It sets up not only Hamlet’s anguish, but the real attraction between his mother and his uncle, which is seen in this version to be at least as sexual as it is political. In film terms, this scene makes the central problem of "Hamlet" perfectly clear, and dramatically strengthens everything that follows. Right at the outset, Zeffirelli and his collaborator on the shooting script, Christopher De Vore, take a liberty with "Hamlet" by shifting some dialogue and adding a few words to create a scene that does not exist in the original: The wake of Hamlet’s father, with Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius confronting each other over the coffin. This is a substantial world of real physical presence, fleshed out by an unusual number of extras we have the feeling that this throne rules over real subjects, instead of existing only in Shakespeare’s imagination. There is mud here, and rain and mist, and the characters sometimes seemed dragged down by the sheer weight of their clothing.
Zeffirelli sets his film in a spectacular location - a castle on an outcropping of the stark coast in northern Scotland, perched on top of a rock nearly surrounded by the sea. He gives us a Hamlet who does his best to carry on, until he is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of events. The approach also may come from Gibson himself, the most good-humored of contemporary stars, whose personal style is to deflect seriousness with a joke, and who doesn't easily descend into self-pity and morose masochism.
Part of that approach may come from Zeffirelli, whose famous film version of "Romeo and Juliet" also played on the youth and attractiveness of its characters, who were bursting with life and romance until tragedy separated them. This is a prince who was healthy and happy and could have lived a long and active life, if things had turned out differently. We get the notion, indeed, that there was nothing fundamentally awry with Hamlet until everything went wrong in his life, until his father died and his mother married his uncle with unseemly haste. Gibson doesn't give us another Hamlet as Mope, a melancholy Dane lurking in shadows and bewailing his fate. The style of Franco Zeffirelli’s "Hamlet," with Mel Gibson in the title role, is robust and physical and - don't take this the wrong way - upbeat. You know the lyrics, so the only possible surprises come from style and phrasing. I feel the same way about "Hamlet." I know the play so well by now, have seen it in so many different styles and periods and modes of dress, that it’s like listening to a singer doing an old standard.
One day in class he said he would give anything to be able to read it again for the first time. I had a professor in college who knew everything there was to know about " Romeo and Juliet." Maybe he knew too much.
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