But how does it all look to Gertrude? To Claudius? To the heartbroken Ophelia? The great benefit of this full-length version is that these other characters become more understandable. Tom Stoppard's 'Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' famously filtered all the action through the eyes of Hamlet's treacherous school friends. What is intriguing about 'Hamlet'' is the ambiguity of everyone's motives. In tormenting himself he drives his mother to despair, kills Polonius by accident, speeds the kingdom toward chaos and his love, Ophelia, toward madness. And then the ghost of Hamlet's father appears and says he was poisoned by Claudius What must Hamlet do? He desires the death of Claudius but lacks the impulse to act out. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

His mother, Gertrude, rushes with unseemly speed into marriage with Claudius, her husband's brother. Hamlet (Branagh), the prince of Denmark, mourns the untimely death of his father.

The story provides a melodramatic stage for inner agonies. Branagh's Hamlet lacks the narcissistic intensity of Laurence Olivier's (in the 1948 Academy Award winner), but the film as a whole is better, placing Hamlet in the larger context of royal politics, and making him less a subject for pity. film since 'Far and Away' in 1992, and at 238 minutes the second-longest major Hollywood production (one minute shorter than 'Cleopatra'). It is the first uncut film version of Shakespeare's most challenging tragedy, the first 70-mm. version, it has a visual clarity that is breathtaking. His 'Hamlet'' is long but not slow, deep but not difficult, and it vibrates with the relief of actors who have great things to say, and the right ways to say them.

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