1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 35: Hamlet

Today is even colder and snowier, so it’s good to review an especially wintry movie: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.

This is the *biggest* Hamlet. All of Shakespeare’s lines are delivered in just over four hours, often at breakneck speed. I doubt anyone could follow the story who didn’t already know it. (Of course, people do know it.)

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Jack Lemmon appears in the first scene. He plays a watchman. We can guess there will be a parade of cameos in the manner of Around the World in 80 Days.

King Claudius – jolly, chipmunk-cheeked Derek Jacobi – addresses his court. In the crowd are many familiar faces. Bright-eyed Ophelia (Kate Winslet) is easy to spot. Queen Gertrude (Julie Christie) beams at Claudius’s side.

Then the camera swings over to Hamlet, who stands apart, in shadow. Branagh is well into his thirties, but he looks like a high school sophomore. His hair is bleached blond. He wears a peacoat, tight pants, and boots – all black, of course.

Claudius ends his speech; confetti rains down; courtiers depart; Hamlet stays to soliloquize. At this point, we expect Walter Matthau to come pushing the confetti with a large broom. (He doesn’t.)

I cannot do justice to the character of Hamlet, or to this production. Roger Ebert reviews it more insightfully than I ever could. I think he is right about three things: (1) Hamlet himself is incredibly complex; (2) it is therefore profitable to look at other characters first; and (3) this unabridged production lends itself well to this task.

The movie’s very sets emphasize the role of the throne as the center of the kingdom.

Yes.

The role of Claudius … is especially enriched: In shorter versions, he is the scowling usurper who functions only as villain. Here, with lines and scenes restored, he seems more balanced and powerful. He might have made a plausible king of Denmark, had things turned out differently. Yes, he killed his brother, but regicide was not unknown in medieval times, and perhaps the old king was ripe for replacement; this production shows Gertrude … as lustfully in love with Claudius. By restoring the original scope of Claudius’s role, Branagh emphasizes court and political intrigue instead of enclosing the material in a Freudian hothouse.

Amen, amen. The less the play is abridged, the better we understand this competent, worldly ruler. It’s his bad luck that his nephew and heir is such a twerp. Or so Hamlet must seem to those who are comfortable with “business as usual.”

Murder, to one so judicious as Claudius, is acceptable; what is not is the systematic violation of decorum. Hamlet is too uncouth and, therefore, too dangerous. He must be done away with.

(Daddy Hamlet, played by that ogre, Brian Blessed, seems to have been downright wild.)

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Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as clueless as people usually imagine them to be (no doubt because of the “spinoff” dramas by W.S. Gilbert and Tom Stoppard)? These two characters are puzzled by their friend Hamlet; but then, almost everybody is. In this movie, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more foolish than other “men of the world.” It’s natural that they should take their orders from Claudius.

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What of Ophelia, the supporting character that Hamlet loves best – and who suffers most – and whose destruction is most painful to behold? Is she wronged by Hamlet? Is she to blame for her suicide?

Given her continued association with Polonius – and, by extension, Claudius – what choice has Hamlet but to reject her?

That she is blameless is the propaganda of the court. The two commoners who dig her grave are not fooled. They judge her thus (I reproduce a paraphrase; the first speaker is played by Billy Crystal, who is in fine form):

GRAVEDIGGER: Are they really going to give her a Christian burial after she killed herself?

OTHER: I’m telling you, yes. So finish that grave right away. The coroner examined her case and says it should be a Christian funeral.

GRAVEDIGGER: But how, unless she drowned in self-defense?

OTHER: That’s what they’re saying she did.

GRAVEDIGGER: Sounds more like “self-offense,” if you ask me. What I’m saying is, if she knew she was drowning herself, then that’s an act. An act has three sides to it: to do, to act, and to perform. Therefore she must have known she was drowning herself.

OTHER: No, listen here, gravedigger sir –

GRAVEDIGGER: Let me finish. Here’s the water, right? And here’s a man, okay? If the man goes into the water and drowns himself, he’s the one doing it, like it or not. But if the water comes to him and drowns him, then he doesn’t drown himself. Therefore, he who is innocent of his own death does not shorten his own life.

OTHER: Is that how the law sees it?

GRAVEDIGGER: It sure is. The coroner’s inquest law.

OTHER: Do you want to know the truth? If this woman hadn’t been rich, she wouldn’t have been given a Christian burial.

