Page 147 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

136 / Shakespeare in the Movies

shipload of pirates. Freud says, "Hamlet is able to do anything—
except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and
took his [old Hamlet's? or Hamlet's?] place with his mother, the man
who shows Hamlet the repressed wishes of his (own) childhood real-
ized." No wonder Hamlet is split down the middle on this, and only
this, issue, to the point of his feigned madness becoming all too real.
As a decent man of moral convictions, how can he bring himself to
kill a man who performed a wrongful act that is precisely what
Hamlet, in his own most awful fantasies, wanted to do but never
would? To kill Claudius would, in essence, be to kill himself—or at
least the dark side of himself. As Freud himself had put it: "The
loathing that should drive (Hamlet) on to revenge is replaced by self-
reproaches, scruples of conscience that remind him he is literally no
better than the sinner whom he is to punish." This is the Zeffirelli-
Gibson Hamlet in a nutshell.
Zeffirelli took precisely the same approach he had earlier assumed
for The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet: Make the Bard
easily accessible to modern audiences by stripping away all sem-
blance of theatricality, replacing archaic conventions with the more
immediate sensation of a mainstream "movie-movie." The result
was as naturalistic a production as possible, with authentic settings
rather than symbolic sets, dialogue mercilessly pruned, and actors
encouraged to deliver lines as if they were prose rather than poetry.
Even the casting of Mel Gibson, star of the Lethal Weapon trilogy,
made clear that this would not be an artsy, elitist Hamlet but a vis-
ceral rendering.
Though Hamlet was something of a stretch for an actor associ-
ated with hard-edged action, Gibson was (thankfully) not encour-
aged to try for reverse typecasting. Likewise, Zeffirelli's visual
approach is full of action. The camera is constantly on the move,
darting, slipping, and finally rushing madly through the film's Elsi-
nore. Camera and character are at one. Both are robust and athletic,
if deeply troubled or even schizophrenic. Surprisingly, serious actress
Glenn Close (who, as Gertrude, everyone assumed would overpower
Gibson) offers the film's weakest performance, appearing more like
calculating Lady Macbeth than a willfully oblivious queen even the
Ghost cannot bring himself to condemn. Perhaps wishing to avoid
appearing as a retrowoman, Close attempted to make her Gertrude
an equal in evil to Claudius.