I once set out to watch every filmed Hamlet available. I got through about five, I think, before I got distracted. It's an unending task, happily so, and it doesn't take long before you realize that every production, no matter how halt and lame (I'm looking at you, Ethan Hawke), will have one or two moments of revelation, ways of presenting a line or an action, a thing you've seen a hundred times before, but somehow until that moment never really saw. The Franco Zeferelli/Mel Gibson movie (of which I have seen only pieces) has Glenn Close offering an interesting and workable take on Gertrude by giving her an extraordinarily childlike nature. The Derek Jacobi production is lovely, and has a wonderful "Nymph, in thy orisons" moment when he realizes Ophelia is holding her prayer-book upside-down. Even that infamous Ethan Hawke version (in which he omits a crucial "from" from his "to be or not to be" speech, thereby implying that his metaphorical traveller to the undiscovered country steals its coastline and never gives it back) puts odd curves on things, like scenes played in a laundromat or using old footage of James Dean as inspiration for Hamlet's musings on playacting.
The Olivier film, a sort of diving board from which a whole subsequent generation of Hamlets leapt in various directions, ages surprisingly well. It's filmed with grace, a camera moving in long, easy pans around an airy castle from scene to scene, and I tend to forget (I suppose because of the hype) what a strange and compelling actor Olivier was, always carrying some terrible secret barely restrained beneath those heavy eyelids.
Whatever your opinion of Kenneth Branagh, radical reinterpretation while remaining true to the text is a thing he does better than anyone, and he does it without breaking a sweat. For example, there's a version available of Twelfth Night as done by Branagh's Renaissance Company, always a troubling comedy because of the cruelties wreaked on Malvolio by its supposedly sympathetic buffoon characters. This one has been refigured as a tragedy, or anyway what you might call a Melancholy, with the truly resplendent Anton Lesser as the clown Feste, a role that has been re-placed (without changing any dialogue, mind you) at the epicenter of the piece as its tragic and romantic hero. Once you've seen it, it seems not only remarkably effective but also obviously what Shakespeare meant all along.
The Big Kahuna Dramaturge at the theatre where I work said unequivocally that you'll never see an uncut Hamlet onstage; it's just too damn long. Branagh did it on film, though, in what is the new textbook version from the mid-'90s, giving us four hours' worth of some of the best Shakespeare you'll ever see. He keeps the forward momentum so strong through the first half that it doesn't seem long, then you're hooked by the second and so it still doesn't seem long. He tucks an intermission in between IV.iv and IV.v, way too late in the day for a theatrical production because no modern audience will sit that long (when I was a kid, I swear they did the plays without intermissions at all, and if you left the theatre they wouldn't let you back in), but it's the perfect break in the play. He leaves us with the "I do not know / Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do,'" speech, just as he's leaving Denmark, banished for England, and he runs into the Norwegian army on his way out. Branagh sets the tiny scene on an icy, waste expanse and has the camera pull back, back, into infinity as the speech goes on, until he's just a tiny black speck in a white landscape, shouting these words into the vastness of the sky. He's truly brilliant, this man. AND after seeing Richard Briers' Polonius -- a harsh, relentless, thinking Polonius, -- I will never return easily to the old dunderheaded approach.
A Scottish brogue is one of the sexier things on the planet, and I always harbored an idea that if some Scottish actor (John Hannah, say) were to speak the "what a piece of work is a man" speech softly into one's ear (particularly the "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" bit), it might inspire a state of ecstatic nirvana profound enough that one might never return from it. You could say, then, that I ventured into the Tony Richardson Hamlet with some unreasonable expectations, since it has a Scot in the lead (Nicol Williamson). This one came out of the late sixties, when theatre (OK, the whole of Western Civilization) was experiencing earthquakes and tidal waves, destroying and reforming itself, and this piece seems to be from the very dark, post-Altamont sixties. You come away from Ophelia's mad scene (played by the ultrahip Marianne Faithfull) with a sense that everyone in the damn court has taken sexual advantage of her, including Laertes and Claudius. Williamson's Hamlet is the most neurotic you'll ever see, wild-eyed and crumpled, his high, nasal monotone (so much for the sexiness of the brogue) running roughshod across all that poetry as if he had no time for it.
You can get the Peter Brook Hamlet on Netflix, too, the 2002 production with Adrian Lester in the lead. Brook, one of a handful of Grand Theatrical Eminences Grises who redefined theatre at the hinge of the seventies, concentrates on graceful, minimalist staging, uses a multi-cultural stable of actors, and encourages his performers to avoid heavy characterization, focusing rather on speaking their lines with truth and simplicity. This can be quite beautiful in a Zen sort of way, but robs the play of much of its zest.
What you CAN'T get on Netflix is the David Tennant production from last year and oh! what I would give to have seen that onstage. They say that Tennant is now the most popular actor in all of England... mostly due to the good doctor, obviously, but across that pond I suspect folks actually take notice when an actor excels at Shakespeare.
A short list of the Dane on film:
Olivier, 1948
Philip Saville, starring Christopher Plummer, 1964
Gielgud & Bill Colleran, starring Richard Burton, 1964
Richardson, starring Nicol Williamson, 1969
David Giles, starring Ian McKellen, 1970
Celestino Coronada, starring Tony & David Meyer, 1976
Rodney Bennett, starring Derek Jacobi, 1980
Zefferelli, starring Mel Gibson, 1990
Kevin Kline, 1990
Branagh, 1996
Michael Almereyda, starring Ethan Hawke, 2000
Campbell Scott, 2000
Brook, starring Adrian Lester, 2002
Alexander Fodor, starring Wilson Belchambers, 2007
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