast is drawn from British Shakespearean veterans and Hollywood and international movie stars turning up in minor-role cameos. That's Jack Lemmon as Marcellus blurting "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," Billy Crystal trying out a hemi-demi-cockney accent as the First Gravedigger, Robin Williams offering magnificently idiotic grins as Osric, Charlton Heston perorating as the Player King and Gerard Depardieu looking suitably seedy as Polonius' spy Reynaldo. Derek Jacobi's Claudius, though a beautifully executed performance, is in keeping with these dimensions; he's a smart politician who allowed ambition to lead him down some dark corridors for the sake of the buoyant Gertrude (Julie Christie). Richard Briers makes Polonius less the clown than is customary these days, and more of a sort of Big Man at Court. By the time he's done with his tedious "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" farewell advice to Laertes (Michael Maloney), he's gotten his son to pay close attention — and to really think about that "to thine own self be true" stuff. Like any well-intentioned "Hamlet," this one features many such moments of small illumination. Its seriousness deserves credit, as does its energy. Branagh, as fans of his "Henry V" will recall, knows a thing or two about shaping screen action. There are some wonderful chases through hidden doors down secret corridors, and the final duel gains a savage edge as it evolves from a controlled fencing match to bloody chaos. But every little triumph seems to inspire in Branagh some accompanying act of bad taste or judgment — some touch of cheesy showmanship, like having Hamlet vault down from a balcony on a chandelier to complete his vengeance upon Claudius. Where daring could help, it's lacking: there isn't an iota of sexual energy or tension in Hamlet's confrontation with his mother. At other times, Branagh's struggle to orchestrate the Big Effect becomes ludicrously ineffectual. He's not the first Hamlet to find a spiritual turning point in the "How all occasions do inform against me" speech — in which he uses the readiness of Fortinbras' army to fight over "an eggshell" as a spur to overcome his own indecision. But Branagh is the first to turn the speech into a rallying cry for an invisible army, with trumpets blasting as the camera pans back slowly to reveal a martial panorama. It's almost as if he thinks he's back in "Henry V," firing up the troops with a Saint Crispin's Day speech. But Branagh's worst device is an overuse of flashbacks beneath narrative speeches. Plainly, this is where he's announcing, "See — I may be good with Elizabethan verse, but I am a movie guy!" It works at first, as when Ophelia's mind flashes to gauzy shots of making love with Hamlet as her father's lecturing her on modesty. Then it becomes intrusive: Why go to the trouble of bringing Charlton Heston in to recite the leading Player's speeches about Priam and Hecuba if you're going to illustrate them with distracting, lavish tableaux? Why, for that matter, bring on legendary performers like John Gielgud and Judi Dench for cameos in these tableaux? Why would anyone ever give John Gielgud a non-speaking role? These overly literal flashbacks don't complement the verse; they pre-empt its power. In the ultimate act of stupidity, Branagh takes Hamlet's metaphysical lament over Yorick's skull and brings it thudding down to earth with banal images of a boy-Hamlet cavorting on the old jester's back. Branagh has enough confidence in Shakespeare's verse to demand a full hearing for it, even if it takes four hours. But he doesn't seem to have much confidence in his audience. Afraid that we won't pay attention, he steps between the language and our minds' eyes, inserting his own snapshots. Too bad they're inferior to what our own imaginations, fed by Shakespeare, can grow by themselves. Movie Archive | Previous 5 reviews: "Gator" needs aid By Gary Kamiya (1/13/96) "Citizen Ruth" By Nell Bernstein (1/06/96) "Evita" By Laura Miller (12/23/96) "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" By Gary Kamiya (12/23/96) "Ghosts of Mississippi" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96) "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96) |