Very few "Hamlets" give us such a sense of boundless life and inescapable, impending death. You can quarrel with the details of Branagh's interpretation, but it's his interpretation, his "Hamlet," consistently and often ingeniously realized. The only serious quibble I'd make is with Crystal - who seems too soft and boyish for the gravedigger.) The film also is dotted with supporting portrayals by famous actors, whose familiar personalities reinforce the richness of the play: Robin Williams as fop Osric, Jack Lemmon as loyalist Marcellus, Billy Crystal as a wisecracking First Gravedigger, Richard Attenborough as a devastated British Ambassador, Gerard Depardieu as a brutish Reynaldo, Charlton Heston as the leonine Player King and that finest ex-"Hamlet" of all, John Gielgud as the silent Priam. The cast makes Branagh's Elsinore a whole, humming world of marvelous plenitude. (Emma Thompson played Ophelia in the 1992 BBC radio production with Branagh and his Renaissance Players - a kind of rough draft for this film - along with current movie cast members Briers, Maloney and Farrell.) In this movie, Ophelia and Hamlet make love (shown in flashback), and when she goes mad, it's in a madman's cell and over an icy lake. Kate Winslet's Ophelia is more bravura and modern. As Hamlet's faithless pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Reece Dimsdale and Timothy Spall (who shows his kinder side in "Secrets and Lies") are perfectly smarmy and insincere. Christie, made up to look like a great beauty in decline, is a poignant Gertrude. Richard Briers is a transparently devious, deliciously comic Polonius. His is a beautifully worked out and infinitely subtle portrayal of weakness and cruelty masked by false solicitude. Jacobi's Claudius would dominate any production. But Branagh puts him in a hall of mirrors, facing down endless reflections of himself.Īround him, the rest of the cast shines as well. When Olivier read the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, he put Hamlet precariously on a castle tower above raging waters. It's a dubious interpretation, but Branagh makes it work. He makes him a fiery, witty subversive, crack swordsman and lover.
But Branagh purges the notoriously "gloomy" Dane of melancholy and neurosis. In his film, director-star Laurence Olivier painted Hamlet as black-clad, blond and morose, "a man who could not make up his mind" enveloped by Elsinore's cavernous gloom.
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