Audiences can accept films that reimagine Shakespeare -- like Baz Luhrmann's wildly uneven and affecting "William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet" and Michael Almereyda's exquisite new "Hamlet," perhaps because their execution travels far enough from their source to seem their own creatures. But Branagh's fairly faithful adaptations cheerfully muck up the still-cherished division between theatricality and "The Thee-uh-tah." Aiming for people who perhaps have never seen Shakespeare -- or who've suffered through stuffy, sluggish productions -- Branagh realized early on that cap-in-hand reverence wouldn't do him much good. He has allowed American stars to share the screen with trained Shakespearean actors. If that has sometimes failed -- Alicia Silverstone in "Love's Labour's Lost," Robert Sean Leonard in "Much Ado About Nothing," Jack Lemmon in "Hamlet" -- it's also produced terrific performances like those given by Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington in "Much Ado" and Billy Crystal's marvelous gravedigger in "Hamlet" (and, in the same film, the sly-wit of casting Charlton Heston as the Player King -- a hambone playing a hambone).

To the audiences and critics who subscribe to the myth that English actors are inherently superior to American ones, that's a heresy. But it's a greater heresy to stifle Shakespeare in the constraints of "culture." One of the delights of "Shakespeare in Love" was its celebration of Shakespeare as an entertainer who cut across all the boundaries that potentially divide audiences. Branagh wants Shakespeare to be experienced in that same spirit.

I never realized how successful he was until I took my father to see his "Hamlet." My father has a better instinct for movies than most critics I know but he had never been taught Shakespeare in school and had always avoided him. Shakespeare, he thought, was something for "educated" people. Thinking it was time he learned the folly of that attitude, I cajoled him into seeing "Hamlet." As first exposures to Shakespeare go, a four-hour uncut "Hamlet" is a walloping dose. He sat through it enthralled. At the end of the night, I asked him how he liked it. He turned to me looking utterly bereft and said, "I never imagined he'd die."

But even if you knew the play, Branagh's "Hamlet" could seem a revelation. For me, this great, flawed film is the most immediate and emotionally accessible production I've ever seen, the first time the play's mysteries didn't blunt its emotional impact. I went into the film admiring the play; I came out loving it. At times, Branagh's grandiosity runs away with him. Hamlet encounters his father's ghost amidst an array of special effects in which the earth itself breaks apart emitting sulfurous gasses. And, ending the first half with Hamlet's "How all occasions do inform against me" speech, Branagh loses the force of the words by pulling the camera back throughout the speech to reveal a massive vista of the Dane against Fortinbras' advancing army. Still, the scope of that shot can knock you dizzy. The bigness is also integral to the film's greatness. For Branagh, the film's scale is simply a reflection of the scale of the story's passions. He stages Claudius' announcement of his marriage to Gertrude at court, jammed with onlookers and all kinds of pomp. (If any of us live to see a Gertrude or Claudius to equal Derek Jacobi and Julie Christie, we will be blessed.) In the midst of this, the camera suddenly pans to the right to reveal, behind all the crowds, at the end of a corridor, Hamlet, clad in velvety black, as physically separate from the celebration as he is psychically separate. It's a simple device and yet it signals us that the passions roiling inside this man will soon equal and eventually dwarf the pageantry we've been regaled with. Branagh's Hamlet never loses the name of action. When he is thwarted in his deeds the action comes from the knife's-edge sharpness of his line readings. His words mock and wound and draw blood and yet the bitterness never obscures that this mourning son is in intolerable pain.

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It seems inconceivable that a production of "Hamlet" by his greatest living screen interpreter could have caused so little stir. That the public didn't get to see it widely is due to Columbia's decision to release it to art houses. (A preferable decision to the rumor that a two-and-a-half hour version was being prepared for mass release.) It's one thing for a Hollywood studio to be wary of a four-hour movie, but among my colleagues at the time there was something like indignation that they would be expected to sit through a four-hour "Hamlet." Nobody complains about movie lengths more than critics. (Given the stuff the job requires you to sit through, this is often with good reason.) But even before it was seen, a four-hour "Hamlet" seemed to afford some critics something like relief. At last, here was something they could point to justify their grumblings about what they saw as Branagh's egocentric ambition.

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