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© 2002 Debra Murphy

In a Catholic family which includes a daughter who wore a Braveheart tee threadbare, a mother who has seen Signs three times on the big screen, and several men folk who, in spite of the female Murphys’ incessant pratings about Mel Gibson being one of the Almighty’s prettier creations, are nonetheless willing to admit that the man, after all, can act, not to mention, direct, it should come as no surprise that this 1990 film, directed by the flamboyant Franco Zeffirelli, is not known as “Zeffirelli’s Hamlet” but “Mel’s Hamlet.” What is surprising, perhaps, is how much this film adaptation has grown on Clan Murphy over the years, in spite of Zeffirelli’s mutilation of Shakespeare’s text. Cut by half ― nay, chopped, hacked, eviscerated, generally shot all to hell. No Fortinbras, nary a complete soliloquy, except for the inevitable “To be or not to be,” and lines reassigned all over the place. Still, this two-hour script of a four-hour play should have been enough to make these bardolaters grieve…were it not that the acting and staging of what remained was so remarkably satisfying.

To begin, Zeffirelli is an Enthusiast with an operatic streak. His many virtues and occasional vices, cinematically speaking, appear to stem from a temperamental tendency to what the Italians call sprezzatura. Let us say, “dying in his own too much.”  But Zeffirelli has taken his over-the-topness down a notch in this film, befitting the bracing North Atlantic setting designed by the brilliant Dante Ferretti.  Zeffirelli has thereby resisted the temptation to Wagnerian excess that I, for one, would have loathed. Instead, the medieval Norse Elsinore that the filmmakers have created, an elemental time and place in which springtime seems like a promise never kept, is subdued in color and ornament but rich in texture. It reels with labyrinthine staircases leading everywhere and nowhere at the same time, as in one of those dizzying Escher lithographs. More to the purpose, perhaps, Zeffirelli and his cast put their sets to good use. The actors move, interact, fill the stage ― unlike the Talking Heads productions one so often sees, in which characters stand around babbling beautifully, but never seem to inhabit their spaces, let alone live in them.

I was impressed, too, as I have been before, with Zeffirelli’s talent for getting inside the rhythms and Weltanschauung of another century, another culture.  With a play like Hamlet, this time-traveling facility can be especially valuable, as it has become notoriously difficult for us twenty-first century postmoderns to wrap our imaginations around a world in which vow-breaking, adultery, incest, and fratricide/regicide are deeply shocking crimes, worthy of gasps rather than snickers; in which a belief in Ghosts, Angels, Demons ― even Eternal Damnation ― are tenable metaphysical positions held by sophisticated, educated, people. But that was the world Shakespeare lived in, the world his text hands us, and many directors, circumscribed by their own broad-minded relativism (not to mention, devotion to Foucault-laced lit crit) cannot seem to stage it any longer without dragging in boatloads of irony. What the audience is usually left with is a Prince of Denmark whose much-ballyhooed “nobility” consists of little more than a furious facility for skewering hypocrisy (Branagh) or a rebel-without-a-cause ennui (Almereyda).

Zeffirelli, however, by all accounts (like his star, Gibson, at least in theory), still adheres to many of those traditional concepts, which form the subtext of this Elizabethan revenge play.  The anti-anti-hero they give, therefore, looks a good deal more, I suspect, like the tragic hero of former ages than has been seen for some time. Burdened, baleful, a little batty, yes, and ultimately broken, but no deconstructed Hamlet this…and my goodness, how refreshing it is.

As for Gibson himself, there has always been something a little ADHD about the actor, and he holds the screen with his energy as much as his good looks.  In the role of Hamlet, his athleticism and animal spirits imbue the top-heavy Dane (always “thinking too precisely on the event”) with an intensity and edginess that I found most appealing. Not that there’s anything blunt or un-intellectual about Mel’s Hamlet, either, let us hasten to add; just that, for once, I was able to believe that the Prince of Denmark was by nature a robust male with an intact personality ― until, at least, he returns from university to find his familiar Elsinore transmogrified into the Twilight Zone.

