HAMLET FULL MOVIE AMAZON PRIME PATCH
HAMLET FULL MOVIE AMAZON PRIME PROFESSIONAL

He grins and enunciates with fervor, he makes grand, meticulously mapped gestures, his eyes quiver, his bottom lip trembles, he presses his hand to his mouth and stares solemnly into mirrors. Moreover, he pairs it all with a Golden Age theatricality that doesn't translate on screen as well as it might on stage. Branagh leaves little room for revelation, much less surprise. Skipping across ballrooms, skulking behind closed doors, tossing Ophelia around like a rag doll, leaping onto stage and barking at both crowd and king, bounding between steely restraint and volatile lunacy, ranting and raving, raving and ranting, spitting his words like a Shakespearean tommy gun.

The ambiguity surrounding Hamlet's sanity is rendered moot: Branagh's prince is off his rocker.

Julie Christie's Gertrude is little more than a seasoned nymph, naive and aloof until the bitter end (Glenn Close followed a similar path in Mel Gibson's Hamlet, but delivered such a raw, vulnerable performance that it worked in her favor) Richard Briers' Polonius feigns surprise and shock in nearly every scene, neglecting to transform the foppish loyalist into a distraught father or meddling servant and Michael Maloney's Laertes accelerates to rage, stalls at vindictiveness, and drifts for half an hour before sputtering into the play's endgame.īut it's Branagh's performance and production design that leave me the most cold. Kate Winslet inhabits the infatuation, desperation, bewilderment and turmoil of Ophelia, making the young girl's descent into hopelessness both convincing and utterly heartbreaking as Claudius, Derek Jacobi absorbs Hamlet's every barb and accusation with flustered reserve, coming unhinged as the king is crushed beneath the weight of his court's prying eyes Nicholas Farrell chains Horatio to Hamlet's every whim, scrambling with pious, wide-eyed devotion, even when it requires him to stare into the same abyss as his friend and Billy Crystal and Robin Williams effortlessly slither into the frenetic mix, coyly infusing measured charisma and charm into smaller roles that could have easily been distracting.

HAMLET FULL MOVIE AMAZON PRIME PATCH

'We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.'īranagh's breakneck Hamlet hurtles along with a mad, almost maniacal momentum, and the whole of the cast seems all too eager to succumb to the same insanity and intensity that drives Shakespeare's fevered prince (played with passion and vitriol by Branagh himself). Kenneth Branagh's sweeping, Oscar-nominated film has long been hailed as one of the greats - several critics have even called it the finest Shakespeare adaptation committed to film - but, truth be told, it doesn't sit as well with me. As accessible as it is complex, as clever and witty as it is tragic and unsettling, as mesmerizing as it is inexhaustible, it has entranced audiences for centuries and given rise to countless adaptations, some brilliant and challenging, some I'd rather not dignify with a response, and some that have carved out a niche in between, vaulting past lesser, uninspired productions only to fall short of greatness. As the Bard's longest work and most frequently adapted play, Hamlet is as iconic and essential as they come a masterpiece in every sense of the word.

Moore's Battlestar Galactica have put more stress on my laptop keys. Only the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (might I offer my eternal, sarcasm-ridden thanks to Mr. And that doesn't include whatever high school term papers and college exam essays I've lost track of over the years.

HAMLET FULL MOVIE AMAZON PRIME PROFESSIONAL

Over the course of my education and professional career, I've written upwards of 85,000 words about William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Reviewed by Kenneth Brown, August 11, 2010

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