4/15/2023 0 Comments Hamlet full movie 1996![]() ![]() All good reinterpretations of Shakespeare present a new facet for the viewer, and here's the one from Branagh's that leaped out at me: the real tragedy is not that of Hamlet, but of the Ghost who so ill-uses him. Five acts later, you've got a corpse-laden throne room where Norwegian warlord Fortinbras (Rufus Sewell) can plant his flag unopposed. The young scion of Elsinore draws close to suicide before a visitation from his father's Ghost recalibrates him for revenge. Must I warn of spoilers? Danish prince Hamlet (Branagh) mourns the loss of his namesake father and king (Brian Blessed), even as Old Hamlet's brother Claudius (Derek Jacobi) ascends the throne and takes the widowed queen Gertrude (Julie Christie) to wife. If it's not following a conversation from chamber to chamber, it's stalking individual characters like a slasher, or eyeing Blenheim Palace, stand-in for Elsinore, as an isolated and vulnerable garrison surmounting a wintry heath. In its best movements, Branagh's camera-expertly guided by Alex Thomson-paces the halls in long, uninterrupted takes. ![]() But the soliloquies are highly mobile, too, and some charged, argumentative scenes have enough cuts to make Michael Bay start nodding along. John Simon called Branagh's conception of the character "an active, brawny one," and indeed there are action beats aplenty to recapture any interest that possibly waned during the last soliloquy. No, Branagh's Hamlet bares his chest, wails, declaims, mocks, condescends, and rages. One forgets that those closed-in movies were usually made in retreat from some grandiose fit like Dead Again or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. One might have thought Hamlet would call for a bit of the drawing-room restraint he'd shown in his smaller films, like Peter's Friends and A Midwinter's Tale. Shooting in lucid 70mm and leaning on giallo techniques when the text (unexpurgated here for the first time on film) calls for a murder, director-star Branagh plays to the box seats as well as to the groundlings. ![]()
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