MOVIES : COMMENTARY : Confounding Expectations : In current film adaptations of dramatic works, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ comes across as stagy, while a reconstruction of ‘Hamlet’ leaps off the screen

The most reliable attribute of art is defiance. Just when you think you have some kind of bead on it, watch it jump the fence and prove, again, that the only predictable thing about it is unpredictability--its amazing powers of self-regeneration in fresh, undreamed of ways.

This is not news, but the fact is driven home again by the recent release of two films based on what might be described as overexposed plays. Surely not “Cyrano de Bergerac” again , even if it is with Gerard Depardieu--and did you say another “Hamlet”? Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, yes, but with Mel Gibson in the lead. . . ?

Never mind. And never mind that, at least in this minority opinion, neither the previous English-language edition of “Cyrano” with Jose Ferrer, nor the Laurence Olivier “Hamlet,” were particularly memorable films--for the actors or directors (even when they’re one and the same). Olivier’s “Hamlet” didn’t touch his “Henry V,” where indeed a kind of English heroism shone through. As for Kevin Kline’s “Hamlet,” seen recently on PBS, it’s not even a contender, being no more than a dreary imitation of any number of traditional British counterparts, Olivier’s included. You can see that this playgoer approached the new releases with some trepidation. Make that downright diffidence.

Well, what a surprise. Neither the glowing reviews that attended Depardieu’s Cyrano, nor the mixed and muted ones that greeted Gibson as the Danish prince, would seem to have been fully deserved.

One can’t compare the sheer philosophical weight of a “Hamlet” to the romantic high jinks of a “Cyrano,” but in the commercial world of movies you would think “Cyrano’s” stylish derring-do would have it all over “Hamlet’s” brooding ruminations. Think again. Despite the good--if very different kind of--time the two latter-day matinee idols are having in each of their roles, it is the “Cyrano” that disappoints, remaining a decent but undemanding, audience-friendly kind of film--while the “Hamlet” leaps off the screen, shaking up our emotions with a sagacious shuffle-and-trim of the original Shakespeare.

Who would have thought it? Not this writer, who was weaned on “Cyrano” and reveled in its heroics that work so well in French, even if they do tend to turn to mawkishness in English. How odd then that this French-language screen adaptation by director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, in collaboration with no less a writer than Jean-Claude Carriere, has such a placid and unruffled tone.

With Peter Brook, Carriere was responsible for the transfixing stage and screen adaptations of “The Mahabharata.” But he seems content here just to let Edmond Rostand’s clever rhymed couplets stand, more or less as Rostand wrote them. Not necessarily unwise, given their elegance, if Rappeneau had delivered a more organically animated film. Despite the good sense demonstrated in using the literate Anthony Burgess translation for subtitles, this “Cyrano” looks and feels like nothing so much as--dare we say it?--a neatly filmed play.

Its emotions are remote. It stays on the page or, in this case, the screen. Even its operatic third act, set in the picture-postcard autumn courtyard of a monastery, with its coy and giggling nuns, unmerry widow and moribund hero--a three-hankie affair on a bet--left this viewer uncharacteristically dry-eyed.

Depardieu and his Cyrano are bristling, alive, heroic, but they’re knocking about in a beautifully designed, visually uncreative movie. So stagy is it, that even the ramparts in the battle scenes look like nothing so much as John Napier’s complex stage set for “Les Miserables”--a French musical whose own heroics, much like “Cyrano’s,” veer in English to the sentimental. Jacques Weber’s subtle performance as the overindulged De Guiche is also rich, but beyond him and Depardieu, there is little to galvanize the spirit.

It’s perhaps important to remember that for all of its musketeering bravado, this is a pseudo -17th-Century swashbuckler overlaid with the Victorian sensibilities of its author. It would take a major expansion to make it the expansive, rambunctious movie it ought to be. Instead, the film works self-consciously at looking like a work of art, which is not the same as being one.

Theater in the conventional sense of “Cyrano” and “Hamlet” talks to us. Its images are an adjunct--a context, not a substitute, for the conversation. Being literature and not photography means that translating theater into film, where so much depends on what you see rather than what you hear, is always a difficult passage. Language does not photograph. So the camera must be used in emphatic ways to force us to listen.

We know film is a director’s medium. Not that the writer is less important (he’s not; there’s no film without a script), but that the director plays so much larger a role in determining where we look and what we take in. Point of view becomes imperative. We can’t circumvent it as we can--and often do--in theater.

Point of view was everything in the superlative 1982 television version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” so brilliantly refocused and reshaped by director Terry Hughes. And point of view was the commanding presence in the film and TV versions of “The Mahabharata,” where Brook consciously chose to zero in on faces and language rather than panorama because he accurately believed that the value of that film was in the word.

The word is dissipated in the garrulous “Cyrano,” precisely because director Rappeneau has taken no such strongly subjective position. In what may have been a scrupulous desire to let the play speak for itself, he has inadvertently allowed it merely to fend for itself. Thus its lack of focus at the receiving end of the camera.