Too, and to his credit, Gibson is one of the few Hamlets I’ve seen who actually thinks his words as he speaks them; is even surprised on occasion ― nay, horrified ― by his own suddenly tempest-dark thoughts and impulses. This, too, was refreshing, as actors aren’t the only ones who know these lines so well they could recite them in their sleep.

The rest of the cast is excellent, though the mangled dialogue frequently leaves the actors with insufficient material to build their characters’ motivations. Helena Bonham-Carter comes across as too feisty and ornery to suit my personal taste in Ophelias, but her mad scenes are nonetheless deeply affecting. Paul Scofield is a soft-spoken, purgatorial Ghost whose impact proves no less powerful for the actor’s restraint. Ian Holm’s busy-bee Polonius is not so much malicious as enormously irritating, as he should be, I suppose, mixing the devil’s own pride with a fawning servility towards his sovereign ― Alan Bates doing a finely calibrated “bloat king” Claudius. The latter is an interpretation for which I usually care little, as it runs the risk of lessening the danger the character should pose to our protagonist, but it works well here as performed by one of Britain’s most seasoned performers. Kudos, too, for Nathaniel Parker’s endearing Laertes, who proves a worthy mirror-image for Hamlet’s faltering will-to-revenge; one can see the poor man’s fury, shame, pity, and befuddlement, all in the space of a moment, particularly in the engrossingly staged final swordplay with Hamlet.

Special mention, I think, needs to be made of Glenn Close’s Gertrude. In spite of her occasionally off-putting Brunhilde-ish get-ups, she is primo throughout. She is also the first actress, in my viewing experience, to nail the poisoning scene. No delicately swooning Gertrude this, as is so common even with the finest actresses.  Her Gertrude’s death is not only not pretty, as they say, it’s just about what one would expect, if one really thinks about it, from a fast-acting “potent poison” capable of reducing an otherwise vibrant woman to a lump of worm food in the space of a couple of minutes. As someone who has worked in hospitals with the very sick and dying, all I can say is, “Yep.”

Least favorite scene: Ophelia’s overtly challenging interchange with her father upon Laertes’ departure. In response to Polonius’s command that she no longer see Hamlet, Ophelia spouts off with a perfectly sarcastic “I shall obey, my Lord.” To my way of thinking, any young woman (especially in that day and age) strong enough to stand up to her paterfamilias in such a ballsy manner should have the whatsis to keep a good grip on her wits when the obnoxious old so-and-so is later killed. The whole episode came across (to me) as an ill-advised and anachronistic concession to the ravenous demands of feminist criticism, and certainly proved a source of cognitive dissonance vis-à-vis Ophelia’s later unraveling.  ..

Favorite scene: The Hamlet-Gertrude “shenting scene,” in which an enraged Hamlet mimics “making love over the nasty sty” on top of his own pole-axed mother. For Hamlets, this scene is like the tenor’s big aria at the climax of an opera; which means that to be fully satisfying, the Hamlet in question must have had the good sense to check himself till then; must have saved something for the finale. Gibson, in keeping with his legendary ability to project rage on screen (think of the revenge-of-his-wife scene in Braveheart ― yikes!) does just that and the result, when he finally lets fly here, is a doozy: It takes little imagination on the part of the audience to understand why Gertrude is hysterical with fear that her son is about to kill her, perhaps even rape her.

But that’s still not the (perdona me) climax, for a second later Close manages a one-eighty that few actresses could navigate: She vises her out-of-control son in a violent lip-lock, and it is Hamlet’s turn to be shocked nearly out of his skin.

Okay, so maybe the whole Oedipal thing has been done to death in the last fifty years of Hamlet productions. Goodness knows I’ve often wished to see just one Closet Scene which didn’t end up in Gertrude’s bed, with Gertrude’s robes falling sexily off her shoulders as her son tosses her about; but in these folks’ skillful hands the effect is grisly rather than titillating. This is something of a ghost story, after all, and we should come away just a little freaked out.

I’m reminded of the cover of the program for the Tygre’s Heart Shakespeare Company’s 1997 production of Hamlet, which read:

Father dies. Mother marries uncle. Dead father visits son.  Son plots revenge.  Stepfather plots sons death.  Mother is poisoned.  Son is poisoned.  Dying son stabs stepfather.

