Hamlet On Screen - Significant Theatrical Releases - Franco Zeffirelli, 1990

Franco Zeffirelli, 1990

Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film of Hamlet stars Mel Gibson as the Dane, with Glenn Close as Gertrude, Alan Bates as Claudius and Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia.

Film scholar Deborah Cartmell has suggested that Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films are appealing because they are "sensual rather than cerebral", an approach by which he aims to make Shakespeare "even more popular". To this end, he cast the Hollywood actor Mel Gibson - then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon films - in the title role. Cartmell also notes that the text is drastically cut, with the effect of enhancing the roles of the women.

J. Lawrence Guntner has suggested that Zeffirelli's cinematography borrows heavily from the action film genre that made Gibson famous, noting that its average shot length is less than six seconds. In casting Gibson, the director has been said to have made the star's reputation part of the performance, encouraging the audience "to see the Gibson that they have come to expect from his other films": Indeed, Gibson was cast after Zeffirelli watched his character contemplate suicide in the first Lethal Weapon film. Harry Keyishan has suggested that Hamlet is well suited to this treatment, as it provides occasions for "enjoyable violence". J. Lawrence Guntner has written that the casting of Glenn Close as Mel Gibson's mother (only eleven years older than he was, in life, and then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction) highlights the incest theme, leaving "little to our post-Freudian imagination". and Deborah Cartmell notes that Close and Gibson simulate sex in the closet scene, and "she dies after sexually suggestive jerking movements, with Hamlet positioned on top of her, his face covered with sweat"