GRAVEDIGGER: Well there, now you’ve said it. It’s a pity that the rich have more freedom to hang or drown themselves than the rest of us Christians. Come on, shovel. The most ancient aristocrats in the world are gardeners, ditch-diggers, and gravediggers. They keep up Adam’s profession.

OTHER: Was he an aristocrat? With a coat of arms?

GRAVEDIGGER: He was the first person who ever had arms. …

This is one of the easiest passages to follow, even in Shakespeare’s language. There is no hurrying through the lines; the whole play is slowed down for this scene, which begins humorously and then turns profound when Hamlet regards the skull of an old friend. He considers that beautiful women and mighty kings also must return to dust:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

That such thoughts are ever before him is what makes Hamlet too undecorous, too unworldly, to be like Claudius and the rest. His sense of inevitable corruption makes him incorruptible.

I’ll stop here, having said nothing of Hamlet’s famous indecisiveness, or of his charisma, or the father-son relationship, or the Christ-parallels that Branagh makes visually explicit. “Of making many books [about Hamlet] there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Also: Of watching Hamlet movies there is no end. It took several weeks to get through this movie, and I confess I was bored at first. But by Act Five I was rooting devotedly for the twerp – and expecting to read and watch a great deal more of Hamlet.

A cynical typeface

Very cold. Very snowy. Will I ever go outside again? I don’t know.

I missed Samuel terribly this afternoon. Karin took him to the doctor, who hinted that his social graces aren’t up to snuff.

“Does he see people?” the doctor asked.

“Hardly ever,” said Karin. “We are in the midst of a pandemic.”

The doctor may have had a point, though, since Samuel was shrieking.

Afterward, Karin took Samuel to the library and got him some books about Puffin Rock. That cheered him right up.

Bear with me, now, as I discuss one of my rather solitary interests. Last night, I found this sinvergüenza free font: Times Newer Roman,

a font that looks like Times New Roman, except each character is 5–10% wider.

Times Newer Roman is designed to add length to any academic paper that has page requirements and also requires the use of Times New Roman. Times Newer Roman is actually an altered version of Nimbus Roman No. 9 L (1), a free and open-source font meant to mimic the size and look of the original Times New Roman typeface. The few minor changes that have been made are in pursuit of widening the letters and the spaces between the letters without changing their vertical heights at all. This means that a paper with a given word count will have more length when rendered in Times Newer Roman instead of the old Times New Roman – hopefully without being noticeable to whoever’s job it is to grade the paper.

Plenty of typefaces run afoul of intellectual property standards: witness the many unauthorized “clones” of Times New Roman, Helvetica, Palatino, etc. But this is the first typeface I’ve encountered that was designed for wickedness.

Humpback whale & gentle thunder

The boy’s newest enthusiasm is for Santana’s Greatest Hits (1974). Yesterday, when “Jingo” came on, he thrashed merrily and then crawled in circles.

This music is pretty unlike the “nature” sounds that I play to encourage him to sleep.

January’s novel by C.P. Snow is The Affair – the third Strangers and Brothers book situated in Cambridge. It comes after The Light and the Dark and The Masters. The Masters is more celebrated, but I think The Affair is the book that propels the series, or certain parts of it, into greatness.

In this novel, the dons again compete for small prizes. They also fight over whether to rectify or perpetuate a rather bizarre injustice having to do with academic fraud. (Their conflicts develop along the social fault lines of postwar Britain.)

A few of the earlier books’ protagonists are replaced in this novel by younger, more impolitic men.

As for the returning characters, several have done remarkable about-faces. Some have blossomed or found belated success. Others have shriveled. A few have even turned their backs on college life.

All are tempted to attend to the case before them with less than perfect scrupulousness.

My favorite character is M.H.L. Gay, a very old scholar of Icelandic literature. He is astute but also hugely, hilariously egotistical. Snow isn’t often funny; indeed, given his purpose of telling his narrator’s life story, his plodding style has some advantages. In his portrayal of Gay, though, he shows that he can amuse when he wishes to.

The novel is very suspenseful. By proceeding one inch at a time, Snow makes exquisite drama out of an affair that, in the grand scheme of things, is of little consequence.

Puffin rock

A day in the 40s (F) – a nice temperature because the snow melted and I didn’t have to shovel. The next days will be in the 20s, so I made sure to go strolling. I’m afraid Samuel doesn’t enjoy these cold-weather strolls. When he saw I was going to put his coat on him, he tried to crawl away, which he’d never done before. But, of course, I caught him.

