Movie Review: All is True

All Is True ** / *****

Directed by: Kenneth Branagh.

Written by: Ben Elton.

Starring: Kenneth Branagh (William Shakespeare), Judi Dench (Anne Hathaway), Ian McKellen (Henry Wriothesley), Kathryn Wilder (Judith Shakespeare), Jack Colgrave Hirst (Tom Quiney), Matt Jessup (Frank), Lydia Wilson (Susanna), Alex MacQueen (Sir Thomas Lucy), Hadley Fraser (John Hall), Gerard Horan (Ben Jonson)

 

If there are alternate realties, I really hope that there is one in which Kenneth Branagh got to have the career he so obviously wanted – to basically become the new Laurence Olivier, and bring new versions of Shakespeare classics to the screen on a regular basis. On the evidence of his first decade as a director – it could have been a great career. His Henry V (1989) was great, his Much Ado About Nothing (1993) is a delight and his Hamlet (1996) is the best screen version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece we have ever seen. While he didn’t direct Othello (1995), his Iago is perhaps by all-time favorite screen version of the character. But alas, times change – and classical versions of Shakespeare don’t happen as much as they used to – so since 2000, Branagh has only managed to bring Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – an ambitious attempt to make the play into a classic Hollywood musical, which didn’t really work, and a TV movie version of As You Like It (2006) to the screen. Branagh has worked consistently – both in front of, and behind the camera – but as a director, he has been sucked into the studio machine with stuff like the live action Cinderella for Disney and the original Thor for Marvel. I didn’t particularly care for his last directorial effort – Murder on the Orient Express – but did think that I would love Branagh to continue the series as Hercule Poirot, because what did work there, was good enough that I wanted to see more (and thankfully, we are getting Death on the Nile sooner rather than later. But I do think we’ve lost something by not seeing Branagh do more Shakespeare – a Macbeth, a Richard III, and maybe some lesser known plays – as stuff like Julie Taymor’s Titus or Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus have been some of the best Shakespearean movies of the past 20 years.

 

Branagh’s latest film as a director is not a Shakespeare adaptation, but does feature him playing the Bard himself. The film opens with the Globe Theatre burning down, and Shakespeare retiring to Stratford to live out his days in retirement. He returns to find his wife, Anne (Judi Dench) and two daughters – Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder) don’t much care that he has returned from so long in London. He wants to mourn the death of his son Hamnet – building a garden in his honor – but he died years and years ago, and the rest of the family has moved on. Despite his success, he is still looked down upon by the upper class in his small town. First one, then the other daughter get caught up in scandals. And he starts to wonder if his life had any meaning whatsoever.

 

People smarter than I can tell you how much of what is on display in All is True is actually true – I gather, not all that much, or at least there is a lot of speculation based on incomplete information going on here. I’m not sure it matters much, as the film pretty much has a defense built into itself when Shakespeare tells an aspiring writer that if he stays true to himself, then all is true in what he writes. I don’t think the questionable history really helps or hurts the film.

 

What does hurt it is that Branagh and screenwriter Ben Elton try to cram in so much into its runtime, and then try to shock you with late revelations that don’t have the impact you think they might. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to actually depict the time around Hamnet’s death – so that the son is an actual character in the film, instead of the cipher he remains. So much is – built upon Shakespeare’s grief for his son but we have no idea who he was, and by the end, we realize we know even less than the movie led us to believe we did. The film also introduces us to so many minor, completely irrelevant characters that just muddy the waters.

 

There are scenes that work here. The best is probably a long conversation between Branagh’s Shakespeare and Ian McKellan’s Henry Wriothesley, his only scene in the film, which has the two great actors go toe-to-toe. I don’t know if it adds much to the overall film – if it even fits in – but it works wonderfully as a scene itself. If only Branagh had given Judi Dench the same opportunity at some point – but mainly, she seems wasted in her role.

 

The film does look good – I’ll give Branagh that. That Globe fire is brief, but mesmerizing – a wall of fire in front of Shakespeare, who watches as his world burns. And apparently, Branagh only used candlelight to film the interiors, and while Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon it is not, it certainly does give the film a distinct, dark look when they are inside.

 

But overall, I could never quite tell what the point of the movie was – what Branagh and company were saying about Shakespeare, either as a man, or as a writer. The film is handsomely mounted, and well-acted – but ultimately pointless.