IF you include his comedy In the Bleak Midwinter and his appearance as Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s Othello, Hamlet is Kenneth Branagh’s fifth screen engagement with Shakespeare, and it is by some way the best film he has directed. Conceived on an epic scale, it is shot in 70mm, uses the full four-hour text and has an international all-star cast.
Visually, the movie is constantly impressive. A snow-covered Blenheim Palace and its magnificent gardens serve as Elsinore; the main interior setting is a brightly lit state room with a black-and- white chequered floor surrounded by mirrored doors that open into small, slightly sinister rooms joined by hidden doors; the cast wear magnificently tailored 19th-century Ruritanian costumes.
Images large and small stick in the mind – Hamlet’s knife going through the grille of the confessional as he contemplates killing the praying Claudius; a breath-taking high- angle shot, that resembles a Caspar David Friedrich painting, of the prince dressed in black, standing on an icy promontory as Fortinbras’s army advances across a snow- covered plain behind him; what seems from floor level like a lake of blood left in Gertrude’s bedchamber after Hamlet has dragged Polonius’s corpse away.
The crisp elegance of the sets, costumes and photography, are matched by the clarity and lucidity of the performances.
With virtually every line intact and intelligible, we are shown Hamlet in all his contradictory complexity and within his moral and political context. Branagh’s prince is not an irresolute dreamer, but a virile, intelligent, witty man of action, often angry, hysterical, but never mad, and more mercurial than melancholic.
Julie Christie’s deeply moving Gertrude is a kindly, loving mother, in awe of her son. Derek Jacobi’s Claudius is a schemer aware of his own weakness. Richard Briers’s Polonius (one of the best I’ve seen) is intelligent and politically astute. Middle- aged rather than doddering, he’s been in bed with a young whore immediately before briefing Reynaldo (Grard Depardieu).
Some may find the fleeting appearance of famous actors in minor parts a little too annoying. Some might also think the opening tussle between Francisco and Barnardo somewhat extreme. But it is part of something boldly executed, and little short of a triumph.
Hamlet opens nationwide this Friday, May 30