Franco Zefirelli's Hamlet (1990)

Before I watched this, I knew two things about it.  First, stars Mel Gibson, action movie star and acclaimed anti-Semite.  Second, it was two hours long, meaning over half the text would be cut. Needless to say, I wasn’t going in with high expectations. 

To put it kindly, it was everything I expected it to be.  However, there was one unexpected bright spot amidst the darkness, so I’ll start there. 

Helena Bonham-Carter was easily the best thing about this movie.   She was intelligent, but vulnerable, and came off as an Ophelia who Hamlet could actually fall in love with.  She fought against Polonius trying to control her, but eventually recognized that she had no choice.  With effort, she held herself together through Hamlet’s cruelty.  In short, she was stronger and more interesting than Ophelia usually is, and she achieved this without having to sacrifice Ophelia’s vulnerability.  Her mad scenes were where she was truly spectacular though.  Helena Bonham-Carter always seems to have a slight mad glint in her eye, and she can do crazy like nobody else.  Her sexually depraved madness coupled with grief was poignant, alarming and altogether beautifully done.  For once, in the entire movie, I actually cared. 

I mean “for once” literally, because the rest of the time, I just couldn’t care.  Occasionally I could move myself to something stronger than apathy, but only rarely and with a bit of effort.  It was only two hours long, but when you just don’t care, two hours feels a lot longer.  To be honest, I was bored.  It’s pretty hard to make Hamlet boring to someone as geeky about Shakespeare as I am, but I was bored because I just didn’t care about any of them one way or the other. 

The cutting and reorganizing of the text was one of the big problems.  I understand you’ve often got to do it to make a good movie that is actually the length of a movie.  However, the goal of editing the text is to streamline and improve it, not just whack out huge chunks and shuffle the rest around for no good reason.

 For instance, they took the “get thee to a nunnery” lines out of the nunnery scene and instead had Hamlet whisper them to Ophelia during the play within a play.  I can’t think of a single good reason to do this.  It distracts from what’s really important in the play scene, and also leaves no room for those lines to feel meaningful, because they’re crammed into a scene with other more important things distracting from them.  It makes Hamlet look purposefully and premeditatedly cruel; it’s very different for him to yell something at her in the heat of a confrontation than it is for him to follow her around for an entire evening whispering abuse in her ear.   It also doesn’t make sense.  Sure, he trades a couple of quips with Ophelia before the play, but he’s not really thinking about her then.  He’s completely focused on Claudius and Gertrude and how they’re going to react to the play.  Why on earth would he spend the play causally torturing Ophelia and ignoring them? 

That was the biggest example of reshuffling, but they did stuff like that throughout the movie and to similar effect.  Sometimes it wasn’t really problematic so much as unnecessary.  Why shuffle a line around when it worked perfectly fine where it was?  For instance, Polonius’s announcement about the players was moved to right before the performance and made into a public speech.  I’m not sure that public speeches are really his style, but it wasn’t problematic, just rather unnecessary.  Most of the time, I felt like lines worked better in their original placement, even if they weren’t really a big issue in their new placements. 

In addition to the generally pointless blenderizing of the text, they also cut massive sections of it.  The Fortinbras subplot, the first ghost scene, the Reynaldo scene, the player King’s speech, half the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, the entire “how all occasions” soliloquy, Claudius’s interactions with Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, Hamlet’s instructions to the players, Hamlet’s “heart of heart” speech to Horatio, Hamlet’s letter to Horatio, their conversation before the duel, and Horatio’s attempted suicide were all totally gone.  That already sounds like a lot, but if you also take into account that every remaining scene had at least a couple dozen lines cut, a massive amount of the play was missing.   

The overall effect was that every character seemed to slide out of focus.  The sharp characterizations and psychological complexity all vanished, leaving a bunch of chess pieces being pushed around rather than living breathing people.  The cutting was just so brutal and extreme that entire characters were completely cheated out of personality, and entire sides of other characters went missing.

 Horatio suffered especially strongly from the cutting, only getting a handful of lines in before “Goodnight, sweet prince.”  He didn’t have a relationship with Hamlet, the audience didn’t really know who he was, and he somehow was expected to be the emotional center of the final moments of the movie, when he was basically a completely random guy.

Rosencrantz and Gildenstern also totally faded away.  Sean Murray and Michael Maloney played them as blandly as possible, and they were just fairly random and insignificant.  They weren’t shown conveying information to Claudius, and with huge sections of their interaction with Hamlet cut out, I wondered if they might have been better off eliminated entirely.  They didn’t serve much of a purpose with this edit of the text, nor did they really seem to illustrate much about Hamlet.  Normally, the fact that Hamlet instantly catches on to them says a lot about who he is: he’s clever, socially astute and a little bit paranoid.  However, they chose to stage his initial greeting of them by having him struggle to remember their names, immediately undermining all of that.  Of course he knew they were spies, since they were random strangers who claimed they had come all the way to Denmark just to say hi.  Unfortunately, they also never did any spying, since all their scenes with Claudius were gone.  With their primary function gone and their relationship with Hamlet cut so short that it didn’t do much to illuminate Hamlet’s character, there was really no point to them at all. 

