This is the Hamlet
film from the BBC Complete Shakespeare series and while I haven’t seen a large
number of the movies from the series, my impression from the ones I have seen
is that they’re fairly patchy. I haven’t
really hated any, but I find a lot of them to be poorly cast, slowly paced and
extremely conventional. This film
touches all three of these, but didn’t manage to be ruined by any of them,
mainly due to Sir Derek Jacobi, who was a spectacular Hamlet. However, due to a
lot of other factors, I thought this was an extremely mixed production, with
some wonderful and some terrible elements.
One of the biggest things recommending this Hamlet is that it is almost full-text. The occasional line was removed, but I’d guess
less than twenty were cut in total. This is one of the two full-text Hamlet films I’m watching this month,
and I wish there were a lot more of them.
Sure, it’s long. That’s okay, in
my book, because each time I see it whole I remember again why cuts always make
me sad. Each character seems to blossom
in a full-text Hamlet. The layers of complexity, the little moments,
the inner thoughts all come out in full, in a way they almost never do in a cut
performance. It’s such a gorgeously
constructed play, such a tightly constructed play, that any cut ends up being a
loss, and I think it takes a full-text movie to remind you of that.
There seems to be a very wide range of production values in
the BBC Shakespeare series, and this is one of the ones on the lower end of
that spectrum. It was shot entirely in
studio, with grey backdrops and little in the way of props or background. They set up chairs and occasionally carpets,
and that was about it. The outdoor
scenes were shot in the bare studio, and the lighting was pretty terrible throughout. The costumes were clearly much higher budget
than anything else, but overall, this was a very low-budget production. If you’re looking for good, or even decent
visuals, this is not your Hamlet.
A lot of the actors also didn’t give spectacular
performances. Patrick Stewart as
Claudius, Claire Bloom as Gertrude, Lalla Ward as Ophelia and David Robb as
Laertes were all flat, and each for different reasons.
Patrick Stewart was a jovial, casual Claudius, who never
seemed quite like the scheming politician he needed to be. You can be smiling and “nice” as much as you
like when playing Claudius, but you have to get a sense of the darkness and
coldness beneath that. Despite having
the full text, which usually makes Claudius seem more intelligent and politically
astute, I never really felt that he was much of a threat to Hamlet. His confession of his guilt seemed to come
from nowhere, acting-wise. Claudius is
such a torn, confused person, and however you want to interpret him, you have
to show his inner workings in subtle ways before that scene, otherwise, it just
seems random, as it did here. However,
despite the poor context of it, I liked his delivery of the soliloquy. Unlike most other Claudiuses, the full range
of emotion in this speech came through: a simultaneous repentance and
stubbornness, self-knowledge and self-loathing, and eventual apathy. If only he’d shown similar depth the rest of
the time.
Claire Bloom was simply too detached as Gertrude. She never felt like an emotional center of
the play, and I never felt like I understood her motivations or mental state. However, like Stewart, she had one
spectacular moment. During the closet
scene when Hamlet started yelling at her, instead of falling apart immediately
as most Gertrudes do, she stood up and slapped him in the face. For a moment, she was every bit a mother
reprimanding a misbehaving little boy, and for the first and only time, their
relationship came through clearly. Gertrude
can be regal, just like Claudius can be jovial, but there’s got to be more than
just those elements.
Lalla Ward’s Ophelia registered about a zero on the
personality scale. Her acting wasn’t
particularly bad, just bland. More
problematically, her madness seemed to come out of nowhere. I think the part of Ophelia takes a lot of
acting in between the lines for her to really make sense on screen, and I
didn’t get enough of that from Ward.
Because of this, her mad scenes lacked the raw power they can sometimes
have, and they felt a little dull.
David Robb as Laertes was the last major weak link of the
cast, and definitely the worst of them.
He just overacted everything, the entire time. Especially when he first returned to Denmark,
he was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch.
Despite all this, I liked this film a lot, and the reason
boils down the Derek Jacobi. That’s not
to say he was perfect, however. He
definitely had a tendency to overdo it, especially after his encounter with the
ghost, and at those times it was almost difficult to watch. Most of the time he was more reined in, but
he was always hovering on the edge of overacting. However, despite his rather over the top
style, he did many things extraordinarily well.