Though the temperature wasn’t piercing, the wind was. Samuel was glad when we came home.

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Samuel’s favorite TV show is Puffin Rock. Karin & I have begun saying “P-U-F-F-I-N-R-O-C-K” to one another because if Samuel hears the words “Puffin Rock” he gets a little wild. The show itself is not very wild. Two pufflings, Oona and Baba, live with their parents and various other small animals – foxes, frogs, owls, bunnies, shrews, hermit crabs, etc. – on an island off the southwest coast of Ireland. Their gentle adventures are narrated by Chris O’Dowd.

Oona is a kind soul. Baba is so infantile that he looks like a fluffy white tennis ball with big eyes. He expresses himself in a lively but inarticulate fashion (he reminds me of Woodstock, Snoopy’s bird friend in Peanuts). I wonder if Samuel is in especial sympathy with Baba; in any case, he laughs and laughs whenever the puffins carry twigs or fishes in their beaks.

Here is a scene in which the puffins guide a lost frog back to its pond.

Tonight, Karin & I put on an episode of Wallace and Gromit – A Matter of Loaf and Death – and, alas, Samuel was terrified. Which was a proper reaction, since it really is an unsettling little movie.

The insurrectionists, in their own words

These videos have been making the rounds:

“A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege” (The New Yorker).

“‘I’m Facing a Prison Sentence’: US Capitol Rioters Plead with Trump for Pardons” (The Guardian).

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Addendum (soundbites):

“Some Christians Feel It’s a God-Given Mission to Fight on Trump’s Behalf” (NPR).

I don’t intend to take any position on the analyses of the historian, Du Mez, and the sociologist, Whitehead. I just want to highlight the message of Metaxas et al., which is absolutely clear.

Whether Metaxas and the other authority figures are truly representative of conservative U.S. Christianity is beside the point. As long as even a few hundred of their followers can be persuaded to do coordinated acts of disruption, trespass, vandalism, or violence against the government, that is chilling enough.

January’s poem

Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, lines 76–78:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

More holy than the rest, and understanding more,
A living creature wants, to rule all made before;
So man began to be.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Translated by Sir Walter Raleigh
The Historie of the World in Five Bookes (1614)

A veterinary ordeal, followed by a quiet evening at home

We had trouble last night rounding up the kitties and putting them into their pet carriers. They knew what was in store for them.

Ziva darted under our bed. But we caught her in the end.

She and Jasper were hauled away. The vet gave them their shots and scolded them for being fat (Jasper has been ballooning ever since he figured out that Samuel tosses food scraps onto the floor).

Thankfully, both kitties were confirmed to be flea-free.

The rest of the evening was peaceful. Karin used her computer to play a very strange role-playing game from Japan, and I read from the unfashionable philosophy of William Godwin. The kitties didn’t fight at home (which they often do when one of them has returned from the vet). Samuel played with a toy alphabet that he got for Christmas; then, listening to the music of Bambi, he went to sleep.

Tonight, though, our Young Prince is considerably more grumpy.

R.I.P. Michael Apted

He directed some widely viewed but not terribly distinguished features, among which I’ve seen: Amazing Grace, Blink, Gorky Park, Nell, and Thunderheart (I haven’t seen Coal Miner’s Daughter or Gorillas in the Mist). I don’t think I ever sought out a movie just because it was his. His magnum opus was the Up documentary series, which, every seven years, examined the lives of the same dozen or so Britons.

This series – at least, episodes 4–9, considered collectively – might be the greatest work I’ve viewed on TV or at the movies. Ever. Only Hoop Dreams gives as rich a picture of human life, but it spans less than a decade. The Up series goes on longer than half a century.

Some say that it’s great despite its auteur (see this review). I disagree. Yes, there are problems with the initial conception; yes, when Apted conducts his interviews, he is often narrow-minded. These flaws might have been fatal had the series been shorter. But they become fascinating once Apted in effect turns into one of the subjects (albeit one who stays behind the camera). His own attitudes, like those of his interviewees, are laid out to be scrutinized, and they change gradually but significantly.

It is claimed, in the review that I linked to, that the series is plagued by the “Woody Allen” difficulty: can we call a movie great if it was directed by a horrible person?

