Jude Law's Hamlet

We caught Jude Law's Broadway Hamlet this afternoon, on $25 tickets which offered a perfectly adequate view of the stage, albeit a long way from the bathrooms. I think a telling moment is in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy where he says

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

Law says "thought" with something between a sneer and a snarl. But Hamlet doesn't disparage thought. He is the most thoughtful character ever. The "sicklied o'er part" may give him trouble but even here, he doesn't snarl: he is perplexed and respectful of the mystery.

It's a defining moment because Law maintains the same tone throughout the play. His is an adolescent Hamlet, a 1968 Hamlet, a never-trust-anybody-over 30 Hamlet. Also an 8,000-calorie Hamlet as Law leaps, prances, wriggles and elbows his way around the stage. In a narrow sense, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact everything that Law does on stage can find justification in the script. The trouble is that there is so much more. Hamlet is an adolescent, with a full repertoire of adolescent angularity. But he is also, as John Gielgud used to say, he is "a great Renaissance prince" (Gielgud said "ruh-NAY-sance," which turned the rhythm out nicely). Law's Hamlet is a catalog of missed opportunities.

By way of example, consider this non-exhaustive list: When Hamlet says "what a piece of work is a man," he speaks with awe and reverence; with the gravediggers, he is bantering and ironic; with his male friends, he is (at least some of the time) a model of masculine friendship; with his Ophelia and Gertrude he is jealous and obsessive; with Yorick, he gives us bittersweet nostalgia; with Horatio before the final conflict, he offers stoic acceptance. And so forth. It's why people who play Hamlet get to go into heaven by a separate door. Law doesn't have any of these except the adolescent part.

I don't suppose anybody gets them all (why Hamlet may work better in thee library than onstage. Branagh went a long way; he was old enough so he got the maturity, and artful enough to fake the youth (even Branagh had his limits (but then, Law is 36). I was never so nuts about Olivier but he did do some things right.

All this is a rotten shame, because so many things in this production work so well. Nearly everybody can mouth a classical line, which is no mean trick. The pace is right, the charcoal-brown setting is right. Polonius is a study in oily manipulation, and goes a long way to drive home the point that Denmark really is a prison: a nest of intrigue and betrayal. Gwilym Lee did an impressive job in what is thankless role as Laertes.

Geraldine James as Gertrude Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ophelia brought a lot to the table, but each of them depends on what she can get out of Hamlet, and in any number of cases, it looked like they just didn't now how to respond to this young man living on emotional capital he hasn't earned. (Okay, gimme irony, Jude! Okay, now effusive! Okay....) When Ophelia says:

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

...you do a quick systems check and tell yourself: no, not tonight.

Afterthought: I admit I set a high standard here. Fact is, the one character I'd really like to see play Hamlet just doesn't seem to be on offer. That would be Michelangelo's David in the Accadamia in Florence. Now, there is a Ruh-nay-sance prince.

Afterthought II: My friend Lily reminds me of the classic Dorothy Parker review: he ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.

Appreciation: Kozintsev's Hamlet

Some people say the greatest Shakespeare movie is Russian. That would be the Hamlet (“Gamlet”!) of Grigori Kozintsev, first shown in the spring of 1964. Kozintsev, had been exploring his topic one way or another throughout his adult life, and this capstone performance counts as a kind of trifecta: himself as director with a script by Boris Pasternak, and music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Or a quadrifecta; the title role went to Innokenty Smoktunovsky, perhaps the most highly regarded Russian actor of his generation. Apparently the film counted as an important cultural event in its time but I wasn’t paying attention; I learned of it only last year and saw it for the first time last night on the big screen at Il Teatro Buce. My judgment is that it is not the greatest Shakespeare movie ever, but it is an interesting and worthwhile endeavor, and I think I can understand why it made such a splash in its time.

