Branagh’s affectionate ode to the trials of being Shakespeare
All Is True 12A cert, 101 min ★★★★
Dir Kenneth Branagh Starring Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Ian Mckellen, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson, Hadley Fraser, Alex Macqueen, Jack Colgrave Hirst
To the truism that films about writing are difficult to pull off, Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare portrait All Is True has a ready solution. It begins in 1613 with the fire that burned down the Globe Theatre, when a stage cannon ignited the thatch during a performance of Henry VIII. The playwright died just three years later, and it’s in this biographical hinterland that the film takes place.
Then again, retirement as a subject hardly lends itself to drama any more readily than quill-pushing. It falls on Ben Elton’s shoulders as a screenwriter to make this project work, a couple of years after he first delved into Shakespeare’s life, for much more irreverent and openly comic purposes, in his BBC sitcom Upstart Crow.
Elton has done a lot of clever stitching to weave the threads of Shakespeare’s home life into a partfictionalised elegy on his achievements, sombre and full of regret. The ghost of Hamnet, Shakespeare fils, haunts the père, in one of the film’s more obvious meta-shakespearean ploys.
The issue of his uncertain legacy (neither of his daughters, Susanna and Judith, had yet borne him a son) hangs over all his family interactions, which are frosty at best: Will has spent so much of his adult life in London that Anne (Judi Dench) receives him more like a B&B guest than a husband, barring him from her bedroom.
Elton, it’s clear, is a Shakespeare devotee: he relaxes all the Blackadderesque mockery here, allowing the kind of shift from punning into profundity that makes any great production of, say, Twelfth Night glow as it rounds the final furlong. The film has wit in its back pocket, rather than flapping it around relentlessly. So we get some very funny bursts of insult – as when Will gets his own back on snooty nemesis Sir Thomas Lucy (Alex Macqueen), a ghastly Protestant MP who has the gall to impugn Anne’s low birth.
It’s the absence of grandstanding, of Stoppardian showing off, that makes this film different, as a lovely meditation on what parts of a man’s legacy truly matter. It takes a while to settle into Branagh’s performance, perhaps because the cosmetic job and bald pate give him a peculiar resemblance to Ben Kingsley. Rarely has he seemed so hidden inside.
But this comes to feel like the whole point, especially given Branagh’s long relationship with Shakespeare on screen. All the antics, the flourishes, the lapel-grabbing we used to associate with Branagh-doing-the-bard are gone. The man who inspired them is a tired figure now, uncertain of his own achievements, craving inner calm.
The best and longest scene is a mid-film visit from Ian Mckellen, far older than the real-life Earl of Southampton – who would have been 40 – but openly enjoying the fact, under a lavishly curly blond wig.
Sonnet 29 – about the consolations of remembered love – is read out in its entirety twice (once by Branagh and once by Mckellen) and Mckellen’s lavish rendition of the poem is so much the more sonorous that it feels like a gift back to the writer, as any great performance is. We hardly need telling what power Shakespeare’s words kept into posterity: the only one who does, in this affecting coda, is him. TR