Word: branagh
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Chest hair. It all seems to boil down to chest hair. Kenneth Branagh set out on an audacious path when he decided to make his own film version of Hamlet, and the result is a film that is overall well-crafted and compelling. But this masterpiece, which Branagh directed, starred in and "wrote" himself, is often shot through with several glaring inconsistencies that take away from the power of the melodrama he has obviously worked hard to create...
...Branagh sets the play in a pre-World-War-I era, apparently for no reason other than novelty. As all Hamlet-o-philes know, the story begins with the sighting of King Hamlet's ghost by Horatio (Nicholas Ferrell), Marcellus (Jack Lemmon '47) and Barnardo (Ian McElhinney). Here Bismarck-style hats poised atop the head of an improbably cast Marcellus steal a scene intended to prepare the audience for the play's mood of ranting and revenge. But to the audience's consternation, the period so over-emphasized early on plays a minor or non-existent role later...
...When Branagh does use the period costumes to some effect, his motivation is questionable and questionably hairy. Hamlet, played by Branagh himself, wears black throughout, coupled with a lengthy trench-coat and cape for dramatic effect -- a trick already employed in his not-so-classic redux of Frankenstein. Nevertheless, Hamlet often also dons a white poet shirt, baggy enough to shift the audience's focus in several lengthy scenes to Branagh's chest hair...
MOVIES . . . HAMLET: "If Kenneth Branagh doesn?t win an Oscar for his four-hour, uncut ?Hamlet,? " says TIME's Richard Corliss, "he should at least cop a Chutzpah Award." Here's the most eclectic cast in movie history -- Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, John Mills, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and the Duke of Marlborough, to name but a dozen -- in the second longest film released by a major studio (after ?Cleopatra?). To his credit, the actor-director-adapter approached this job not as a solemn duty or an egotistical...
Enter Hamlet, mirthless, disheveled and on cue, at the year's end in a Kenneth Branagh movie that resurrected the melancholy, not-quite-corny figure yet again and plunked him in the middle of the aging New World. Here was the eternal young man, immensely gifted and born to high expectations, who had an overwhelming moral problem and either did not know what to do or did and could not do it. His inaction would never have been as poignant had he not been encumbered with the wild idea that a person should do whatever is nobler in the mind...