Hamlet.  Suddenly your family seems normal.

Now if only, this had been a nice, plump three-hour Hamle with “Rogue and peasant slave” and “O how all occasions” speeches left intact.

© John Murphy, 2005

Kenneth Branagh is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Or is he working? I mean, as a director? He directed a movie called Listening two years ago, which nobody’s heard of, and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) was barely a blip on the radar. That would place this film, Hamlet, quite squarely as Branagh’s last “important” work. Nine years ago. He’s had steady employment as an actor in a slew of respectable films (I loved him in Celebrity and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and I’d have gladly given my pinky finger to see his performance as Edmund, the titular character of David Mamet’s play, on stage in London last year. But where is Branagh the erstwhile wunderkind, the heir to Olivier and Welles? Where is the man who made Henry V, Dead Again, and Much Ado About Nothing in the space of four years? Where is the director who first lit the flame of Bardolatry under me as a seven year old? Other kids wanted to be Robocop or the Terminator for Halloween. I wanted to be Henry V.

I apologize for the ramble, but it’s meant more as an opening salvo. The fact is that Branagh is blinded by unbridled ambition. He swings for the grand-stands every time he steps up to bat. I love that quality, but his passion is double-edged, his most notable strength and weakness as a filmmaker. This aim-for-the-rafters modus operandi has produced a decidedly mixed bag of films: transcendent entertainment (Henry V and Dead Again), a monumental misfire (Frankenstein) and the muddled middle ground of Hamlet. One thing’s for certain: Branagh is never boring. Even at his ham-fisted worst (stalking around Frankenstein’s lab with oiled, glistening abs, giving birth to “the Creature”), he still succeeds at compelling the audience’s interest in a way more conservative directors fail to do.

I was thirteen when Hamlet came out, and rarely had I ever been so jazzed to see something. I wanted this to be Branagh’s magnum opus. Okay, maybe my expectations were unreasonable, and my initial disappointment has been abated by the intervening time. There is no such thing as a definitive Hamlet. And there is so much to applaud about this movie, so much to celebrate.

First off, it’s four hours long, and so far as I’m aware it’s the only full-text cinematic adaptation of the play. Branagh is uncompromising on that score, and the end result is a better sense of Shakespeare’s original vision (obviously) for the play than the trimmed versions. The scope is epic, novelistic. For example, most adaptations, in an attempt to streamline the material, hack out the entire Fortinbras subplot. Here the politics of the play (such as Fortinbras’ jockeying for power, and the inner workings of the Danish court), are given much welcome screen time. Emphasis shifts from Hamlet’s almost solipsistic melancholy/madness to a broader idea of how Hamlet’s behavior fits into the scheme of things. Points to Rufus Sewell (Fortinbras) for bringing a smoldering intensity to an oft-excised role. He commands the little screen time he has.

Satellite characters are fleshed out, enriched, and motivations made more legible. Polonius is often played as a “tedious old fool,” good for little more than comic relief between Hamlet’s weighty soliloquies. Richard Briers, given breathing room, adds dimensions to Polonius: his cruelty to Ophelia, his lording-over of Laertes, his fawning obsequiousness to the king and queen, his preening self-importance and constant meddling in affairs, all add up to a character significantly more manipulative and destructive than other versions showcase.

Ophelia, doomed daughter of Polonius, is given a radiant treatment by Kate Winslet. Winslet is able to suggest Ophelia’s strength while not compromising the fragility that leads to madness. Her interpretation makes more sense than Helena Bonham Carter’s feisty spin on the role in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). Winslet also has a hum-dinger of a mad scene, setting a high bar for future actresses playing this part.

Derek Jacobi, an all time great (whose own performance as Hamlet inspired Branagh to become an actor), turns in the movie’s best performance as the villainous uncle, Claudius. The unabridged text benefits Jacobi’s characterization as well, since Claudius has been too often reduced to a lecherous drunk with the hots for his brother’s wife. Here Jacobi balances Claudius’ outsized appetites with a menacing iciness. Don’t cross this guy. He’s smart, red-blooded, conscience-stricken, manipulative, and genuinely in love with Gertrude. He’s three-dimensional, and probably a pretty good king. Jacobi doesn’t hit a wrong note. I liked the touch of giving him hair as platinum-blonde as Hamlet’s, a suggestion that perhaps Claudius’ designs on Gertrude began long long before the death of Hamlet’s father.

I have to give special props also to Charlton Heston as the Player King. Who knew he had this in him? Otherwise, Branagh’s star-studded cast is hit-and-miss (Billy Crystal’s a decent Gravedigger, Robin Williams is so-so as Osric, Gerard Depardieu’s a distraction, and Jack Lemmon is awful as Marcellus); but Heston shines. His performance is confident, comfortable with the language, and very affecting.

Even in the context of a four-hour production, the success or failure of any Hamlet production rests on the interpretation of English literature’s most famous character. Like the film itself, Branagh who’s played the part so many times on stage, has moments of breathtaking brilliance contrasted with head-scratching silliness. He seems to rush through certain scenes, not inhabiting them, and reciting his lines by rote. You can almost see him thinking about the next shot. He turns the amp up to 11 too early in the movie, exhibiting an unnecessary amount of emotion as early as his “’Tis not my inky cloak, good Mother” spiel in his first scene at the royal court. The scenes with his father’s ghost (chillingly played by Brian Blessed) are set in a chintzy forest from Roger Corman’s backlot, and again Branagh goes over-the-top, nearly frothing at the mouth after the encounter.

Worst scene in the movie, hands down, is when he delivers the “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy like it’s the St. Crispin’s Day speech, a choice that makes zero dramatic sense considering the content of the speech. Not that it matters, anyway, since I could barely hear Branagh over Patrick Doyle’s inappropriately rousing and climactic music. The digital soldiers in the background, meant to represent Fortinbras’ army, more closely resemble marching ants.

Branagh has his moments, though. His “To be or not to be” soliloquy is striking, spoken to his own reflection. He really hits his stride in the post-closet scenes, after he’s murdered Polonius, thinking it was Claudius. There’s a particularly stunning, heated encounter between him and Claudius (“Where is Polonius?” “At supper”) that results in Claudius viciously backhanding Hamlet across the face. Branagh and Jacobi have great chemistry here, and for about fifteen minutes the movie truly takes flight. I also liked Branagh’s touching reading of “The readiness is all” soliloquy; he really slows down and lets the beauty of the language take center stage.

But in the end Branagh’s reach proves greater than his grasp. What should have been his definitive statement proves definitively messy. Branagh has clearly attempted to match the play’s verbal ambition with a grandiose visual palette. Hamlet was filmed in 70mm, a format (alas) obsolete and most strongly associated with the grand epics of yesteryear like Lawrence of Arabia, Guns of Navarone, or 2001: a Space Odyssey. The sets are lavish, the costumes elegant, and the music annoyingly awash in Wagnerian excess. If Branagh was on a Hitchcock kick with Dead Again, here he’s an aspiring David Lean. And yet Branagh the director is not up to that standard, at least not yet. Bravo to him for having the cajones to attempt this ambitious, unwieldy production, but there are way too many flaws to consider it a resounding success. The years between its release and the present haven’t dulled the sharp disappointment of my first viewing, and I can see it now for what it is: an uneven movie with moments of brilliance and moments of groan-inducing absurdity. Kind of a microcosm for Branagh’s entire cinematic óevre.

Click here to see vidclips from Branagh’s Hamlet

© 2000 John Murphy

Hardcore Shakespeare traditionalists who insist on “purity” of interpretation (i.e. a whole lot of tights and prepubescent boys in drag) miss the essential genius of the Bard’s plays. The reason Shakespeare endures 400 years after his death is his ability to transcend the boundaries of time, geography, and culture by addressing in his work the most universal concerns of humanity.

