There's nothing held back in his performance, yet at the same time it's subtly calibrated.įrom the film's first scene, which takes place not on the battlements with the ghost of Hamlet's father but at the murdered king's funeral, we are locked into Hamlet's fury and disappointment. Gibson's Hamlet is deeply felt, electric and made very much for the camera. Zeffirelli has succeeded in one respect this is an intimate, close-in "Hamlet." Most of the credit for this must go to the film's star. And what the director has lost in depth he's attempted to recover in immediacy. In Zeffirelli's hands, "Hamlet" is more of a potboiler it's very much a revenge play, a genre piece. And though he hasn't trashed the play, he has robbed it of its more resonant dimensions. Zeffirelli's approach is based on the assertion that Shakespeare was a popular playwright, writing for the common man, and that concessions for the mass audience and for shortened modern attention spans are allowable. Not everything that has been trimmed is fat, though. All other subplots or grace notes - in other words, anything that might slow down the play's headlong dash to its conclusion - have been jettisoned. There is only a single plot line - that dealing with Hamlet's revenge on his stepfather, Claudius (Alan Bates), for the murder of his father. This "Hamlet" - which, the credits reveal, is based on the play by William Shakespeare with a screenplay by the director and Christopher De Vore - has been radically trimmed, with scenes rearranged or speeches shifted from one character to another it's not a "Hamlet" for purists. If Zeffirelli has brought anything to the proceedings, it's a sort of Cliffs Notes quality. In adapting the play, Zeffirelli appears not to have been moved by any strong new reading of the material there's no special insight or original spin on the play's meaning. There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production. You can relax, it's not "Lethal Bodkin." But Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet," with Mel Gibson as the Melancholy Dane, has been given a stripped-down, aerodynamic design - it's the first production of a Shakespearean tragedy to be built to wind tunnel specifications.
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