The same was true of the Rex Harrison “Heartbreak House,” so much more potent on stage in 1983 at New York’s Circle in the Square than when it was taped for television three years later. Same production, same actors,

same director (Anthony Page), but no understanding of the camera’s requirements or its possibilities. It was an archivist’s dull preservation of a once live performance--and not, as is sometimes argued, a problem of screen size. Page simply, lazily, filmed the play.

“Hamlet” is quite another story. No one can accuse Zeffirelli of not knowing his medium or of playing second fiddle to anyone, not even Shakespeare. And in his wrenching usurpation of the play, his manhandling of it to a large degree, he proves a point. This is a thoughtful, flinty reconstruction of “Hamlet” that judiciously slashes what wouldn’t work on screen and rearranges the rest.

Forget the opening scenes on the battlements. Cut to the court assembled in a dusty, stony crypt where they’ve just buried Hamlet’s father. Meet the new king, the teary widowed queen, Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia. The lot of them in one, dramatic stroke. And in the shadows, Hamlet. We don’t encounter Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo until later, when they visit Hamlet in his cell-like room having come to tell him, yes, of this strange apparition they’ve all seen. . . .

Whatever he does, Zeffirelli doesn’t insult our intelligence. He’s supremely visual and very direct. When he cuts, it’s to the quick--of the story, the scene, the moment, the character or the play. All is stripped bare. Not a redundancy left.

Soliloquies don’t come across well on camera? He finds photogenic ways through or around them--or he slashes them too. With impunity. No need to shudder. There is no heresy. What he and co-screenplay shaper Christopher De Vore have cut and pasted together (Shakespeare is still the writer) works at surprisingly little loss to the sense or the poetry of the text, even though its four hours have been reduced to just under 2 1/2.

Shot in Scotland and at Dover Castle on England’s southern coast, this is a visually rugged, majestic and uncompromising dominion, aptly more English than Danish, and matched by the toughness of its inhabitants. The climate seems right for murderous plots and counterplots.

Political overtones are done away with by the disappearance from the text of Fortinbras. Polonius is perhaps the most modified of the characters by selective elimination. His sillier, more labored speeches are gone, and Ian Holm’s representation is not that of a dodderer, but of a stern eminence grise who falters only around his children but brooks no interference in a court long under his control.

Hamlet’s reference to him as “a foolish, prating knave,” after he accidentally kills him, comes across as personal antipathy, a perception of Polonius as a meddler entirely too wily for his own good.

Most intriguing is a virtual dismemberment of the nunnery scene. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy follows rather than precedes it, and the scene itself has been severely trimmed and its injunctions removed to the mummers’ pre-show in the play-within-the-play (or now the play-within-the-film). They actually work better there.

Zeffirelli is not past such radical usurpation or using panorama when it suits him. Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern takes place out of doors after a hard ride by the water’s edge. It’s a striking image, full of sea-birds and brisk air. The ensuing pursuit of truth (“Were you not sent for?”) and Hamlet’s description of the surrounding earth and sky (“. . . this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire . . .”) makes perfect sense delivered in the open air. It also naturally leads in to the arrival of the players, pushing and pulling their broken-down old wagon up the craggy road to the castle.

Hamlet’s advice to the players has been cut, as has any mention of his writing an additional speech with which to trap Claudius. Call it shorthand. The action does not fare any less well, and not delivering the expected has a strangely refreshing effect. Similarly, some of Ophelia’s lines in the mad scenes dovetail elliptically into Gertrude’s in potent cinematic dissolves.

(Shorthand, however, can also misfire; just why Hamlet returns to Denmark after having set sail for England was apparently abandoned somewhere on the cutting-room floor. . . .)

Aside from the general wisdom of Zeffirelli’s choices and his expert use of the camera to emphasize language (including close-ups and juxtapositions of images), it is in his casting decisions--Gibson in particular--that he triumphs.

Gibson is the most unaffected and lucid Hamlet in memory (going back to John Gielgud’s superb portrayal). There is a sadness deep in the translucent blue eyes and a set in the jaw that make this road warrior seem not so much a man paralyzed by fate, as fortune’s toy disarmed by it. His performance throbs with intelligence. It is well-spoken, graced with economy of gesture and a spontaneity that might be the envy of any actor. No sham here, not even a trace of grandiloquence. This is a Hamlet, as actor/director/playwright Steven Berkoff described the character, “of compassion, charm, wisdom, wit, moral force, insight and philosophy.”

He might have added eloquence. The film’s most indelible moment comes when Hamlet accepts Claudius’ wager and agrees to take on Laertes, even though he has a premonition that this fencing bout might not turn out well. “We defy augury” is a statement of deep resignation, strengthened by Gibson’s deliberately choppy delivery and a sinking blood-red sun in the background. As often as we’ve seen it and know the outcome, the final fencing match plays like a cliffhanger.

It is all done with mirrors, of course. But it is how expertly those mirrors are manipulated--the unusual camera angles, the probing close-ups, the half-light--that makes a film come together.

It may be only a coincidence that Cyrano and Hamlet complement each other. These protagonists have much in common as men: self-hatred, pride, wit, dignity and talented swordsmanship. The parallels only underscore the differences to be found in these new filmed editions of both plays--differences that argue conclusively, one more time, that the only sound measure of art is the imagination of its artists.