This is a smear. Apted is not perceptibly worse than most of us. As the reviewer concedes, other researchers who’ve done longitudinal studies have exhibited Apted’s same prejudices. (And isn’t it arguably more narrow-minded – especially for an historian, which is what the aforementioned reviewer is – to so forcefully condemn a single person for attitudes that he shared with so, so many of his contemporaries?)

There is one crucial artistic choice that Apted gets right. Every episode depicts the present, juxtaposing it with what has happened before in the interviewees’ lives; but because all but the first few episodes are of roughly equal length, Apted must decide what old footage each episode will rebroadcast and what it will leave out. On the whole, he includes the old material that best resonates with the interviewees’ present concerns. The result is that some themes (images, plot points, feelings) which once were prominent are dropped from the series.

And this makes the Up documentaries uniquely lifelike. It’s unusual for a movie, or even a TV series, to begin with one theme only to drop it later (unless it’s trying to perform some sort of postmodernist trick). But this sort of fading out is precisely what happens in real life. Things come and go. True narrative is not all unified.

For all the retrospective musing, each Up movie is remarkably present-focused. Thus, Apted begins the sixth episode (42 Up) with scenes of a middle-aged person’s wedding – that is, with a kind of rebirth – and he concludes the eighth episode (56 Up) by celebrating a grand new building in an ailing London neighborhood.

The series’s motto, taken from the Jesuits, is “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” Yes; but our pasts are not always the point. Like other things, our histories rise and fall in importance for us – as does our present.

Civil disobedience

Yesterday, I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: I wanted to trace its influence upon John Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience. (Had I previously read all of the “Letter,” or just excerpts? I’m not sure.)

What a lovely manifesto. Again and again, MLK extends the olive branch to his opponents, though his own cause is obviously just, and theirs is not. Again and again, he calls for their inclusion in the pursuit of justice, and he says that protests should not be violent.

How unlike what happened today at the U.S. Capitol!

It is not at all clear that today’s demonstrations were for a just cause. The protestors I saw on TV managed only to mumble vague allegations about how the voting machines had been tampered with – allegations that none of them could have known to be true, that none of them seemed even to understand.

And there was no extending the olive branch. No commitment to nonviolence. No humility. No acknowledgment of opponents’ humanity. Just brashness and destructiveness and petulance.

Solomon devised a test to figure out which of two contenders was the child’s true mother. We have a similar test in front of us that can help us to discern who are the real patriots.

Are they the people who’d attack the legislative bodies and procedures to which the citizens’ welfare has been entrusted?

Or are they the people who’d permit a peaceful transition of governance – of care – so that the vessel, creaky and leaky though it might be, could remain afloat with all of its passengers?

Madeline and its philosophy; a shootout

Winter is here in earnest. Snow covers the ground (thankfully, the sun sets appreciably later than at solstice-time). Samuel and I hardly ever go out strolling any more – unlike the little girls who walk around Paris, “in rain or shine,” in Madeline, which has become Samuel’s favorite book.

We read it daily. I used to struggle with the lines of poetry because they’d often break in the middle of a clause, but now I can utter them smoothly enough. The trick is to stress the RHYMES: “Madeline woke up two HOURS / later, in a room with FLOWERS.”

Madeline is not a very profound book, though the philosopher Thomas Hurka quotes from it to summarize his theory of what distinguishes the virtuous: “They smiled at the good / and frowned at the bad.” He omits the line: “And sometimes they were very sad.” (I suppose that when these little Parisian girls are sad for the soldier who has returned, wounded, from the colonies, it can be construed as another example of their “frowning” at the bad.)

On the other hand, the girls neglect to “thank the Lord [they] are well”; indeed, they are sad that they are not ill (they covet the benefits that their friend receives as compensation for having been ill). Perhaps they are not so virtuous after all.

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And now, some outdated news too important not to mention. Barcelona defeated Liga de Quito in the “return” leg of Ecuador’s championship round and, for the sixteenth time, won the Serie A.

I missed the game, alas. It was held on Tuesday night of last week – not on Wednesday night, as I had expected. Apparently, Barcelona “parked the bus” all game long and waited for the penalty shootout. Not very glorious.

Then again, just winning in Quito is difficult enough. This was Barcelona’s first victory in Liga’s stadium since it was inaugurated in 1997.

I was especially pleased for Matías Oyola, Barcelona’s captain and long-serving midfielder, who played his last game before retiring. He scored in the shootout. He contributed to three of Barcelona’s championships.

Here is a video of the shootout.