Almost great Dane

This Hamlet's fault lies in the stars

by Peter Keough

Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Adapted by Branagh from the play by William Shakespeare. With Branagh, Julie Christie, Derek Jacobi, Kate Winslet, Richard Briers, Nicholas Farrell, Reece Dinsdale, Jack Lemmon, Gérard Depardieu, Billy Crystal, Charlton Heston, John Gielgud, Richard Attenborough, RobinWilliams, John Mills, and Timothy Spall. A Castle Rock release. Opens Friday at the Avon.

There's at least one two-hour masterpiece in Kenneth Branagh's brave, sprawling, over-the-top adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Too bad it has to be extricated from a star-studded four-hour (not including intermission)70mm extravaganza that's the Bardic version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. A symptom of what's wrong transpires in the opening scene, in which the Ghost of Hamlet's father appears before a Jack Lemmon tricked out in bulky 19th-century Hussar garb as the bewildered soldier Marcellus. The audience at the screening I attended laughed -- which was clearly not Shakespeare's intention, nor Branagh's.

When Branagh fulfills his intentions, he transforms his inspirations into often breathtaking cinematic conceits, and his Hamlet offers some of the finest Shakespeare committed to the screen. Who would think that there could be any novel twist brought to "To be or not to be"? Branagh recites it before a mirrored door behind which lurk Claudius (Derek Jacobi) and Polonius (Richard Briers), underscoring the point that this quintessential moment of theatrical introspection is, in fact, a performance.

Branagh's Hamlet is a play of surfaces, not an exploration of depths -- the glittering halls of the sets seem more suitable for The Student Prince than for gloomy Elsinore. His hero is a man of action stymied not by existential doubts but by external circumstances -- no Freudian folderol at work here. His father murdered, his mother Gertrude (Julie Christie) remarried to the likely culprit, he's pissed that he has to do some detective work to get the facts straight before he can grab the situation by the balls and have done with it.

A scene just before the intermission sums him up. Like a Caspar David Friedrich figure, he stands in the foreground of an icy plain, bewailing his inaction to the camera, while behind him loom the antlike columns of Fortinbras's army, "twenty thousand men/That, for a fantasy or a trick of fame,/Go to their graves like beds." It's the St. Crispin's Day speech in reverse -- a rallying cry for the self, not the self-sacrificing.

Indeed, there may be too much of Prince Hal in Branagh's performance -- the film seems at times like Hamlet V. His energy and emotion peak early and never abate; and that and not the length is what makes the film exhausting. Except for the deftly wrought and flaky mad scenes, there are no quiet moments of reflection to mitigate the swashbuckling pace.

This lack of interiority has the advantage of putting the other characters in deeper relief. Derek Jacobi's Claudius is almost Hamlet-like in his brooding doubts and dreads -- he, not Hamlet, is the melancholy Dane in this version. His soliloquy in search of expiation observed by his murderously intent nephew resonates more than any of Branagh's orations, but the scene ends with a visual shocker that proves Branagh's triumph in this film is not so much his acting as his genius at adaptation.

Julie Christie's Gertrude radiates little sensuality, only a faded sadness. This is the result of Branagh's decision to eliminate all traces of the Oedipal angle; Hamlet's confrontation with his mother in her bedchamber seems more about spousal abuse than latent incest. If there are any Oedipal shenanigans going on here, it's between Polonius and Ophelia (Kate Winslet) -- his inquiry into his daughter's relationship with Hamlet explodes into an all-too-convincing violent rage arising from repressed sexual jealousy. Briers's Polonius is one to reckon with; he's pompous, all right, but also crafty, ruthless, and deceptive. It's one of the film's more engaging ironies that we see Polonius as the worthy opponent he is, not the pushover and buffoon Hamlet dismisses him as.

One of the great rewards of Branagh's defusing of Gertrude's sexuality is that it fires up Ophelia's. Winslet's scenes with Branagh seethe with sexual passion and pathology. (They're marred by his decision to include a flashback of the pair in the sack; flashbacks, such as one with Yorick looking like John Wayne Gacy in clown costume, spoil more than one scene.) The brutal double-entendre'd repartee between these genuine if dysfunctional lovers in the play-within-the-play scene is erotic and heartbreaking.

That is, until Charlton Heston pops up as the Player King, which reminded me of the Saturday Night Live routine where the stiff and ponderous actor reads from Madonna's Sex book. Billy Crystal as a Brooklynese Gravedigger and Robin Williams dressed like the Nutcracker as Osric don't help much either. Maybe Branagh wants to be the name-dropping Woody Allen of Shakespearean productions, but in this Hamlet, the fault lies not in himself but in his stars.