Hamlet, Branagh version
Jun. 1st, 2009 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabeth... 232 minutes.
Much as I love Hamlet - and I do, I've studied it this whole semester, I've watched a different version every week, I've read and underlined and highlightered until my copy is really colorful - the full on we cut nothing edition is just... my eyes have gone fuzzy and my head hurts and I really should have stopped when I had to change discs so I could get something to eat.
Also, there are a few bits where I got real bored and hit fast forward. Those bits I feel could have had at least half their lines left out no problem.
That said: This was definitely a movie, not a stage play with cameras, and it used all the techniques. It was also definitely the rich stuff version. If you're going to go big, this is the way to do it. Gigantimous actual palace to film at and enough extras to make it look full? Big. And colorful, and shiny. Extreme use of mirrors, and using them to give 'To be or not to be' its ambiguity of address in a really nice way. A palace of secret passages and hidden rooms, rooms within rooms connected like a maze, never going in and out the same way. That adds to the text in interesting ways.
I'm not sure I like what they did with Fortinbras at all. It's exagerating a possibility from the text, it makes sense, it looked spectacular, but... well. Hamlet's ending was all Action Hero with a side of swashbuckler, immediately rendered all rather irrelevant because they'd just been invaded. Instead of how I'd always read it, that the tragedy and irony was this unwanted consequence of the warlike neighbour moving in without a war. In one Fortinbras' election is the result of Hamlet's revenge, in the film the concept of election is not even relevant and Fortinbras ruling has very little to do with Hamlet at all. Plus that line about dead belonging on the field not in the hall gets all kinds of icky ironic if his people have just charged through killing everyone.
Also, why are they bothering to talk at all when everyone except Horatio appears to be dead already?
So I didn't like how they treated Fortinbras.
Laertes didn't work for me. He didn't seem to be doing much.
Some of the background changes seemed a bit abrupt to me, though they all made perfect sense for the meaning of what was being said. Background and words worked together, just sometimes they changed in the middle of a speech I think of as happening all in one place, and sometimes they seemed to juggle time abruptly between sentences. I could get used to that.
Use of voiceover... I dislike it when it collapses the possibilities of which things can be overheard and which cannot. I think the ambiguity is of great added interest in Hamlet. There's bits in books about a surveillance society, Hamlet always being watched, but it is more accurate to say he is always being listened to. Audience? Not the equivalent word, is it? But there's moments, like To Be or Not To Be, when he may or may not know he is overheard, and there's others where we don't know when he is heard. There's moments where plans and plots may or may not be known to someone who just walked in to a scene. If the speeches or plans or reactions happen in voiceover with the actors mouth closed then nobody over hears them, full stop. I find that subtracts interest rather than adds it. It's a valid interpretation, it just steps on something I rather like.
The parts where they took a speech and added visuals from other times and places were... something film can do, something that built their particular interpretation, and something I didn't like for all it was done well enough.
The big sets, the colors, the shiny, it's all stuff that Isn't Actors. Give me a simple setting and some good acting to watch and I'll like it plenty. Showing me the actions from far away doesn't interest me half as much as showing reactions near to. But with all the intercutting you can get both, so, okay. Is good for what it is.
The bits where Hamlet and Ophelia are in bed together seemed to collapse the interpretations again, and again I wouldn't like that, but then there was a few seconds where Hamlet apparently stabbed someone in the ear, only then it turned out not to have happened. So then these images aren't always actual true things that happened in a literal sense, but rather things that are imagined, and very dramatic. *That* adds the interesting back in. If you don't know if what the camera is showing you is literally happening then all sorts of fun gets drawn in. And the sequence where the ghost tells how he died becomes as ambiguous as I like once again, because we see what he tells, but it's not saying that's how it happened. It's like the moment Hamlet sees the ghost and his mother doesn't - not everything we and Hamlet are seeing is the same kind of true, and all the layers of interpretation get added back in again.
Hamlet went on the stage in the play within a play. Director Hamlet interrupting his own show. Not my favourite thing still.
Mostly though... I liked this Hamlet. He was angry and barely controlling it, confused and hurt, different with his friends and his enemies, physically affectionate with the Players to a degree he didn't even get close to with others. It was a complex performance with layers and range. Also, it helps when he can whisper and shout and we'll hear just as well.
So I wouldn't have done it like this, but it was well done.
David Tennant is still my favourite.
That's unlikely to change.
