![]() ![]() But even for veterans of past Hamlets, there are significant bonuses on the textual level alone. Pic gets off to a somewhat wobbly start with the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father on a wintry night, but clicks into gear with a lushly colorful ceremony, in a dazzling mirrored royal assembly hall, celebrating the marriage of the widowed Queen Gertrude (Julie Christie) to the late king’s brother Claudius (Derek Jacobi) a mere month after the monarch’s mysterious demise.īoth his father’s death and his mother’s hasty marriage have sent the brooding Hamlet into a deep funk, and it is the revelation by his father’s ghost (a glowingly blue-eyed Brian Blessed) that Claudius murdered him that spurs the remainder of the action as well as Hamlet’s deep look into his own, and human, nature that is the substance of the play.įor young viewers and audiences unfamiliar with the work, this is about as coherent and welcoming a presentation of the storyline as they are likely to see. The director’s pragmatic approach, which includes brief illustrative flashbacks designed to fix characters and events in the viewer’s mind, will probably strike legit partisans and academic purists as lowbrow and coarse, but can be defended as well as a perfectly plausible cinematic device that both helps keep things straight and varies the visual texture.īranagh, who has played Hamlet onstage close to 300 times, transplants the tale to an unspecified period of the mid-to-late 19th century, a time well suited to the issues of shifting European borders and interrelated royalty pertinent to the play. Just as it creates the problem of length, this decision also yields significant artistic dividends through the revelation of normally excised or underemphasized aspects of the play, with the balance ultimately tipping in favor of increased meaning and richness over added dramatic longueurs.Ībove all, the film strives for maximum clarity, for laying out the political, psychological and emotional dimensions of the complex work as fully as possible, and for making the language accessible and comprehensible to the widest audience. ![]() But all in all, as near to Branagh's masterwork as dammit, and far better fun than a jig, or even a tale of bawdry.The sixth sound-era film adaptation of the celebrated tragedy, the first having been Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winner in 1948 and the most recent the Mel Gibson-Franco Zeffirelli pairing only six years ago, this one gains immediate distinction as the first to present the work intact. Drawbacks: an intrusive score spurious sex scenes between Kate Winslet's Ophelia and Branagh's pre-antic Hamlet and a full-scale Norwegian invasion during the final duel. Tim Harvey's production design makes Elsinore a highlight, creating a snow-swept Ruritania of chessboard floors, mirrored corridors, freezing courtyards. Branagh's prince is admirable: popular, versatile, frank, kind, ruthless, athletic, straight-backed, with a little-boy-lost voice to go with the martial one. The role-playing scores most in the world of work and politics, warfare and diplomacy, as imagined by Briers' superb Polonius and Jacobi's Claudius. Sometimes the casting is regrettable (Jack Lemmon looking ill-at-ease as a superannuated sentry) at others tongue-in-cheek (Attenborough as the English ambassador) or wasteful (Depardieu as a one-scene monosyllabic spy). The star/director has assembled one of the finest casts ever seen on the big screen: so the Player King is played by Heston, who at least gets to speak, unlike Gielgud, Dench, John Mills and Ken Dodd in a succession of parts which underline the text through imagined interludes. If Branagh's ambitious film needs any kind of compliment, it is that at around four hours it carries itself perfectly well. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |