The rest is silence

Who, when, how long?
Kenneth Branagh, 1996, 4 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
65mm.

What's missing?
Not a bloody line--and now that I've seen this, I'm confident that that is not true of any other version I've seen; I'm also confident that, reverence to the Bard notwithstanding, no film version should strive to include every blessed line.

What's changed?
Very little textually, but I did notice that about ten lines that Claudius speaks beginning c. IV.5.80 (editions vary), "When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions . . .," get moved to the start of that scene. Maybe there are other such liberties, but I wasn't alert enough to catch them.

Oh, wait: there are some lines not delivered per the text, perhaps most notably and effectively during the scene where Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude his theory about Hamlet's madness: he brings Ophelia in, forcing her to start reading the letter. Overcome, she runs away, whereupon Pol reads the poem, but then Hamlet himself takes over, as we see a flashback to Ham & O in bed.

I'm not sure whether that falls under the rubric of the changed or the odd. Of course, no audience since WS's time has not wondered whether O & Ham have actually made the beast with two backs, and I'm not at all sure what's gained by making it explicit, as Branagh does in three or four flashbacks. (Well, aside from seeing Branagh and Winslet naked, to which I certainly have no objection.) Those flashbacks completely change the tenor of Laertes' farewell lecture to O, as well as Pol's chiding afterward: they're both telling her "don't fuck him," and she's guilty because that horse is already out of the barn. Maybe it's not a minus, but I don't see it as a plus. More about that interesting sequence below.

What's odd?
Quite a bit, some to the good, most not.

Let me start with the worst: the ending just absolutely blows. In the text, there's a stage direction, "March afar off, and shot within," after which Hamlet asks, "What warlike noise is this?" and Osric answers, "Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland / To th' ambassadors of England gives / This warlike volley." From that evidence (and intuition, and will, perhaps) the dying Hamlet "prophes[ies] th' election lights / On Fortinbras" for the now-vacant Danish throne.

How does that translate to the final fencing duel being intercut with the Norwegian army marching on Elsinore, overrunning all sentries, and skewering Osric such that when he delivers the line, he holds up his bloody hand? How does that translate to F (Rufus Sewell at his testosteronic peak) being crowned while Hamlet's still warm? It's all an inexplicable overreach of the text--did Branagh decide that the final scene just wasn't gripping enough as written?

Apparently so, because he also turns Laertes into a rank coward in that scene, running away from Hamlet after nicking him with the unbated and envenomed foil--running away and up a flight of stairs, so that after Hamlet nicks him back w/ the poison blade, he can, as if the foul practice is insufficiently turned on him, tumble over the balustrade to the floor below. Silly, silly, silly shit, followed by Ham slinging the envenomed blade from the landing to the ground to skewer Claudius, then unloosing a chandelier onto him before running down to force the poisoned chalice onto him. It's like fucking Die Hard Danish. Finally, we have a statue of old Hamlet being toppled by the Norwegians in an unsubtle and completely inapt allusion to the toppled Lenin statues after the Wall came down. Look, if Hamlet has just been the last bastion of corrupt Communism, why the hell should we care about his moral dilemmas in the first place? This is just brainless filmmaking--"Hey, we have a big statue of old Hamlet--you know what we could do with it at the end? . . . "

And yet.

Back to the Laertes-Ophelia-Polonius sequence in I.3. Maybe I'm just dim, but in all the times I've read the play and all the films of it I've seen in the past five or six weeks, it has never before been so obvious to me that Laertes' lecture to Ophelia parallels the lecture he's about to receive from Polonius, and thus clearly suggests that he's a foppish Polonius in training. One seemingly pointlessly weird thing about that sequence is that when Pol starts his farewell speech, the scene abruptly shifts from outdoors to a chapel. At first I thought, "Brilliant: this speech is a flashback, addressing one question I've always had: if Laertes has already taken his leave from his father once, as he tells O he has, why has Pol waited until now to impart these words of wisdom?" Well, I still think that would be a brilliant way to play it, but that's not Branagh's game, because instead of bringing us back to the outdoors location for the final farewells and Pol's badgering of O, we stay in the chapel, making the scene shift just a strange puzzle. Nonetheless, the scene ends on a high, as a tearful O delivers the final line, "I shall obey, my lord," not aloud to her father, as in every other version I've seen that includes the scene, but as an interior monologue.

Other unusual approaches are hit and miss: Ham essentially provides a comic crowd warm-up for the play-within-a-play, telling jokes and dragging Pol into the act. It's interesting, but I don't know if it's useful on balance. He also dashes back to the stage after the first scene to ask Gert what she thinks--a device with some precedent. The play itself is a series of rapid cuts with a lot of reaction shots--clearly Ham and Hor are not the only ones observing the reactions from the royal box. When the Player King is killed, we also get a couple of cuts to Old Hamlet's murder. This just all seems rather gimmicky and obvious.

On the other hand, Claudius's quasi-attempt to repent afterward is cleverly staged in a confessional. For those non-Catholics in the crowd, this is where Catholics go to own up to their sins to a priest as an intermediary of God. In the old days, this was supposed to be confidential, so there was a screen between the penitent's closet and the priest's. So here, Claudius is going through his self-serving declaration of inability to repent while sitting with his back to the screen. Then when he asks angels to help him to his knees, he assumes the penitent's position, and we see suddenly that Ham is in the priest's closet. When he muses that he could kill Claud now, we see his dagger come through the grille, toward Claud's ear, which I liked a lot. Unfortunately, they had to take it a step further--a fantasy moment in which Ham actually drives the blade home and blood spurts. Unnecessary, Ken. Still, a fine, inventive scene.