Michael Almereyda, director of the most recent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s indelible play, Hamlet, possesses a firm grasp of this concept. The action of the play has been updated to modern Manhattan, where revenge, corporate espionage, greed, betrayal, and lust are not unfamiliar motivations behind day-to-day human activity. Almereyda avoids the seductive pitfall of using the contemporary setting as a crutch for making the play more “accessible;” rather he explores original ways to emphasize the timelessness of the words through the updated environment. Modern technology is subtly incorporated into the action; nowhere does Almereyda appear to be forcing an agenda onto the play that is not concomitant with the play’s inherent message. There are some self-aware bits of post-modern cleverness, the most breathtaking being when the “to be or not be” soliloquy is staged in the “Action” aisle of a Blockbuster Video, as scenes of violence and mayhem play on the myriad television screens behind Hamlet.

However, the best illustration of the success of Almereyda’s technique is, as it should be, the performance of Ethan Hawke as Hamlet. At first glance, Ethan Hawke makes for a listless, tired Hamlet, but his choices reveal themselves to be cleverer than originally anticipated. Hawke presents “the melancholy Dane” as a thoroughly modern young man, indistinguishable from any beatnik wannabe poet/musician/artist found decorating campus coffeehouses around the globe. His black wardrobe is as much a fashion statement as a symbol of mourning, and when the time comes for “the play-within-the-play,” it is brilliantly presented as an arty short film (directed by Hamlet, naturally) in the vein of Warhol’s misguided forays into cinema. Hawke turns Hamlet’s ennui into a posture; he is seen watching footage of James Dean (“studying” would probably be a more accurate description), and the correlation is intentional. Hamlet relishes his own depression, stews in a pot of solipsistic self-pity. This provides motivation for his otherwise disturbingly selfish treatment of Ophelia, for example. Hamlet is a spoiled child who resents his privileged status (his best friend, Horatio is obviously not of similar financial means), but still often slips into a pattern of self-important behavior at the expense of others.

The spot-on quality of Hawke’s interpretation is given ample support from an ensemble of well-seasoned Shakespearean performers, as well as a few perfectly cast newcomers. The standout from among the supporting cast is, without question, Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius.  Though his role is substantially abridged from the original text, MacLachlan breathes fire into Claudius, playing him as an oily, honey-tongued executive who appears to have emerged from the womb sporting a smart Armani three-piece. MacLachlan, a veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is obviously comfortable with the notoriously tricky Shakespeare vernacular: his line readings sound not only natural, but (an even greater achievement) as though he had just thought of them.

There isn’t a bad apple in the rest of the cast, and all seem in sync with Almereyda’s vision. The comic timing of Bill Murray is utilized to great effect in his performance as Polonius, and Julia Stiles injects unexpected pathos into the role of Ophelia. The focus remains throughout the film on the acting, not on the set decoration or a hip soundtrack. Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was a truly commendable effort, but was also cripplingly flawed and occasionally incoherent. Luhrmann’s actors seemed lost in a sea of Radiohead tunes and flashy camera moves and operatic scenic design, and appeared sometimes as confused as the audience. Almereyda, by contrast, elicits believable, naturalistic performances from a game troupe of actors and never allows the modern setting to overwhelm or override the meaning of Shakespeare’s words.

Traditionalists sitting in their tweed suits in their armchairs in their libraries can put this in their pipes and smoke it. Almereyda has crafted one of the best, most faithful adaptations of Shakespeare of recent memory, minus the tights and prepubescent boys.

CAST:

Hamlet — Ethan Hawke
Gertrude — Diane Venora.
Claudius — Kyle MacLachlan
Polonius — Bill Murray.
Ophelia — Julia Stiles
Horatio — Karl Geary
Laertes — Liev Schreiber
Ghost — Sam Shepard.
Rosencrantz — Steve Zahn
Guildenstern — Dechan Thurman
Osric — Paul Bartel
Player King — Robert MacNeil.
Fortinbras — Casey Affleck
Gravedigger — Geoffrey Wright
Marcella — Paula Malcomson.
Bernardo — Rome Neal
Flight Captain — Tim Blake Nelson
Blockbuster Clerk — Bernadette Jurkowski

© 2007 John Murphy

O’erstepping the Modesty of Nature

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature…”

Hamlet’s advice to the players is well-taken. Laurence Olivier, one of cinema’s first and foremost interpreters of Shakespeare on film, generally neglects the Melancholy Prince’s pearls of wisdom. He saws the air with his hands, tears a passion to tatters, to very rags, and splits the ears of the groundlings. He admittedly cuts an impressive figure while doing so. His Caesar haircut, Roman profile, dimpled chin, noble bearing, and melodious voice each contributes to the overall impression of a finely-tuned, highly polished musical instrument.

