Hamlet

Without a doubt, Branagh's film of HAMLET is the most ambitious Shakespeare film to date. He goes all in on.. well, everything. He brings aboard a stellar all-star cast, too many to highlight all, but includes Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and Jack Lemmon - none of which are known for their Shakespearian pedigree. Branagh takes on Hamlet, the largest role in all of Shakespeare - and most English language literature. His interpretation is - not surprisingly - brilliant and worthy of study. Kate Winslet plays his challenged love Ophelia, and Derek Jacobi is the fraudulent King. Rounding out the largest roles, Julie Christie is the doomed queen and Richard Briers is the fussy Polonius. All excellent in their handle of the language and expression of humanity. Much of the film takes place inside the castle of Elsinore, a gorgeous and regal stage set lined with mirrors to challenge each individual's intentions and a chess-board floor to accentuate the challenge in the royal battle for checkmate. The Elsinore grounds are widespread and scenes in the snow covered Danish mountains all shown in glorious 65mm film... an extremely detailed film stock that was rarely used because of the extreme expense and cumbersome camera size. With HENRY V and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Branagh has proven he is a master of adapting Shakespeare's long form story into much more manageable American movie length. Well, here he goes all in and captures the 4 hour play in its uncut full length. The film was shown with a 15 minute intermission. HAMLET itself is doubtlessly one of the most intelligent character studies ever written by any author, and Branagh does a great job recording that. Even many other productions of the show do as good a job or even better job in relaying that story. Either way Branagh's film work is filled with many treasures and to this point, his Shakespeare films are close to flawless. For now...

Summary: 10/10: an uncut, impeccably spoken "Hamlet" with a cast so improbable it borders on the miraculous, proof that Shakespeare fails only when the people performing him don't understand what they're saying, and triumphs completely when they do. Some people have a gift that pulls brilliant people into orbit around their project, and Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" is proof of how strong that gravity can be. Charlton Heston as the Player King. Robin Williams as Osric. Billy Crystal, of all people, as the gravedigger, cracking wise over Yorick's skull as though he'd been doing Shakespeare his whole career. John Gielgud, who had been playing Shakespeare since before most of these other actors were born, makes a cameo appearance as Priam. Even Richard Attenborough shows up in this film. On paper, this cast list reads like a fever dream, something a film school student might invent as a joke. But it makes perfect sense once you understand what Branagh represented in 1996: a director-actor who had already proven, with "Henry V," that he could make Shakespeare real and alive on screen. All those talented people were ready to join him. I totally get it. If I received a message saying Branagh needed a silent walk-on but I had to pay my own airfare to London, I'd be at the airport in an hour, no questions asked. What's easy to forget, amid the star power, is that this is the only film version of "Hamlet" ever made using the complete, unabridged text, nearly four hours long, conflated from the First Folio and Second Quarto. That's an act of faith in the material, and in the audience's capacity to sit with it. Most people say they hate Shakespeare, and I understand why, because most actors butcher him. They either shout the verse like it's an oration ("to split the ears of the groundlings") or whisper it like it's some kind of coffee-house beatnik poetry divorced of meaning. (No offense meant to Ginsberg.) Either way, the audience doesn't get it and ends up hating Shakespeare. I spent years doing Shakespeare on stage in Florida, which is not exactly known as a cultural capital, so take this with appropriate humility, but I had audience members tell me afterward that I was the only actor they'd understood all night. That's not a boast about talent; it's an indictment of how rarely the verse gets spoken with actual comprehension of what it means, line by line, thought by thought, rather than performed as decoration. Branagh understands this completely, and it's the single greatest achievement of this film. His own delivery of Hamlet's lines is immaculate, clear without being flattened, musical without losing sense. You can follow every turn of thought because he knows exactly what each line means and trusts the meaning to carry the music, not the other way around. That clarity extends to his direction and his screenplay choices throughout; actors who've never done Shakespeare on screen before suddenly sound "trippingly on the tongue", because Branagh has built a frame that lets meaning lead. Alex Thomson's cinematography, all 70mm grandeur and mirrored corridors, gives the production the scale it needs without ever upstaging the language, which is the hardest trick in adapting Shakespeare for film. I don't know that I need to say much more. Here is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, performed uncut, by a cast that reads like a miracle, directed by a man who loves the language enough to "beget a temperance that may give it smoothness". It's a brilliant production.