HAMLET
A film review by svihla@evax0.eng.fsu.edu
Copyright 1991 svihla@evax0.eng.fsu.edu
I saw HAMLET this weekend and was favorably impressed. It looks wonderful -- the costumes, sets, and scenery elicited oohs and ahs from the audience. The performances are adequate -- Mel Gibson is much better than I would have expected and Glenn Close is quite good as well. My caveats have to do with a certain lack of subtlety and the irritation I felt at the director's cutting, rearrangement, and truncation of certain scenes. Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery" scene with Ophelia is set *before* his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, except that the actual "Get thee to a nunnery" dialogue is grafted onto the "Murder of Gonzago" sequence. I liked the original sequence better. Hamlet's speech to the players is cut inexplicably as is the actual leaping into graves which punches up Ophelia's funeral. Gibson is adequate when he is charging around ranting and having swordfights, but he is less believable in more restrained moments. The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is atmospherically set, but Gibson's delivery struck me as that of someone who is delivering a pretty speech, and not considering matters of life and death. The director chose to develop a couple of scenes directly rather than by exposition through a character, and let me say that the scene where a disheveled Hamlet has a wordless encounter with a bewildered Ophelia does not play well. It elicited hoots of derisive laughter in the theater, which was probably not the desired effect. Maybe Shakespeare left it out for a reason -- maybe it didn't play well in the Sixteenth Century either. I couldn't detect any real chemistry between Gibson and Helen Bonham-Carter who plays Ophelia. Ms. Bonham-Carter may have one of the prettiest faces on the planet, but I was not overly impressed with her portrayal of Ophelia. The friendship between Hamlet and Horatio is also given rather short shrift.
In summary, a credible effort, beautifully photographed and exceedingly atmospheric. Well worth seeing, but neither deep or subtle enough to qualify as a definitive version. I hope some people who see it will be tempted to rent Olivier's version or make an effort to see the entire play somewhere. ***
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