The film cries out for comparison with the benchmark Hamlet for that generation—Lawrence Olivier’s, released in 1948. No, not “cries out;” rather “insists upon” comparison, dressing Smoktunovsky in Olivier-esque black, with his close-cropped hair, his voice-over soliloquys, and his general air of moodiness and introspection. This comparison may not have been obvious at the time because Kozintsev also did so much to distance himself from Olivier: in particular, to showcase the political context that Olivier virtually excises.

The result is a Hamlet (or a “Hamlet”) hemmed in by posturing and intrigue, claustrophobic inside Elsinore, cut off by the vastness of the ocean and the great featureless northern plains. It must have carried a powerful message outside of (and in) the Soviet Union, at the end of the great thaw, and the beginning of the mean mendacity of the Brezhnev years. Apparently it still carries force today: some of the strongest framing scenes appear as theft homage in the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet of 1996.

Actors in a good many of the supporting roles function admirably to drive home the point: an intriguing, fussy Polonius, short and round and bearing what appears for all the world to be a rubber nose, would be comical if he did not remind us so much of the sinister supernumeries of the Kremlin in its time. King Claudius is a chillingly smooth manipulator and thug. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no better than they ought to be. And the gravedigger looks like he has been waiting all his life for just this chance.

The script—or rather the subtitles, because I can’t read any Russian—is a mixed bag. It’s Shakespeare only by courtesy, which it may not deserve—mostly a collection of Shakespearean snippets assembled almost as if in a word game out of magnetic panels on a refrigerator door. Yet one has to concede that a straight translation just wouldn’t have worked in context. And you have to concede that even if he took snippets, still Pasternak seems to have found the right snippets for a lot of individual moments. Shostakovich’s score doesn’t seem to add a great deal. At some points, it threatens to intrude; at best it seems simply to remind us of other things that Shostakovich has done better (and more generally, perhaps, for his heroic presence in Soviet culture).

But the real trouble here is the star, though once again, I suspect the guilty party may be Olivier. It was Olivier who taught a generation of moviegoers that Hamlet is a young man in a permanent sulk. He is that; the catch is that he is so much more. John Gielgud called him “a great renaissance prince” (Gielgud pronounced it “ruh-NAY-sance,” the first time I ever heard it pronounce it that way). And that he is: sometimes sulky, but often ebullient, sometimes jaunty—and sometimes very close to downright brutal. It’s the reason I like Branagh so much: imperfect as he may be, he is the only film Shakespeare who seems to me to come close to capturing the full range of his possibilities.

So Kozintsev’s Hamlet is a Hamlet with a hole in the center—a hole we might not even have noticed in 1964, dazzled as we were by Olivier and gripped by mesmerized by the shadow of the Soviet Union. It remains a worthy achievement and an important artifact of its time. I like it well enough that I think I’ll go on and watch his Lear and even his Don Quixote. I might even watch this Hamlet again. But I wish it were better.

Final Verdict

That squib on Sir Lancelot set me thinking of other famous life-assessments. Here are a couple of perhaps the best known. First, this:

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

That is Hamlet, responding to Horatio, remembering his--Hamlet's-- father. It is perhaps relevant that nothing else in the play suggests that old Hamlet deserves any such encomium.

Perhaps better supported is Plato’s final assessment of Socrates—or Plato’s through the voice of the narrator of the Phaedo. Much or most of Plato’s work was dedicated to the task of memorializing his great master, so he surely feels he had justified this verdict:

Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest, and justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.

--(Jowett Translation)

(This Jowett translation has always seemed a bit flat to me, but it is the easiest to find on the Internet, perhaps not least because it is out of copyright.)

Not all assessments are so positive. Here is Hamlet again, in his mother’s bedchamber, having run his sword through Polonius behind the arras:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better:

But perhaps my particular favorite is the memorial of a man who seems to have been beyond all praise or blame. This is a log entry from the HMS Victory near the end of the battle of Trafalgar:

Partial firing continued until 4.30 p.m., when, a victory having been reported to the Right Hon. Lord Nelson, K.B., and Commander-in-Chief, he died of his wounds.