All’s well that ends well for Judi and Ken
With two of our greatest stars in fine form as Shakespeare and his wife, it’s . . .
All Is True (12A) Verdict: An intriguing winter’s tale ★★★★✩ If Beale Street Could Talk (15) Verdict: A musical without songs ★★★✩✩
ON JUNE 29, 1613, at the Globe Theatre in London, a stage cannon was fired during a performance of William Shakespeare’s play All Is True, which today we know as henry VIII.
It was a small theatrical flourish that would have devastating consequences, because the cannon set fire to the Globe’s thatched roof and within an hour the most famous playhouse in England, where most of Shakespeare’s plays had been unveiled, had burned to the ground.
The career of the country’s greatest playwright ended on the same night. he never wrote another significant play and died a couple of years later.
Those last two years are the focus of Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True, as heartbroken and bereft, Shakespeare returns to his home town of Stratford, and to the uneasy embrace of his wife Anne hathaway and their two daughters, whom he has rarely visited over the previous two decades.
All Is True is a heavyweight production, if only in terms of the personnel. Branagh, who has done as much as anyone alive to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the silver screen, plays the great man himself.
Mind you, he is barely recognisable under a gleaming dome of a forehead, a knobbly prosthetic nose and a jutting, bearded chin which, when added to a surprising lack of assertiveness, give him the air of a man who can’t decide whether to enter a lookalike contest as Ron Moody or Jimmy hill.
Less compromised by the make-up department, Judi Dench plays Anne, and Ian McKellen has a highly enjoyable cameo as Shakespeare’s erstwhile patron, the Earl of Southampton. It is strongly hinted that the Earl was also the object of Shakespeare’s ardour. Or ‘Bardour’, if you’d rather.
The script is by Ben Elton, who has tempered the jauntiness of his Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow to give us a barrage of sexual scandal and a whirl of emotions — grief, resentment, envy, lust — more suited to an episode of EastEnders. Or maybe that’s the wrong soap opera.
All Is True largely unfolds as an everyday tale of country folk, for which Dench unpacks her best rural vowels. It’s a ruff version of The Archers.
THE
scandals concern both Shakespeare’s daughters. Susanna ( Lydia Wilson) is unhappily married to a holier- than- thou Puritan doctor, to whom she is apparently unfaithful.
Judith ( Kathryn Wilder) marries the more rakish Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave hirst), who has already impregnated another local woman, Margaret Wheeler (Eleanor de Rohan).
The grief is mostly Shakespeare’s, whose return to Stratford, without the distraction of writing and staging all those plays, re-ignites the pain of losing his only son, 11-year-old hamnet, many years earlier.
‘I’ve lived so long in imaginary worlds, I’ve lost sight of what is real,’ he laments, though he at first gets precious little sympathy either from the stolidly undemonstrative Anne, or from miserable Judith, who was hamnet’s twin, and feels certain that her father would prefer her to have perished instead.
Occasionally, Shakespeare loses his temper with these unappreciative womenfolk. ‘ Through my genius I’ve brought fame and fortune to this house,’ he bellows, and 400 years or so later there’s no real arguing with that, though Anne doesn’t look too convinced. Gradually, however, the family learns to live with, and even love, each other again, despite Elton pulling a rather startling late twist out of his garters.
Eyebrows have been raised, incidentally, at Branagh’s decision to cast Dench.
Anne was eight years older, whereas the actual gap between them is 26. I don’t think it matters. It’s a pleasure to see our greatest Shakespearean actress playing the Bard’s wife, and indeed, All Is True contains many pleasures, not least of which is Zac Nicholson’s cinematography.
he pounces like another 17th-century genius, Rembrandt, on the lighting opportunities afforded by all those candles, all those
sunbeams streaming through mullioned windows.
And outdoors, the panorama shots are ravishing. Warwickshire never looked prettier. n THE backdrop to If Beale
Street Could Talk, an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel, could hardly be more different: grimy, urban, modern New York City.
There, two young AfricanAmericans, Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), fall madly in love.
The only obstructions to their happiness are extreme poverty — which doesn’t stop them both looking a million dollars, but never mind — and, more seismically, Fonny’s arrest on a trumpedup rape charge. In other words, their colour is preventing them from living the life they deserve. Lots of rhapsodies have already been blown in the direction of this picture, but let me add a raspberry. Or not a raspberry, exactly, because it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking film, but I expected to love it and didn’t.
The writer/ director is Barry Jenkins, whose last film Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture once they realised they’d dished it out accidentally to La La Land. I thought Moonlight was over-praised, too, and maybe the problem I have with both films is the righteous indignation about social and racial prejudice that drives them.
Legitimate grievances can make for clumsy story-telling, and so it is here. So gorgeous and admirable are our young lovers, so passionate (and frankly, soppy) their love, and so twisted and ugly the racism that blights them (as represented by a laughably venomous white cop), that If Beale Street Could Talk has the unsubtle, unreal feel of a musical, only without original songs.
There’s an enormously powerful scene when Tish’s mother (Regina King) travels to Puerto Rico to confront the woman who wrongly identified Fonny as her attacker — a scene that on its own is probably responsible for King’s Golden Globe win as Best Supporting Actress, which might yet be matched at the Oscars.
And there’s a great soundtrack, too. But overall the film is less than the sum of its extravagant plaudits.