Page 157 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

146 / Shakespeare in the Movies

the death of Ophelia, and the eventual fate of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are reported but not shown. Although Branagh decided
to keep Shakespeare's language intact, he might have cut away to
the action, since it's wise to make a movie visual whenever possible.
On the other hand, if there is a single sequence that proves
Branagh's directorial gifts, it's his handling of the "To be or not to
.
be .." speech, the play's most glorious soliloquy and yet the most
troublesome for filmmakers. What is one to do with all these words?
Olivier offered one approach: speaking the speech while cutting away
to images of the ocean crashing on rocks. Zeffirelli went the other
route, having Gibson speak the speech into a static camera, suggest-
ing there are indeed moments when the cinema need not add any-
thing. Branagh's approach is more satisfying than either, so right that
we wonder why no one thought of it before.
Hamlet begins speaking into a mirror, unaware it's a one-way
window. Claudius and his coconspirators stand on the other side,
observing. Branagh cuts back and forth between Hamlet's con-
frontation with himself through his image, and the antagonists
voyeuristically learning about a side of the prince he would never
knowingly reveal. Then Polonius makes a noise; as Hamlet contin-
ues, he does so with the realization that the walls literally have ears.
Without adding extraneous material, Branagh refuses to sit still for a
set piece; integrating the words, he makes the soliloquy play cine-
matically as never before.
After everyone is killed at the end, Olivier had us look up at
Hamlet's dead body, suggesting positivism, while Zeffirelli insisted
we gaze down, implying negativism. Branagh, again refusing to sim-
plify, combines the best of both. First, as Hamlet's body is carried
away, Branagh shoots the scene with the camera angled depressingly
downward, perhaps overdoing the symbolism by allowing himself, as
actor, to spread out his arms, Christ-like. This is followed by an up
angle, as Hamlet ascends, suggesting that from the negativity of this
great man's death, something positive has been achieved. By refusing
to make a Hamlet that ends with the old, positive Elizabethan vision
(Olivier) or the more modern negative one (Zeffirelli), Branagh sug-
gests that Shakespeare's script contains elements of each, incorpo-
rating both into what rates as not only a sturdy film of Hamlet but
a virtual apotheosis of all twentieth-century Hamlets.
What we here encounter is both the Shakespeare of our collective
imagination and "the real Will," too often obscured by existential,
oedipal, and academic approaches. Janet Maslin of the New York