THE WHOLE DANE THING

By RICHARD CORLISS

Here's the most eclectic cast in movie history--Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, John Mills, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and the Duke of Marlborough, to name but a dozen--in the second longest film released by a major studio (after Cleopatra). If Kenneth Branagh doesn't win an Oscar for his four-hour, uncut Hamlet, he should at least cop a Chutzpah Award.

To his credit, the actor-director-adapter approached this job not as a solemn duty or an egotistic stunt, but in the sensible belief that the greatest work in dramatic literature damn well deserved to be filmed in full. Next to this, all other movie versions, from Laurence Olivier's to Mel Gibson's, seem like samplings--a Reduced Shakespeare Company run-through of Hamlet's greatest hits.

Big and pretty, vigorous, thoughtful, this Hamlet expands the story with helpful flashbacks; Yorick, Priam, Old Norway come alive as if from a vivid history book. The full version restores Shakespeare's emphasis on court politics, with whispers of intrigue that establish Hamlet and Laertes as potential usurpers of Claudius' throne, and massed armies behind Hamlet. Here he might be a Henry V who's gone just this side of bonkers.

This version is strongest where most shorter productions fail: in Act IV, where, in Hamlet's absence, Ophelia goes picturesquely mad while the star gets to catch his breath. Winslet's decline is an edifying horror show; Christie gives all her urgent glamour to Gertrude's one big speech; and Michael Maloney's subtle power as Laertes makes him a kind of good twin to the melancholy Dane. Hamlet, after all, hates his stepfather because he seduced the lad's mother and killed his father. But Laertes has similar reasons for hating Hamlet, and here he has the same carnal, bloody and unnatural itch for Ophelia that Hamlet has for Gertrude.

The cast is mostly excellent, with Crystal a nice surprise as the gravedigger and Richard Briers rescuing Polonius from amiable fuddery; this old man is as much plotter as plodder. If there's a lapse, it's in the central performance. Spuming his lines with catarrhal intakes of breath punctuating the bolts of rhetoric, Branagh is a whiz at making the poetry colloquial and intelligible; he spits out the 400-year-old verse like a rapmaster. But he can't so easily make it poetic.

He has spoken admiringly of Shakespeare's business sense, and he has it too; he also possesses Olivier's keen ambition, the entrepreneurial magnetism that attracts the brightest lights of Britain and Hollywood to his projects. What's lacking in this merchant of culture is Olivier's danger, the preening beauty and sweet delirium that makes an actor a star. Those are precisely the qualities that keep this admirable Hamlet--and Hamlet--from being a thrilling one.

--By Richard Corliss