The main quality he had was the psychological understanding
of Hamlet. Sometimes with a bad Hamlet,
you can’t follow his emotional journey, and it’s hard to connect his actions,
his emotions, and his words. Sometimes,
with a good Hamlet, you get the clear emotions behind every word he says. And rarely, as with Derek Jacobi, not only is
every emotion crystal clear, but every thought is as well. The flow of one thought to another, and how
that guides what he feels and what he says was completely clear. Each time I’ve seen him, I see lines in new
ways that I never have before, because the thoughts beneath them come through
with such clarity. When he speaks, he’s
not making a speech, he’s just thinking. I was willing to look beyond the overacting
and fall in love with his Hamlet because of this psychological clarity.
His Hamlet was clearly distinguished from the rest of the
court, wearing only a rough white tunic in contrast to their richly adorned
clothing. His excitement and comfort
with the players was abundant, and he seemed more comfortable with them than
with anybody else. He was a Hamlet with no pretentions, and little interest in
reining in his emotions in front of others.
Only several times did he attempt to rein himself in, mainly during the
nunnery scene when he’s yelling at Ophelia.
He suddenly gasps, and says quietly, to himself “It hath made me mad,”
then hurries away, horrified. The rest
of the time he was emotional, energetic, and intellectually engaged with
everything. He was not a supremely
depressive Hamlet as Olivier was; his mood in the beginning especially was much
more furious than sad. He was completely
consumed by his rage at his mother.
Jacobi has stated that he views Hamlet not as a man of
inaction, but a man of “great, diverse action.”
His Hamlet was certainly not the stereotypical weak ditherer. He delayed revenge because after his initial
surge of excitement, he couldn’t work up the right passion to do it. He swore to revenge in an almost manic frenzy
after his encounter with the ghost, but afterwards, his passion for doing it
completely dissipated. During the “rogue
and peasant slave” soliloquy, he tried to work up the passion by acting out how
he’d murder the King: “Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous,
lecherous, kindles villain! Oh, vengeance!”
It didn’t work. He still wasn’t
feeling it because when he was in a calm state he couldn’t feel the same
excitement about the prospect of murder.
He also pulled off the mad scenes spectacularly. Some Hamlets are just embarrassingly strange:
they pull faces and act silly, and they come off as mad to the other characters
at the expense of coming off as stupid to the audience. Some Hamlets are witty and mocking in the mad
scenes, leaving the audience confused as to why everybody else in the play has
decided that Hamlet is crazy. Some
Hamlets come off as genuinely insane, and that’s a whole other can of
worms. Jacobi’s Hamlet hit a perfect
note in between wit and madness: the audience was in no doubt of his sanity,
his wit came through, and he still seemed insane to the other characters around
him. Since we were inside his head
enough to see where each of his jokes and gibes came from, his mocking of
Polonius was clear and amusing, but it was also understandable why Polonius
came to the conclusion that Hamlet was insane.
I also thought his treatment of Gertrude during the closet
scene was an interesting take on the sexual elements of that scene. He didn’t avoid dealing with the sexual
nature of Hamlet’s attack on Gertrude, but he also didn’t go for the Oedipal
interpretation, and instead gave something much more effective and
interesting. At one point during the
scene when he was describing her behavior with Claudius, he pinned her on the
bed and mimed thrusting on top of her.
It wasn’t sexual for either them or the audience; it was disgusting and
horrifying. But that was exactly how it
was supposed to be. He was using the
disgust she felt at being humped by her son that to illustrate that, in his
mind, what she did with Claudius was no different. What’s more, the disgust felt by the audience
helped you feel Hamlet’s outrage much more deeply than you otherwise would,
since most modern audiences don’t feel that Gertrude’s relationship with
Claudius is incestuous. While it was
difficult to watch, I thought it was extraordinarily effective for exactly that
reason.
Several of the more minor characters really shone as well. Rosencrantz
and Gildenstern were played by Jonathan Hyde and Geoffrey Bateman as
deliciously slimy courtiers, whose loyalties lay with whoever had the most
political power at the time. Hamlet, who
didn’t know them very well in the first place, wasn’t fooled for a minute. Ian Charleston also did a remarkable turn as
Fortinbras. He had enough of a screen
presence that when he marched in for the final scene, you remembered who he
was, and he didn’t seem completely random as he sometimes can. He was politically clever, powerful, and had
an impact much larger than was reflected in his percentage of lines.
Despite the mixed quality overall, this is completely worth
watching to see Derek Jacobi’s wonderful performance as the most
psychologically real and complex Hamlet I’ve seen.
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