Hamlet & Me (Part V)

"It's me. Hi."
Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie
Hamlet, 1996

Look. I come to bury Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, not to praise it.

But how can you argue with success? It’s a brightly colored production with manically animated set pieces and swirling camerawork – Hamlet as an action film, which is fine! The character has long been described as a man who cannot decide, who is unable to “take action.” But he does! He’s always on the move! And Branagh makes him vital and exciting, not brooding and torpid.

I visit schools all over, have done so for years, and if there is a film version of Hamlet most shown in these schools, this is positively that one.

However, in the act of presenting the complete text, a four-hour endeavor, the entire undertaking feels rushed, under-rehearsed and not carefully considered.

Watching the film for the first time in a recently renovated Centrum Theatre on Coventry, I was impressed by the first soliloquy, “O, That this too, too solid flesh …” Not for the rendition itself (which is fine) but how long the take is. Branagh delivers the piece without a cut, and then the scene continues unbroken as Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus enter to share the news of the ghost.

Long, uncut takes like this allow an actor to display the range of their stagecraft, and it’s like watching a good play, up close. Take for example Claudius (Derek Jacobi) seducing Laertes (Michael Maloney) into committing acts of treachery. It’s a great scene from the play, and one usually cut to the bare facts.

Unfortunately, as the film goes on these long takes feel like a method to rush the filming along. For the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, which should be one of the high-points of any production, Branagh thrashes about with his limbs, frantically gawping as he trashes a map room. It may be emotionally appropriate, but the director in me wanted him to try it again. I was led to believe the whole production was so big he decided that there wasn’t time to get it right.

Other crimes, in no particular order:

• Scary, scary Brian Blessed
• Sexy Dane sex
• Rapier javelin
• Smushed Ophelia face
• Christ pose exit
• Jack Lemmon

And perhaps most egregious, the speech “How all occasions do inform against me” is depressing, not rousing. It is not “St. Crispin’s Day.”

As my father once told me, “If you aim at a king, you must kill him.” That summer I had already started to fantasize about staging some future production of Hamlet, and I would take my time in conceiving it.

To be continued.