Claudius also lost a lot of his personality; he didn’t get to maneuver his way out of the possible disaster with Fortinbras, and he didn’t take much charge in dealing with Hamlet’s “madness”.  He went along with the plan to watch Hamlet with Ophelia, and that was about it.  He didn’t summon Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, and his more active role in planning to spy on Hamlet with Ophelia and Gertrude was eliminated, making him look like a king who just went along with whatever Polonius did.  Most of his soliloquy was also cut, leaving only his statement that he had, in fact, killed his brother.  The other sides of him, including his genuine repentance and resigned self-knowledge were eliminated.  With all these cuts he came off as weak, passive and not particularly interesting.  He spent the whole play reacting instead of acting, and turned an already fairly weak villain into a bit of a joke as far as villainy goes. 

Glenn Close could have been a good Gertrude.  Unfortunately, it was a bit hard to tell with all the incest dominating most of her scenes.  Olivier flirted with the incestuous in his Hamlet.  Zefirelli flirted with it, fell in love with it and married it.  Now, I don’t really see much evidence for it in the text, nor do I see anything that requires such an extreme and bizarre explanation.  Basically, I don’t find an Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet to be either particularly illuminating or particularly interesting. 

However, Zefirelli went for it with all he had in him, and I felt like it pretty effectively ruined the closet scene.  First of all, if the entire scene features Hamlet thrusting on top of his mother, you don’t pay attention to what he’s actually saying.  You pay attention to the thrusting.  This whole scene that should be about complex emotion and conflicting feelings is reduced down to just sex.  Additionally, it’s unpleasant to watch.  I don’t want to see that.  Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show scenes that are difficult to watch.  I have difficulty watching the scene in King Lear where Cornwall puts out Gloucester’s eyes.  It’s unpleasant and difficult, but it’s there for a good reason and it’s important.  It’s not just shock value and it’s certainly not empty.  However, in Zefirelli’s Hamlet, the shock value of the mother-son make-out is completely empty.  I don’t really see that he’s using it to say anything significant or make a more interesting movie.  It seems like it’s there for shock value and not much else.  People can walk away talking about how it’s “edgy” when in reality, he hasn’t said or done anything interesting. 

That aside, I liked Close’s Gertrude.  I liked that she played up how truly happy she was with Claudius: she wasn’t just content, she was practically radiant, and even Hamlet couldn’t rain on her parade too much.  It made her realization that he was a murderer much more tragic, and underscored the horror of her dying at his hands. 

And now, I turn to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet.  I’ll try to put aside my violent allergy to Mel Gibson as best I can, and analyze his performance based on his acting alone.  Watching any given scene alone, he wasn’t all that bad.  However, if you put them all together it got much worse, because there seemed to be little psychological connection between them.  It was as if Zefirelli told him “Alright, Mel, act angry in this scene,” so he went on stage and acted angry, and then for the next scene he told him to be sad, so he did that instead.  I couldn’t get inside the internal life of Hamlet at all, because there didn’t seem to be much of a psychological connection between one scene and another.  He wasn’t remembering and reacting to past events, he was just sort of being pushed around the stage and made to say things at random.  That’s the primary reason why I was bored: Hamlet had no internal life and wasn’t a person I could invest in at all. 

Additionally, everything he did was staged with about as much subtlety as a hammer to the head.  He delivered the “to be or not to be” speech in a tomb, examining the caskets.  So if he’s in a tomb, the audience will know that he’s talking about death, right?  When he mentions Gertrude in the “oh that this too, too sullied flesh” soliloquy, he’s got to look out of the window and see her.  When he comes up with the idea of the play in the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, he’s watching the players in the courtyard.  It was like we couldn’t be counted on to believe that he remembered things that happened to him from before and contemplated them and used them to formulate new ideas.  Since he didn’t have any internal life or psychology at all, they felt the need to make it so he was only able to think about things that were directly in front of his face.  The result was that everything felt spoon-fed to the audience in the most obvious way possible and Hamlet’s internal life vanished even more. 

However, Mel Gibson is an action star, right?  So he should be able to do a swordfight well at least. No such luck.  Maybe it wasn’t Gibson’s fault, but the swordfight was slow, clunky and poorly choreographed.  It looked about as realistic as a Jedi Light Saber battle, with lots of spinning around, needlessly opening themselves up to attack and failing to hit each other when they were wide open.  Additionally, it was dreadfully slow, looking almost slow motion.  That seemed to be because the swords were too heavy for them, so it took a long time to heave them through the air.  It was a disappointing end, but by that point I don’t think the movie could have been much redeemed by even the best swordfight choreography. 

Really the only reason to watch this is Helena Bonham-Carter.  She was great, but not good enough to make the rest of it worth the two hours.