There is much that's unusual (nude scenes aside) about the treatment of Ophelia. When she comes in to tell Pol of Ham's strange appearance in her closet, she uses up too much emotion--it reminded me of "Thomas Kent" having to be toned down by the playwright in his early speech about Rosalind in Shakespeare in Love. "She's some baggage we never even see," says WS (or words to that effect). "What will you do when you meet your true love?" Same thing here: she has two mad scenes to come, plus the maddening exchange w/ Ham; Branagh the director should have held her back here.

After Polonius is killed, we get a gratuitous scene of soldiers violating O's bedchamber, looking for the killer. Then she appears, calling to Ham, before he runs away from R&G and co. Again untextually (maybe Branagh just wanted to get Kate's face onscreen as much as possible, which is a reasonable strategy), we see her seeing her bloody dead father being carried away. We see her straitjacketed and capped at the start of her first mad scene, and then after the second, we see her getting hosed down in a cell--and we see that she has secreted the key in her mouth. And when she's dead, we get an obligatory shot of her soggy drowned face.

This is all kind of ghoulish stuff, and all completely unnecessary. On the other hand, her second mad scene, as static as the first one (once Gert loosens her binding) is kinetic, is a quiet marvel, played in a face-to-face squat with Laertes, both of them reflected in a mirror behind. It's one of several good mirror scenes in the film, maybe the best. At the end of the scene, any trained psychologist--hell, anyone who's watched a few psychological dramas--can see that she's made her decision and she wants watching 24/7.

Another notable use of mirrors is in the "To be" soliloquy and the following exchange w/ O--the mirrors in a hallway of doors are two-way, and Claud and Pol are secreted behind one, but which? Well, the one he's addressing, of course--and the tenuousness of the separation is such that Claud flinches when Ham brandishes his bare bodkin. When O comes, Ham doesn't suspect they're being spied on until the spies make a noise just before "Where is your father"--this makes the rough treatment of her before that point a bit puzzling: cruel to be kind? In any case, after he begins to suspect, he ramps up his abuse, dragging her from door to door as he searches, then finally pressing her face up against the mirror/window he senses is concealing the spies.

But it's another soliloquy that provides one of the high points of the film, and one of the most unusual readings--though why unusual is hard to fathom, because it's clearly the right one. This is the soliloquy after asking Fortinbras's captain about the force initially mustered to march on Denmark, now Poland-bound. Hamlet then muses on the pointlessness of such war--a speech parallel to the "What's Hecuba to him" soliloquy after the First Player's rote speech, but more expansive. This is glory, Hamlet concedes: to risk all for nothing. But if some will risk all for nothing, how the fuck can someone who has a genuine grievance still be sitting on his unhomicidal ass? "From this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" It's a big fucking speech, a final declaration--exile to England notwithstanding--that Claud is going down. But bizarrely, it gets slight play if any in the other versions.

Here, Branagh positions it right before intermission and stages it with a gorgeous snow-and-mountain background. And in that snowy field the Norwegian soldiers are arrayed, ready to fight and kill and die for an eggshell. As the speech reaches its climax, the camera pulls back, showing more of the mountains, which dwarf the shrinking Hamlet, thwarting his ambition just as his exile does. It's an amazing bit of filmmaking--and of Shakespeare-filming--and it makes you ready to forgive a lot of the film's flaws.

Flesh?
Too too solid. This soliloquy, incidentally, is where I cast off my early doubts about the production and about Branagh's Hamlet. He gets a 10 on this solil. and high marks on all the rest.

Ghost?
Stiff, a stiff. Spooky blue contact lenses. Had no idea until the end credits that he's played by Brian Blessed, who was Augustus to Derek Jacobi's Claudius way back when. The big Hamlet-Ghost scene is sorta Stephen King-ish, or maybe early Sam Raimi-ish: big cracks open up in the ground, a ton or so of dry ice is converted to smoke--silly.

Ham-Gert eros?
Not a bit of it; Julie Christie is as maternal a Gertrude as I've seen.

Other people?
A big freakin' distraction, frankly--too many cameos by Stars:

• Jack Lemmon, absolutely dreadful as Marcellus;
• Gérard Depardieu, nearly as bad as Reynaldo, apparently intent upon crafting an accent that can't be understood but isn't really French;
• John Mills, unrecognizable as Old Norway;
• Charlton Heston, surprisingly acceptable as the First Player;
• John Gielgud and Judi Dench as Priam and Hecuba, who, of course, are mentioned only in a speech delivered by Hamlet and then the Player, and so are seen only for a few seconds and make barely articulate sounds; it is impossible not to wonder what stars of that magnitude earn for such appearances;
• Billy Crystal, surprisingly good as the lead gravedigger;
• Robin Williams, as a sort of Mayor of Munchkinland Osric; is this when he started to be consistently insufferable, or had that already happened?

On the other hand, casting Timothy Spall as Rosencrantz (or was he Guildenstern?) was a perfect touch, and something should be said about Jacobi's Claudius.

Well, here's something to say about it: it's just the best Claudius ever (and I know at least one person who thinks his Hamlet was the best ever). This Claudius is a political genius--he's so good that if you knew nothing about the play, you would think him a sympathetic character in I.2, and you would be skeptical of the Ghost's testimony until Claud confesses just before the "To be" soliloquy. At the play-within-a-play he loses his cool for a while, but he regains his seductive politesse when Laertes returns. This portrayal makes it absolutely understandable that Gertrude would fall for him, whatever Hamlet might think of his father's and uncle's comparative merits, and it makes it sensible, moreover, that all Denmark would have fallen in line. In short, it makes Hamlet the outsider, the sour-grapes spoilsport, that he really should be at the start of the play--it makes him earn our allegiance.

A very good, if very uneven, production; as good as any at its best, as silly as any at its worst, but take it for all in all, well worth four Mouse-traps.