I saw the four-hour, 70 mm version (a 3-hour, 35 mm version will be released later this spring). It's a gorgeous film, stunning set design in a lush palace more reminiscent of Versailles than of Laurence Olivier's gloomy, forbidding Elsinore, and Kenneth Branagh, who stars, directed, and "adapted for the screen," makes excellent use of the 70 mm format to give us wide, sweeping vistas and emphasize Hamlet's solitude in a vast stateroom. But there's just no getting past the fact that it's four hours of Shakespeare.
Branagh tries to liven things up with an amazingly multicultural court, pointless cameos by famous actors (Sir John Gielgud, Gerard Depardieu, Robin Williams), and special effects (one bizarre sequence where Hamlet meets his father's ghost has the earth splitting open and spitting out steam and fireballs -- more Dante's Peak than Shakespeare). But he does insist on filming the entire play (by the way, does it seem odd to anyone else that he was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar even though the whole selling point of this movie is that it incorporates all of Shakespeare's text, intact?), and frankly, there's a reason why no one else does that. Because there are scenes that are overlong, overtalky, or just plain nonsensical. One is a diatribe about child actors, apparently a popular fixture of Elizabethan stage and one of Shakespeare's pet peeves, obviously intended for Elizabethan audiences and really irrelevant to the play. The play comes alive in spurts -- the final fight scene between Hamlet and Laertes is balletic, energetic, and stirring -- but most of the time, I nestled in my comfy chair and tried hard to keep my eyes open.
The actors are all pretty good, although Branagh, with his peroxided, Nazi-youth haircut from Marlon Brando in The Young Lions and his facial hair from any given Seattle barista/band member/bike messenger, sometimes overdoes it. The special "look who's doing Shakespeare" cameos, like Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, and WIlliams, are generally ineffective -- the solidly Shakespearan actors like Derek Jacobi as Claudius and Kate Winslet as Ophelia are much better. Still, I have to say I liked Glenn Close's Gertrude (in Mel Gibson's Hamlet) better than Julie Christie's in this film.
In short, it's a long, long, long movie. I would recommend it for video, but then you would lose the effect of the 70 mm. So, it's up to how much of a Shakespeare buff you are -- and how much coffee you can drink before going into the theater.
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