The director’s pragmatic approach, which includes brief illustrative flashbacks designed to fix characters and events in the viewer’s mind, will probably strike legit partisans and academic purists as lowbrow and coarse, but can be defended as well as a perfectly plausible cinematic device that both helps keep things straight and varies the visual texture.īranagh, who has played Hamlet onstage close to 300 times, transplants the tale to an unspecified period of the mid-to-late 19th century, a time well suited to the issues of shifting European borders and interrelated royalty pertinent to the play. Just as it creates the problem of length, this decision also yields significant artistic dividends through the revelation of normally excised or underemphasized aspects of the play, with the balance ultimately tipping in favor of increased meaning and richness over added dramatic longueurs.Ībove all, the film strives for maximum clarity, for laying out the political, psychological and emotional dimensions of the complex work as fully as possible, and for making the language accessible and comprehensible to the widest audience. The sixth sound-era film adaptation of the celebrated tragedy, the first having been Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winner in 1948 and the most recent the Mel Gibson-Franco Zeffirelli pairing only six years ago, this one gains immediate distinction as the first to present the work intact.
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