Much as I love Hamlet - and I do, I've studied it this whole semester, I've watched a different version every week, I've read and underlined and highlightered until my copy is really colorful - the full on we cut nothing edition is just... my eyes have gone fuzzy and my head hurts and I really should have stopped when I had to change discs so I could get something to eat.
Also, there are a few bits where I got real bored and hit fast forward. Those bits I feel could have had at least half their lines left out no problem.
That said: This was definitely a movie, not a stage play with cameras, and it used all the techniques. It was also definitely the rich stuff version. If you're going to go big, this is the way to do it. Gigantimous actual palace to film at and enough extras to make it look full? Big. And colorful, and shiny. Extreme use of mirrors, and using them to give 'To be or not to be' its ambiguity of address in a really nice way. A palace of secret passages and hidden rooms, rooms within rooms connected like a maze, never going in and out the same way. That adds to the text in interesting ways.
I'm not sure I like what they did with Fortinbras at all. It's exagerating a possibility from the text, it makes sense, it looked spectacular, but... well. Hamlet's ending was all Action Hero with a side of swashbuckler, immediately rendered all rather irrelevant because they'd just been invaded. Instead of how I'd always read it, that the tragedy and irony was this unwanted consequence of the warlike neighbour moving in without a war. In one Fortinbras' election is the result of Hamlet's revenge, in the film the concept of election is not even relevant and Fortinbras ruling has very little to do with Hamlet at all. Plus that line about dead belonging on the field not in the hall gets all kinds of icky ironic if his people have just charged through killing everyone.
Also, why are they bothering to talk at all when everyone except Horatio appears to be dead already?
So I didn't like how they treated Fortinbras.
Laertes didn't work for me. He didn't seem to be doing much.
Some of the background changes seemed a bit abrupt to me, though they all made perfect sense for the meaning of what was being said. Background and words worked together, just sometimes they changed in the middle of a speech I think of as happening all in one place, and sometimes they seemed to juggle time abruptly between sentences. I could get used to that.
Use of voiceover... I dislike it when it collapses the possibilities of which things can be overheard and which cannot. I think the ambiguity is of great added interest in Hamlet. There's bits in books about a surveillance society, Hamlet always being watched, but it is more accurate to say he is always being listened to. Audience? Not the equivalent word, is it? But there's moments, like To Be or Not To Be, when he may or may not know he is overheard, and there's others where we don't know when he is heard. There's moments where plans and plots may or may not be known to someone who just walked in to a scene. If the speeches or plans or reactions happen in voiceover with the actors mouth closed then nobody over hears them, full stop. I find that subtracts interest rather than adds it. It's a valid interpretation, it just steps on something I rather like.
The parts where they took a speech and added visuals from other times and places were... something film can do, something that built their particular interpretation, and something I didn't like for all it was done well enough.
The big sets, the colors, the shiny, it's all stuff that Isn't Actors. Give me a simple setting and some good acting to watch and I'll like it plenty. Showing me the actions from far away doesn't interest me half as much as showing reactions near to. But with all the intercutting you can get both, so, okay. Is good for what it is.
The bits where Hamlet and Ophelia are in bed together seemed to collapse the interpretations again, and again I wouldn't like that, but then there was a few seconds where Hamlet apparently stabbed someone in the ear, only then it turned out not to have happened. So then these images aren't always actual true things that happened in a literal sense, but rather things that are imagined, and very dramatic. *That* adds the interesting back in. If you don't know if what the camera is showing you is literally happening then all sorts of fun gets drawn in. And the sequence where the ghost tells how he died becomes as ambiguous as I like once again, because we see what he tells, but it's not saying that's how it happened. It's like the moment Hamlet sees the ghost and his mother doesn't - not everything we and Hamlet are seeing is the same kind of true, and all the layers of interpretation get added back in again.
Hamlet went on the stage in the play within a play. Director Hamlet interrupting his own show. Not my favourite thing still.
Mostly though... I liked this Hamlet. He was angry and barely controlling it, confused and hurt, different with his friends and his enemies, physically affectionate with the Players to a degree he didn't even get close to with others. It was a complex performance with layers and range. Also, it helps when he can whisper and shout and we'll hear just as well.
So I wouldn't have done it like this, but it was well done.
David Tennant is still my favourite.
That's unlikely to change.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 10:42 am (UTC)This is why theatres have intervals :)
I've seen Branagh do Hamlet both on stage and in the film. I preferred the stage version (he had more energy) but the film is great for clarity and making even very difficult speeches understandable. And it is still my favourite version. Of course I'm hoping the Tennant one will be better still, but I will have to wait to find out so for now Branagh wins.