The music is here in the first sound-era film of Hamlet, but not the muscle. Olivier plays Hamlet the Icon, not Hamlet the character. He famously intones at the beginning of the film, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Well, glad to have that cleared up, Lord Larry. As such a reductive quote would suggest, Olivier doesn’t bother too much about getting inside Hamlet, trying to understand what makes him tick. Poor fellow simply can’t make up his mind, that’s all.

The other actors, perhaps guided by Olivier, give equally un-nuanced performances. Many of them are fine, reputable thespians, but their readings are fairly predictable. Polonius is a doddering old fool, Ophelia (the gorgeous Jean Simmons) is fair and fragile, Claudius is drunken and lascivious, and the oblivious Gertrude dotes creepily on her fair-haired son. No real surprises, though it should be taken into account that Olivier was helping to make some of these molds as much as repeat them. Fans of the original Star Wars movie will enjoy watching Peter Cushing (who played Grand Moff Tarkin in the space opera) chew up the scenery as the swishy “waterfly,” Osric.

Because of Olivier’s towering reputation as the classical actor of the twentieth century, it is easy to overlook the innovations he introduced as a director. For better or worse, Olivier put forward as early as 1945 (with his rousing, jingoistic Henry V) the concept of an accessible Shakespeare on film — ages, in fact, before Franco Zeffirelli or Kenneth Branagh set their visions to celluloid. Purists who praise Olivier but put-down Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive Romeo and Juliet (1996), for example, are not paying much attention. Not only did Olivier excise the character of Fortinbras, he got rid of the entire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern subplot! In going from stage to screen, he pruned the play, re-assigned lines, rewrote lines (if you can believe the audacity! Though mostly for the sake of clarity), and put a lot of energy and invention into both his performance and his production. So none of this bosh about Olivier being a bastion of Shakespeare classicism and directors like Luhrmann or Peter Brook being sacrilegious with the text – they’re all peas in a pod, straining to make the old Bard exciting for new generations.

To Olivier’s credit, his Hamlet is much more visually arresting than one might expect from a film helmed by a classically-trained theater actor. The chiaroscuro camerawork owes a clear debt to the Orson Welles school of cinematic expressionism. The floating camera, askew angles, fog-bound black-and-white, and deep, slanting shadows are more reminiscent of Citizen Kane than the vivid Technicolor dreamscapes of Olivier’s own Henry V. This is not a filmed stage play; it is thoroughly cinematic. And that may well be Olivier’s most lasting contribution to the development of Shakespeare-on-screen — the use of new technologies and cinematic styles to retell age-old stories.

And in case you’re under the impression that Olivier the actor is a limp-wristed old ham in black tights, you’re at least partially misguided. He adds plenty of spice to the proceedings, including a heady dash of Freudian symbolism. For a film from the vaults of the late 1940s, the overtly Oedipal reading of the relationship between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude (played by Eileen Herlie, an actress thirteen years younger than Olivier) still has the power to shock. The lingering lip-locks between mother and son would make Larry Flynt blush. Speaking of which, do I just have a dirty mind…or were the folds of Gertrude’s bed canopy evocative of certain, let’s say “fertile,” parts of the female anatomy? Olivier must have been undergoing psychoanalysis at the time, or else decided the dusty text needed some 20th century shock-value.

Whether you prefer Olivier’s Freud-filtered Hamlet, or Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Richard Burton, Adrian Lester (or any number of other actors) in the part is probably a matter of taste more than an objective judgment of quality. Perhaps our favorite Hamlet says more about us than it does about the character. (Something along the lines of Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare reads us, not the other way round). Olivier is an iconic Hamlet, as I mentioned, and there’s room for that interpretation along with a melancholy Hamlet (Kline), a sarcastic Hamlet (Jacobi), or a sensitive Hamlet (Branagh). Simply put, the part is big enough for all comers, and Olivier has much to be thanked for in proving that Shakespeare was as worthy of the Big Screen as the Old Vic.