Branagh's Epic 'Hamlet': Triumph or Folly?

Chicago Tribune, January 5 1997
by Sid Smith

They are calling it a public "Hamlet"--a brightly lit epic with a thousand soldier-extras in the cast--and, at 4 hours and 20 minutes, they are calling it long.

Filmed in glorious 70 mm (rare these days), boasting a built-in intermission (ditto), "Hamlet," at the very least, will stand as Kenneth Branagh's everlasting triumph--or folly.

With it, the wunderkind Shakespearean maestro of "Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing" either puts up or shuts up. He knows in his bones he has reached some sort of rubicon: He won't even say if he'll keep making Shakespearean movies after this one.

"Who knows?" he answers. "This is such a lifetime ambition. After 'Henry V,' the one thing shining ahead I felt I had to do before I died or got too old was 'Hamlet.' I don't feel that compelled about any other Shakespearean role, at least right now. I may go in a completely different direction."

As for the result, "I'm proud of the film. Any delivery period with a movie is nerve-wracking. But what I've learned is that you have to be comfortable with your own reaction when you see any movie in its complete form for the first time, and you have to remember that a thousand times later when other reactions come in. The rest of it is in the lap of the gods. It's all such a lottery, isn't it?"

Branagh, interviewed while here recently for a benefit screening for the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute, looks tanned and trim these days, looking much more the matinee idol of his "Henry V" days than he did during his last visit here to promote the movie version of "Much Ado About Nothing." A friendly conversationalist, he remains the least intimidating Shakespearean expert imaginable, noting affably that "Chicago absolutely has the best tea in the states" as he sips his hotel brew.

Branagh certainly made every effort imaginable to brew a perfect "Hamlet" the movie (which is scheduled to open Jan. 24 in Chicago). He played the title role three times on stage and played Laertes once (to Roger Rees' Hamlet, no less). "Since 'Henry V,' we've had various opportunities to make the picture, but always at a budget that wouldn't allow for the opulence I felt it needed."

And what budget might that be?

The current release cost some $18 million, according to Branagh, small when compared to $60 million for "Evita," but more than double the $8 million "Henry V" price tag back in 1988.

Shot in an actual Danish castle, Blenheim Palace, "Hamlet" boasts Hollywood celebrities (Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Charlton Heston), international stars (Gerard Depardieu, Julie Christie, Rosemary Harris), and British stalwarts (Derek Jacobi, John Mills, Judi Dench, Richard Attenborough) in its cast. Even John Gielgud--the greatest surviving Shakespearean from the Olivier era--gets a silent cameo in an unusual fantasy flashback as Priam.

If nothing else, Branagh certainly makes cinematic history: His is now the only complete "Hamlet" ever filmed. Unlike the typically abridged versions--Olivier's 1948 version runs 2 hours, 33 minutes, for instance--Branagh uses the complete text of the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare's works, the standard early collection for scholars, and incorporates some missing passages included in an earlier, separate edition of the play dating from 1604.

More seems like less

Paradoxically, Branagh insists the result should seem to play more quickly. "I've watched the complete version in the theater, and I feel it moves quicker and is easier to take in.

"Having seen various incomplete versions on stage, I find what happens is that it's harder to follow because a lot of the set pieces are artificially yoked together. It causes a not very helpful intensity, and it's exhausting to play. And often, because key lines are cut, actors play scenes longer than they otherwise would. It's as if, by being allowed to play the scenes completely, actors aren't afraid to throw lines away, as it were, to move the text along. They don't take artificial pauses to let the audience know some lines have been cut."

Branagh also felt most trimmed versions zero in on Hamlet in a drama where he is already unmistakably a center. That can actually do the actor performing the title role a disservice. "There are two purple patches close together, for instance, beginning in the second scene in Act II. Hamlet meets the (traveling) players and gives his 'rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy. There's a scene that follows that's often cut, but then the next contains the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy.

"When you trim that intervening scene, you go from one of the richest speeches--one about the art of acting, after all--to one of the most famous. The actor's required to strike 12, as it were, with hardly a break. Playing the scene in between, as written, gives Hamlet--and the audience--time to breathe."

As much as any "Hamlet" turns on its bravura title player, Branagh believes his approach helps shine light on the other roles and characters, too.

One scene often cut is a brief interchange between Polonius and his minion, Reynaldo. The scene, the first in Act II, follows shortly after Polonius' most famous speech, his advice "to thine own self be true" to his son Laertes. But the latter scene reveals a more manipulative, plotting father, one charging a spy to keep watch on his son. Branagh believes this allows for a more complete portrait of Polonius, often played for codgerly comedy, but in Branagh's film, as portrayed by Richard Briers (who played Lear under Branagh's direction for the International Theatre Festival here), he's a cool, calculating palace conspirator.

Unlikely faces

"When you see the whole text, the cumulative effect on some of these characters is startling," Branagh says. In terms of star casting, Branagh makes no apologies. Amidst a scene involving two very British actors, Jack Lemmon shows up, as Marcellus, in the first moments of the movie. British and American accents side by side in old Denmark?

"A whole series of things led to that choice," Branagh says. "First, I believe Shakespeare belongs to everybody--he isn't just the province of British actors. I like sending that signal right away, and I've always used American actors, Russian actors, black actors, you name it. Second, in order to illuminate the play, I didn't want to undercast any role.

"Marcellus has one beautiful passage early on for a simple man, and I wanted somebody who could come on with that sense of ordinariness, someone whose presence would be startling and make the audience sit up and take note.

"Charlton Heston (as the Player King) brings star charisma to a character who has to come on and transform Hamlet's thinking. Crystal (as the First Gravedigger) and Williams (as Osric) bring clear comedic gifts, but these parts aren't necessarily funny. What I've found in casting essentially comic actors--though in the end, acting is acting--is that they rehearse with great humility, despite their fame. They have a sense of not being quite appropriate, so they work hard and are very available to direction."

As for overall interpretation, Branagh sees "Hamlet" as the end of a family dynasty played out in a series of extraordinary events befalling the title character.

"Hamlet's father dealt in arm-to-arm combat, we're told. Hamlet instead is a renaissance man, a scholar. He believes in the rightness of revenge, and yet the only time he commits murder, he does so in a fit of passion (when he stabs Polonius behind the curtain). He is utterly changed by killing someone and suffers a basic moral revulsion. Perhaps that's why he's so empathetic to so many people.

"He's dealing with something we all must deal with--the death of a parent--and at the same time being told by the ghost of that parent that his uncle committed murder. His quest throughout is for doing the right thing. Here's a man all around him believe is capable of being a great leader, but who is absolutely paralyzed by this extraordinary thing, his father's ghost demanding revenge. What would you do?

"He is reacting as we would, with total volatility. He's fallible and not always attractive. He can be cruel, childish, petulant and viciously funny.

"But he can be generous and full of spiritual wisdom, too, a man who learns and wants to know what it's like to be happy. By the end, he has killed, and he knows others will be killed for nothing. By then, his attitude is, 'Oh, well, if it comes now or later, what does it matter?'

"Or, as Hamlet puts it to Horatio near the end of the play, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends/ Rough-hew them how we will."

Branagh has been coming to grips with some unpleasant life choices himself. Not long ago his marriage to Emma Thompson came to an end, simultaneously dissolving a celebrated on-screen partnership ("Much Ado About Nothing" as well as the non-Shakespearean "Dead Again").

"It's sad, of course, it's always sad when these things happen. But we are friends, and we will work together again sometime. That team will re-emerge."

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