There are two big selling points for this Hamlet: Elsinore Castle and Christopher
Plummer. Filmed at the actual Elsinore and with a famous, highly regarded
actor as Hamlet, this film had a lot of
promise. However, I found it
depressingly disappointing on pretty much every level.
I’ll start off with Elsinore itself. Perhaps this was due to the contrast between
expectation and reality, but I found Elsinore to be pretty dull. Of the three Hamlets I’ve reviewed so far, this was by far the most uninspiring
set. The outside of the castle actually
looked pretty nice, but unfortunately, this was only shown a handful of
times. Most of the movie was shot indoors
where there were white walls and windows.
The windows had bars on them and sometimes that walls had
tapestries. Not particularly rousing. As
a selling point, then, Elsinore fell pretty flat.
That wouldn’t matter though if the movie were well acted and
well directed. Nobody watches Hamlet primarily to see a pretty castle,
so this could have been a success even if the real Elsinore was rather
disappointing. Unfortunately, I found
the acting to be uniformly overdone and unconvincing. It was so overdone it was almost camp:
certainly not a good direction for a Shakespearean tragedy to head.
The problem was only accentuated by the fact that most of
the shots were up-close shots of the actors’ faces. There was really no room to overact without it
being extremely noticeable, and they were overdoing it enough for it to be
glaring from a long way away. In such an
intimate film, understatement is key, and they went as far as possible in the
other direction.
Plummer himself was the worst offender when it came to camp:
everything felt overly dramatic, silly almost, and lacking in psychological
reality. I could never believe that he
was a real person, much less Hamlet. He
was a character being pushed around by the writer, not a person whose own thoughts
and personality guided his behavior. I
found it hard to see much in him beyond the hammy overacting, but what was
there certainly could have been good, had he just toned it all down quite a
bit.
He was a hypersensitive Hamlet throughout, taking everything
to heart and swinging wildly between moods at the drop of a hat. His relationship with Horatio was loving and
tender, and he made no effort to hide his emotions from Horatio in any way. He also seemed to have been quite close to
Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, greeting them initially with as much affection and
joy as when he greeted Horatio. Unlike
many Hamlets, he was never overtly cruel to them, and his role in their deaths
was never discussed. Even after they
admitted they were spying on him, he was unable to control himself from
confessing his inner thoughts to them; he began the “What a piece of work is a
man” speech sarcastically but quickly became genuine, as if he couldn’t help
but to be honest with them.
He was a fairly gentle Hamlet; he yelled at Ophelia but
didn’t hurt her, and though he was rough with Gertrude, he wasn’t nearly as
violent as many I’ve seen. As he was
leaving Gertrude after the closet scene, he turned and ran to hug her and reassure
her that “I must be cruel only to be kind.”
His mocking of Rosencrantz, Gildenstern, Polonius, Claudius and Osric,
which can sometimes come off as incredibly harsh was toned down, and only
really stung at all with Claudius and Osric. Part of this was that his
interactions with Polonius were mostly done with him grotesquely pulling faces
and trying to act mad, so that his jabs at Polonius came off as simply crazy
instead of insulting. His “Play upon
this pipe” speech was done with a tone of personal hurt rather than anger, and
though Rosencrantz and Gildenstern were uncomfortable around him, he didn’t
give them much of a reason to be.
Really though, the main thing I noticed about him was the
extent to which he overacted. It was so
bad that it overshadowed the characterization of his Hamlet and made it
impossible to be drawn into the world of the film.
Of the rest of the cast, Robert Shaw as Claudius and Michael
Caine as Horatio gave the most convincing performances. Shaw was masculine, vain and a little bit
insecure as Claudius. He delivered the
line “My cousin Hamlet and my son,” as a question, as if he was still unsure of
how to negotiate that relationship.
After the play within a play, he was upset almost to the point of being
dysfunctional. However, the rest of the
time he maintained a virile, strong exterior.
Caine’s Horatio was a bit of a yes-man, especially because many of his
longer speeches were omitted, but he managed to create a solid, believable
relationship with Hamlet. Their
relationship to each other felt more genuine than anything else in this movie,
and that was in a large part due to Caine’s way of quietly and constantly
showing tenderness and affection.
The last point I have about this movie was its general
sloppiness. There were a number of
problems with jump cuts, such as when Hamlet managed to walk towards, open and
partially climb out of a window during a half-second cut to Rosencrantz and
Gildenstern. Issues like that happened
fairly often, and I found them to be very distracting. The biggest and most confusing of these was
when the entire Royal Court vanished during the final scene. Because of the heavy use of close-ups, I
can’t say exactly when they disappeared, but when Claudius was stabbed about
one hundred people were there, and when Fortinbras entered the room, it was
only the dead bodies and Horatio.
Somewhere in the middle of that, either one hundred people managed to
silently exit the room, or were abducted by aliens.
There were also several scenes staged in ways that rendered
them fairly illogical. They cut the
actual text of the Play within a Play, and instead did only the dumb show. I don’t have an incredibly strong objection
to that, but, if you’re going to do that, you have to cut references to the
text of the play as well. In the middle
of the dumb show when Gertrude says the lady protests too much, the lady isn’t
saying anything at all. How could she
possibly be protesting too much?
Similarly, they had Hamlet overhear the King admit that his
praying isn’t working because he isn’t genuinely repentant. That, of course, makes Hamlet’s decision not
to kill him completely illogical. His
belief that killing the King while praying would send him to heaven doesn’t
hold if he knows that Claudius isn’t really atoning for his sin. This sort of sloppy illogicality in the
filming and staging got in the way of enjoying the movie and it only
accentuated the already overpowering lack of realism. If you can’t really believe the lead actor,
and he can also open windows instantaneously, it’s hard to get engrossed.
That’s really all there is to say. If you’re dying to see Elsinore Castle, there
are some lovely photos you can find with a quick Google search.
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