Hamlet (1996)

Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet arrives at four hours and two minutes, unabridged, shot on 70mm, and populated by what appears to be every working actor in the British Isles. Billy Crystal turns up. So do Jack Lemmon, Gérard Depardieu, Robin Williams, Judi Dench, and Charlton Heston, the last of whom is asked to play a player king and does so without complaint. The enterprise is enormous and sincere, and the 19th century setting is applied to the Elsinore interiors like wallpaper in a heritage hotel.

The concerns here are grief, a hasty marriage, delayed revenge, and the mechanics of royal succession. A prince feigns madness to survive a court that is watching him. A young woman is broken by the same machinery and drowns. These are tragic devices, and the film treats them as such. There is no gesture toward contemporary identity, no ecological lament, no reading of the Danish crown as a stand-in for late capitalism. Race goes unremarked. The cast is white and drawn from the repertory tradition, and the lone Black actor plays a sentry, which is to say he plays a sentry. Ophelia's collapse is grief, not a case study in anything.

This is a museum piece in the best sense: four hours of Elizabethan verse delivered with total conviction to an audience that stayed home. It grossed under five million dollars against a budget of eighteen. Four Oscar nominations, no wins. The film has no sermon to deliver and no modern grievance to air, and after a long diet of pictures that do, the silence registers as a kind of mercy. We score it accordingly, with the quiet gratitude of a sommelier handed a vintage that has not been adulterated. Zero.