All is True

All is True

Kenneth Branagh, as an actor and director, has given us Shakespeare for the big screen lively, impassioned, funny and randy productions such as “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Henry V.” Like his Bard-loving predecessor Sir Laurence Olivier, Branagh has gone from Hamlet to ham. He’s never gone full-tilt trash like Sir Larry O., with his Frankenstein monster. And though I still long for him to adapt some woebegone Harold Robbins smut novel, I’ll have to content myself with this clever bit of meta-casting in “All Is True.”

Branagh plays Shakespeare again.

With a little makeup aid and a history-bending script by one-half of the team that brought us “Blackadder,” Branagh gives us a surprisingly reined-in Bard. This one is afflicted with the same neuroses that every writer we’ve ever known suffers; he’s just taken up gardening instead of booze. (Flowers will do that.)

Branagh doesn’t chew on the scenery here; he mows it down with widescreen compositions often described as lush or comforting if not both. The lawn of Shakespeare will never win any awards for its garden-like qualities or because it blossoms like his prose. But it does keep him occupied.

Ben Elton’s speculative yarn about the last years of Shakespeare’s life lets us know immediately (via opening titles) that not much is known about them except that in June 1613, the Globe Theater burned to the ground in London. So here we open with our character juxtaposed against a raging fire occupying an entire movie screen: Shakespeare vs. writer’s block.

Without a theater to premiere his work what’s left? Words fail this man without words. So vowing never to write again, he heads home.

In Stratford upon Avon, wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), who’s had to do without her man around the house all these years, seems somewhat exasperated to see him though she’s ready to welcome him back. He’s also greeted by his daughters, married Susannah (Lydia Wilson) and unmarried Judith (Kathryn Wilder).

She’ll give him her bed, but she won’t occupy it with him. That would be weird. So he gets the “best bed” in the house. It is this peculiar bit of pillow placement that leads a moviegoer to suspect that there are many more issues and storylines and complications ahead for Shakespeare and Anne.

And so there are.

Their marriage has been strained by its very existence, the long separations necessitated by a single minded genius’ duty to himself, his work and to an era when London was all dirty streets and dark alleyways where public safety authorities hadn’t yet discovered light poles or lamp oil.

“You’re never here,” she tells him.

This may be the original All Time Greatest Quote From An Artistic Wife In History: “You spent more time with other men than you ever did with me.”

The poet Ben Jonson (Ian McKellen) comes round to say hello; they have a friendly rivalry from way back when. A lawyer thinks it might be time for our writer to update his will while he still can. “Your days are numbered,” he tells the Bard of Avon.

But none of this is true (Elton wrote that joke.) Except for the fire at The Globe. That happened.

Some critics have suggested Branagh took on this project because he doesn’t actually love Shakespeare enough or understands too well how dull those movies can get. Credit Elton with adding enough humor, history and humanity to make us care about this old writer who doesn’t believe in ghosts, until maybe now.

“All Is True” ends as it should, with a funeral. The Bard’s.

I realize that you might be thinking: this will be another one of those biopics where all sorts of improbable coincidences result in famous facts about the person’s life or their art. “All Is True” sidesteps that cliché with its timeframe. That said, the film has other sins to commit, starting with the tragic figure who haunts the main character.

Shakespeare is haunted by the death of his son Hamnet, whom he thought would take up his writer’s mantle and carry on his work. We see Hamnet multiple times offering up to his dad the most recent poems he’s written. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s relationship with Hamnet’s twin, Judith is strained because you guessed it the wrong kid died. Judith even says this line in the movie, and so I curse Dewey Cox for what he hath wrought.

Branagh won’t let you get too hung up on predictable stuff like this he’s running some equally diverting counter programming at the same time. Judith’s constant snark reminds me of MTV’s Daria and her rivalry with her sister has more than a bit of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” about it. If she can’t give her father a male heir to pass down his inheritance then she might as well not exist! Lydia is married to the kind of boring Puritan who’d rather burn theaters than fan flames of sexual passion though they do have kids; Judith does not.

“All is True” also wants to explore societal roles for women during Elizabethan times; we spend just as much time with Shakespeare’s women as we do with him. While Lydia gets her freak on outside her marriage, Judith seethes at her father while he mopes around mourning his dead son. Wilder really makes you feel the hurt beneath these moments of lashing out so that Shakespeare becomes something of a villainous representation for how little his era valued women.

Anne seems to be the only one comfortable with her life and her delusions. When the truth comes out about Hamnet’s death and his poetry, Anne digs in her heels about telling this lie she agreed upon. Branagh’s framing of this scene where he is dwarfed in the background between Anne and Lydia is as powerful as Dench’s acting. Say what you will about his onscreen vices, but Branagh has always been a generous director and it really shows here.

But make no mistake: this is still the same guy who went full-on operatic in the wildly entertaining “Dead Again.” Just when it feels like the Bard doth protest too much about his misery, the film injects some major juicy theatrics courtesy of Sir Ian McKellen. Like Branagh, McKellen knows from Bard and from dousing his performance in figurative pork products.

Sir Ian plays the Earl of Southampton, who has come to visit Shakespeare while in town on other business; this is the guy to whom the Bard supposedly wrote those sonnets. Delectably foppish, McKellen shows up looking like Edward Everett Horton disguised as an old theater queen, with that thick mustache and outrageous Scarlet Pimpernel wig throwing shade enough to cover three rooms of windows.

Shakespeare, in fact, has a tremendous desire for the Earl of Southampton but the latter says “you are not noble enough for these gifts”. He fails to seduce him when he recites Sonnet 29 in full as a technique of love making. The one that goes “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” etcetera. Branagh tears into the rendition reminding us all how good he is at doing Shakespeare.

After rejecting his proposal, the young man recites this poem back at him again so that Shakespeare can see that his love would have been reciprocated had he been born king too. However, even though it is still an amazing performance by any standard Mckellen gives a completely different but equally beautiful reading of this sonnet. This acting duel is one for history when it comes to battles among actors.

“I never allow truth to interfere with telling a good story,” confesses Shakespeare. “All Is True” could be chewed up by purists it’s prone to dragging yet I couldn’t get it out of my mind days later. Like “Wild Nights With Emily”, which remains superior as an Emily Dickinson vehicle because it bypasses Dicknson’s worthy immortality earned through canonization and lets us see her humanity (and drama) instead.

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