Hamlet & Me (Part IV)

Brian Blessed & Kenneth Branagh
Henry V, 1989

At the age of 26, Orson Welles directed and starred in what is generally regarded as the best film ever made, Citizen Kane. That was in 1941.

At the age of 26, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in what is generally regarded as the best adaptation of Shakespeare to film, Henry V. That was in 1989.

Side note: At the age of 26, I directed my first Shakespeare, Guerrilla Theater Company’s production of "Romeo & Juliet" and lots of people liked it. That was in 1994.

An independent film, and therefore not widely distributed, I believe I first saw Branagh’s Henry V in early 1990, and we all lost our shit.

Recently acolytes to the genius of Shakespeare we, the magnificence and success of this movie heralded nothing less than a renaissance of Shakespeare on film, which indeed came to pass. Whether or not you choose to credit Branagh with this achievement, 1990s cinema (and beyond) was fairly awash with Shakespeare, including Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Twelfth Night (1996), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) as well as adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), O (2001) and She’s the Man (2006).

Branagh’s next cinematic Shakespearean outing solidified his reputation among Gen X aged theater nerds. Much Ado About Nothing is a bright and goofy take on what has become one of my very favorite of the Bard’s scripts, and this time Branagh expanded upon his acclaim by casting a number of high-profile American actors including Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and Michael Keaton.

This is one of the truly impressive things about Branagh; great actors and movie stars want to work with him, a trend which continues to this day as his Poirot adaptations pop with familiar names and faces.

Even before Henry V, Branagh had staked his reputation with his Renaissance Theatre Company. Like Welles before him and his Mercury Theatre, the work began onstage. Branagh directed and starred in stage versions of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and others as well as classic works by other playwrights. He also produced radio adaptations for R&J, King Lear and Hamlet, all of which I acquired and listened to on cassette.

I could go off on how his audio adaptation of Romeo and Juliet inspired me to direct a production myself, or how I read that John Gielgud was unhappy with how Branagh insisted on recording King Lear (Gielgud played the lead) with scant rehearsal. This last detail will be relevant later.

Michael Maloney (center) & ensemble
In the Bleak Midwinter (1995)

For his third Shakespearean outing onscreen, I had hoped Branagh would choose, well, absolutely any title but Hamlet. Much Ado, for all the adoration heaped upon it, is not great. There is a lot of mugging and eye-rolling meant to indicate to an American audience which lines are meant to be funny, and before that he had directed the modern noir mystery Dead Again (1991) which is unintentionally hilarious. I didn’t think he was yet a good enough director to summit the Dane.

When it was announced that Branagh’s Hamlet would feature the complete text, entirely unabridged, it was clear he was pointing to the bleachers. It was clear he wouldn’t be merely directing a Hamlet, he wanted to make the Hamlet. I was very worried.

In 1995, Branagh wrote and directed In the Bleak Midwinter (US title: A Midwinter’s Tale) a brief, black and white comedy about the company of “am-dram” performers putting on a holiday production of Hamlet. It’s a silly and delightful piece of work, full of inside baseball for thespians, and Branagh doesn’t even appear. His surrogate is the film is Michael Maloney, who opens the film with the monologue about the anxiety of acting as a profession, a performance which is all the more enjoyable when you realize Maloney is doing a spot-on impersonation of Kenneth Branagh.

Midwinter is a celebration of the act of creation, a love-letter to theater artists everywhere, and in its way, I felt the film was an apology for the grotesque and unhappy excesses of his Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Maybe Branagh's Hamlet would be good after all.

To be continued.