Page 153 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

142 / Shakespeare in the Movies

confetti fill the screen. The experience is more like watching some
Ruritanian romance, perhaps The Prisoner of Zenda, than the dark
Hamlet of our century.
Branagh's mise en scene includes the dead of winter, the tale set
against a backdrop of eternally falling snow. There are moments
when this strains credulity; what is one to make of Gertrude's lines
about Ophelia's grasping for blossoms while floating downstream?
Still, Shakespeare didn't present time realistically; why should
Branagh? The perennially icy palace is a symbolic place; this is an
Elsinore of the mind, not some spot in Denmark.
From Hamlet's first confrontation with his mother, it is clear that
any attraction is as banished as Romeo from fair Verona. As Stanley
Kauffmann pointed out in the New Republic: "In Gertrude's key
moment, the closet scene, Christie bursts with the frightened
despair of a guilty woman who thinks her [salacious] behavior [with
Claudius] may have driven her son mad." Also, Branagh's prince is
rightfully angry about being denied his throne—possibly Shake-
speare's most essential point, however obscured by a century of post-
Freudian pontificating. Claudius wears the crown that should be
Hamlet's. David Denby wrote in New York magazine: "This Hamlet
very much wants to be king." And well he should; the crown
belongs to Hamlet, and him alone; that is the central issue of the
history-chronicle plays, here carried over to the realm of tragedy.
Commentary's Donald Lyons questioned Branagh's "effort to turn
the play into a political epic," though this might better be described
as Branagh's effort to return the play to what Shakespeare created,
which is nothing if not a political statement.
Branagh insists that Hamlet and Ophelia (Kate Winslet) were sex-
ually involved, a point left ambiguous in previous films. Branagh
thus motivates Hamlet's eventual bitterness as well as his intense
reaction to her death. Ophelia's protestations to brother and father
(the terrified girl insists she has resisted Hamlet's advances) are
included, though Branagh directed Winslet to speak the words awk-
wardly. During her self-defense, Branagh cuts to shots of Hamlet and
Ophelia '"twixt the sheets," undercutting the distressed girl's lies.
Although the look in Polonius's eyes makes it clear that he wants to
believe his daughter, he is perceptive enough to see through her cha-
rade. When he continues to insist that Hamlet's mental problems
result from sexual rejection, which denies Hamlet a physical outlet,
Polonius seems less the sex-obsessed fool of other films than a wise
man.