Or Not to Be

I’m about to strongly recommend a movie that most of you aren’t going to want to watch. It won’t matter that the movie is adapted from perhaps the greatest literary work of all time. Nor that it has received critical acclaim and won numerous industry awards. Or even that it has a wonderfully eclectic all-star cast with actors you know and love. Most of you will still will not be interested.

But for those of you that have the slightest attraction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 movie version, just out on DVD, is not to be missed. Set creatively in the 19th century, Branagh’s Hamlet is an unabridged four-hour spectacle with breathtaking sets, delightful costumes and a terrific score. Having worked the genre before in the excellent Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh’s cinematic liberties, such as enlightening flashbacks and lingering close-ups, somehow makes the production feel alive, energetic and contemporary.

The casting is fun and unusual, and not just for the liberal use of American actors. I wish I wouldn’t have known and could have been pleasantly surprised by the cast, which includes Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Charlton Heston, Gerard Depardieu, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Sir John Gielgud, Judi Dench, Richard Attenborough and Rufus Sewell, plus Branagh’s own riveting performance as Hamlet.

(By the way, this is a textbook case for ClearPlay. Although most people won’t find Shakespeare’s sometimes coarse language offensive, the sex scenes are significantly more explicit than you would expect, and in fact would make watching the movie in schools a bit of a problem, a terribly wasted opportunity.)

But be warned: Even if you’re comfortable with English accents, the dialogue is often hard to follow, and even the uber-literary Lanee found the going tedious at times. My advice is to relax and not worry about it. If you don’t know the play, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little prior research to better follow the story. And you might want to stretch the 242 minutes over two nights. But if you’re not intimidated by Shakespeare or period pieces or Elizabethan language or four-hour movies, then give Hamlet a try.

To watch, or not to watch. That is the question.
Whether to ennoble your mind with four hours of the immortal Bard,
Or to take arms against Elizabethan culture,
and watch instead a Bruckheimer action flick.
To die. To sleep. No more.