Hamlet [1990] Franco Zefferelli

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Hamlet (1990)


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Hamlet is a 1990 drama film based on the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet. It was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Mel Gibson as the young Prince Hamlet. It was also the first film from Icon Productions, a company Gibson co-founded.

Dunnottar Castle, Stonehaven, Blackness Castle and Dover Castle were used as locations in the film.

Mel Gibson ... Hamlet
Glenn Close ... Gertrude
Alan Bates ... Claudius
Paul Scofield ... The Ghost
Ian Holm ... Polonius
Helena Bonham Carter ... Ophelia
Stephen Dillane ... Horatio
Nathaniel Parker ... Laertes
Sean Murray ... Guildenstern
Michael Maloney ... Rosencrantz

William ShakespeareΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥wracked perhaps by the recent death of his only son, HamnetΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥took an oft-told revenge melodrama set in Denmark, changed its lead character from a soldier prince to an introspective scholar, and crafted what would become the most famous play in the history of Western drama. If one is to believe literary luminary and Yale professor Harold Bloom, the Bard's excursions into psychological exploration gave birth to our awareness of our own minds; Shakespeare, in Bloom's words, invented the modern human being.

Bloom's excesses asideΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥hyperbole is as good a gimmick as any to sell an 800-page academic tome to the broadest audience possibleΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥there's little doubt about Hamlet's quality as dramaturgy. The play is one of the most potent amalgams of the Bard's keen psychological observation, tragic fatalism, and bitingly intelligent verbal and conceptual humor. Not only has it remained a staple of the theater for 400 years, but it's seen countless screen adaptations dating back to the silent era. Most notable among cinematic Hamlets are Laurence Olivier's stagey 1948 adaptation, Kenneth Branagh's 1996 unexpurgated epic, and the one we'll be looking at here: director Franco Zeffirelli's (The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet) muscular, fast-paced take, starring Mel Gibson (The Road Warrior, Lethal Weapon, Braveheart) as the world's most famous anguished Dane.

Franco Zeffirelli's cinematic stab at the Dane is most famous for its star, and for its radical excising of much of Shakespeare's poetry. Trimming Hamlet down to a more manageable length is nothing new, of course. It's highly unlikely, as a matter of fact, that Richard Burbage and the rest of the King's Men ever performed the entire text of the play during its original run at the Globe Theater. The monster by which we forcibly acculturate thousands of high schoolers each year is most likely a composite of various rewrites and alterations made by its playwright in order to keep the story fresh during a long and successful runΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥replacing a scene here and there with new material apparently kept groundlings coming back for more. Still, Zeffirelli's 135-minute film is extremely lean considering some critics thought Olivier's 153-minute version a hatchet job. That said, his rearranging of scene order, trimming of soliloquies, and transposing of specific lines of dialogue from one scene to another is what really jumps out as a radically new approach among mainstream Shakespeare adaptations. This is Hamlet for a generation unaccustomed to the slower rhythms of theater, a cut-to-the-chase version for people weaned on television and cinema.

Zeffirelli's is an experiment in bending the Bard's work to the conventions of cinema, in contrast to previous film adaptations that were mostly content bending cinema to the conventions of the Bard. The results are surprisingly satisfying provided one doesn't view the film as an attempt at being definitive. There can't be a definitive screen Hamlet any more than there can be a definitive stage version. The play is too huge to be considered in such a narrow light; it's been handled and interpreted by too many generations of thespians. The trick is to approach the material in a unique way.

Zeffirelli was trying to do something fundamentally cinematic. He was trying to make us forget the material was originally a play and let the audienceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a young audience, not savvy to ShakespeareΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥experience the movie purely as a movie. If Gibson's ineptitude was at the center of things, why did Zeffirelli similarly slice and dice the oratory of proven Shakespearean actors Bates, Scofield, and Ian Holm (Alien, Brazil)? In the Mel Gibson: To Be or Not to Be documentary included on the disc, the actor notes that one of the truly negative side-effects of the director's decision to give the story a more kinetic feel was that some lengthy pieces of poetry might be spoken on screen as the character moves from the Scottish castle at which they shot exteriors to the sets they used for interiors, meaning the entire speech might be shot in sections, out of order, a week or more apart. These sorts of logistical acting nightmares certainly produced unique challenges, even if the actors didn't have to worry about handling the difficult language in one take. (To his credit, though, Gibson humbly observes in the Hamlet: An Actor's Journey featurette that he's never actually played Hamlet since he hasn't played it on stage; it only appears that he played the role because there happens to be a movie of him doing pieces of it.)

Film scholar Deborah Cartmell has suggested that Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films are appealing because they are "sensual rather than cerebral", an approach by which he aims to make Shakespeare "even more popular". To this end, he cast Gibson ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon films ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ in the title role. Cartmell also notes that the text is drastically cut, but with the effect of enhancing the roles of the women.

J. Lawrence Guntner has suggested that Zeffirelli's cinematography borrows heavily from the action film genre that made Gibson famous, noting that its average shot length is less than six seconds. In casting Gibson, the director has been said to have made the star's reputation part of the performance, encouraging the audience "to see the Gibson that they have come to expect from his other films" Indeed, Gibson was cast after Zeffirelli watched his character, Martin Riggs, contemplate suicide in Lethal Weapon. The fight between Hamlet and Laertes is an example of using Gibson's experience in action movies; Gibson handily depicts Hamlet as an experienced fencer.

Guntner has written that the casting of Close as Hamlet's mother (only nine years older than Gibson, and then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction) highlights the incest theme, leaving "little to our post-Freudian imagination" and Cartmell notes that Close and Gibson simulate sex in the closet scene, and "she dies after sexually suggestive jerking movements, with Hamlet positioned on top of her, his face covered with sweat".