Hamlet - Two-Disc Special Edition DVD

Hamlet is possibly the longest, probably the most performed, and certainly the most written-about play ever. Almost every major actor, and a good many actresses, have played or wanted to play the protagonist, a character with whom every thinking, psychologically beleaguered and suffering human being must feel kinship. Through the ages, there has been an infinite variety of Hamlets depending on the temper of the times and the temperament of the actor.

The complete text, of which more than one version exists, is daunting for the performers and demanding for the audience. Editing and cutting have become customary. A completist version is rare and temerarious; nevertheless, as a graduate student, I directed such a semi-staged version in Harvard's quasi-Elizabethan Sanders Theater, in which I also played a crotchety Polonius and gung-ho Fortinbras.

Under the unenthusiastic sponsorship of the renowned scholar F. O. Matthiessen, the event had a foursquare Hamlet in Bill West, who, as Will West, was to have a modest acting career on the West Coast (not named after him). I recruited the best student actors available, including the subsequently celebrated Jerome Kilty as a subtle Claudius, and the soon to be notorious Boston debutante Pansy Prince as a bouncy Gertrude. The music of Ottorino Respighi was culled for a canny background score.

From this I learned the foolhardiness of a completist Hamlet, the unkindest cut of all. Nonetheless, that is what Kenneth Branagh gave us with his 1996 film, newly rereleased on a two-disc DVD, the full First Folio further beefed up with generous helpings from the Second Quarto. So whereas Laurence Olivier in his film contented himself with a perhaps too thrifty 148 minutes, Branagh's galumphs in at an unhealthily obese 242.

Branagh had already out-Heroded Olivier with an inferior Henry V, with battle scenes in ankle-deep mud; now he tried to out-Hamlet him with a Hamlet steeped in enough faux-snow made of bleached cornflakes to feed the starving orphans of Africa. His was to be a DeMille-anly grandiose and modernizedly mundane Dane, to outstrip Olivier's. And, apropos outstripping, he invented nude scenes for a copulating Hamlet and Ophelia, and a titillating morning after for a postcoital Polonius, with a shamefaced concubine slinking out of the old man's bedchamber.

Clearly, Branagh suffered from the cinematic equivalent of a Napoleon complex—an Olivier complex. But whereas the old-style madmen were satisfied to be Napoleons, Branagh had to go Olivier one megalomaniacal better. Yet his one better was to prove several worse.

Take first that hammily hyperborean setting, and that unfelicitous updating to the late nineteenth century. For whereas a ghost story is fitting in the Renaissance, Queen Victoria would not have been amused by a ghost made creepier with special effects like something out of a John Carpenter horror flick. No less horrible was a latter-day Ophelia hosed down in a padded madhouse cell and emerging from it in a straitjacket.

Whereas Olivier had a suitably stark, battlemented Elsinore atop ocean-tossed crags, Branagh picked Britain's biggest and grandest palace, Blenheim, which could have housed 20 simultaneous Hamlets. And not even DeMille would have shot most scenes in its Versailles-like Hall of Mirrors, anachronistically two-way ones at that.

And, however snow-clad, the flat landscape around Blenheim flattened out the early ghost scenes, though it later did accommodate thousands of extras for the Norwegian army to provide the background for Branagh's "How all occasions" speech, surely the most overpopulated soliloquy in history. But excess characterizes all of this film, what with pleonastically acted-out scenes and dumbly inserted characters merely mentioned by Shakespeare.

[IMG:R]And what about the lead performance? As I noted, there have been Hamlets of all stripes, ranging from dreamily sensitive plants to matinee-macho barnstormers. Branagh, a lover of extremes, has it both ways. For the soliloquies, he affects a whispering—not baritone—countertenor in exquisite falsettos. The dialogue scenes he mostly rattles through, chasing after a Guinness record for fastest Hamlet this side of shot from guns. While variety is a good thing, hurtling from murmurs to thunderclaps, from delicate rubato to greased lightning is not. And he even emulates Olivier's blunder of blonding his hair, but whereas Olivier at least sported medieval locks, Branagh, with his military uniform and Prussian haircut, resembles a minor official at the Wilhelmine court.

But rather than enumerate further unblessed conceptions, let me fast-forward to the queerest one: casting stars of screen and stage in bit parts or even unscripted, wordless walk-ons. So we get a Where's Waldo game: Instead of concentrating on Shakespeare, we try to amass brownie points by spotting Jack Lemmon, John Gielgud, Gerard Depardieu, Rosemary Harris, Judi Dench, John Mills, Billy Crystal et al. as they zoom by. (Even the Duke of Marlborough on horseback, no doubt in repayment for the loan of his Blenheim Palace.)

Some of the leads are well taken: Derek Jacobi as a slimily insinuating Claudius, Julie Christie as a touchingly eager Gertrude. Others flop, e.g. Kate Winslet's bovine Ophelia and Nicholas Farrell's smarmy Horatio. Still others are sabotaged by absurd effects, like the able Brian Blessed's Ghost. All told, despite its flaws, stick with Olivier's Lean Cuisine Hamlet rather than Branagh's stuffed Strasburg goose one.

A few of the extras on this DVD version, including commentary by Branagh and Shakespeare scholar Russell Jackson, may be of glancing interest, but what good is a periphery where the center does not hold?