All Is True (Kenneth Branagh, 2019)

[Mr Sheldrake]

Who but Branagh to play the Bard in his brief retirement years, much of his career invested in bringing the plays to life. He's good but hampered by a screenplay intent on revealing secrets, all of them, it might have been better to leave some mystery.

The Earl of Southampton comes a-callin, he's the love object of much of the poems, and he rhapsodizes Shakespeare as being the greatest artist, then berates him for living "a small life". The implication being that all of Shakespeare's imaginative powers are used up in the work, there was little left for the joys of real life. The visit concludes with dueling recitations of Sonnet 29 (fortune and mens eyes). Branagh and Ian McKellen are superb, as one might expect.

Judy Dench has a calm and wise dignity as wife Anne. The compelling relationship is with daughter Judith, she feels unloved for being the twin that should have died, in place of brother Hamnet, Shakespeare craving a male heir. Many of the plays have such intensity in father/daughter recriminations, estrangements and joyous reconciliations, that the depiction rings true.

[colinr0380]

It is perhaps important with All Is True to recognise that the script was written by comedian Ben Elton (writer of the last three Blackadder series), which makes the film feel a bit as if it has developed out of (though appears to not be directly connected to) his BBC television series in which David Mitchell played Shakespeare Upstart Crow. I quite liked Upstart Crow in a sitcom-y way, but its very much a comic-revisionist view of the Bard where rather irritatingly every single play has to be sourced not from Shakespeare's imagination but rather the plot plays out in front of him in his real life and he just copies it down with a bit of flowery language for decoration. Or worse it gets stolen without credit from the longsuffering and overlooked women in his life.

It is a weird mix as there is obviously a lot of research done to throw in certain biographical facts of Shakespeare's life for those in the know to chuckle at, and on the other hand to have very modern comic asides as well. But I rather feared for students doing their A levels with only knowledge gleaned from Upstart Crow as their guide!

(Branagh turned up in last years Upstart Crow Christmas special in order to, for some reason, tell Will Shakespeare the story of A Christmas Carol!)

[ando]

All Is True

Who but Branagh to play the Bard in his brief retirement years, much of his career invested in bringing the plays to life. He's good but hampered by a screenplay intent on revealing secrets, all of them, it might have been better to leave some mystery.

The Earl of Southampton comes a-callin, he's the love object of much of the poems, and he rhapsodizes Shakespeare as being the greatest artist, then berates him for living "a small life". The implication being that all of Shakespeare's imaginative powers are used up in the work, there was little left for the joys of real life. The visit concludes with dueling recitations of Sonnet 29 (fortune and mens eyes). Branagh and Ian McKellen are superb, as one might expect.

Judy Dench has a calm and wise dignity as wife Anne. The compelling relationship is with daughter Judith, she feels unloved for being the twin that should have died, in place of brother Hamnet, Shakespeare craving a male heir. Many of the plays have such intensity in father/daughter recriminations, estrangements and joyous reconciliations, that the depiction rings true.

First, thanks for bringing this film to our attention (I remember looking forward to a viewing when I heard of its release). That is the extent of anything positive I have to say about it.

Second (my major gripe), why would the filmmakers expect an audience, accustomed to the verbal splendor and occasional rigor of a Shakespeare play, to be entertained by a comparatively murky, Lifetime Special-like melodrama about an aging writer without the benefits of flashbacks to the glory days of his genius or a visual equivalent of his inventiveness? Nothing about (what we know of) his life or his plays is this dreary. Granted, most of the Bard's stage stuff is damned close to melodrama but at least he fills it with glorious language and real, vital, actable motives. And it's not like the scriptwriters were clueless about a potential potboiler in the making when they snagged on to the historical fact of, for example, John Shakespeare's indebtedness to many of Stradford's citizens. William Shakespeare was a moneylender! You bet your house he wanted to get even with those who helped put Papa in the poorhouse! Instead, we get an old, grumpy, mopey Bard, kowtowing to the local authority and in search of his loooong dead son, Hamnet, getting continual eye rolls from his wife and daughter, who have not only moved on but know far more about the real dead boy than Shakespeare cares to know. Who are we supposed to relate to here? And why should we care?

Third, much in this film that passes as provocative is in insultingly bad taste. Why does anyone think, for example, that Sir Thomas Lucy would get away with publicly insulting Shakespeare to his face in the town square without so much as the retort of a duel? Puritan encroachment on a suspected Papist family or not; no man, with great respect or not, in 2019 would stand for such a smear on his family and/or personal character in person as Will does in the latter half of the film. Bits of historical license like this are not only unbelievable (gentle Shakespeare= punk?) but the desperate reaches of a disappointingly poor script. F

If you've been infected I advise the purgative of a good production of the real (All Is True) Henry VII, say the 1979 BBC film with John Stride (Henry), Timothy West (Cardinal Wosley) and Claire Bloom (Katherine of Aragon). Quickly!

[MichaelB]

I was pleasantly surprised by this 1978 TV series with Tim Curry as Shakespeare - although its major virtue was that it was written by John Mortimer, a writer with the gift of, as I said in the attached piece, "language which has the whiff of authenticity without being overly scholarly, lest it scare off peaktime audiences."

[ando]

I was pleasantly surprised by this 1978 TV series with Tim Curry as Shakespeare - although its major virtue was that it was written by John Mortimer, a writer with the gift of, as I said in the attached piece, "language which has the whiff of authenticity without being overly scholarly, lest it scare off peaktime audiences."

- Came back to edit my post and was relieved to find your well advised alternative. I admire Life of Shakespeare. It's actually a bit of an inspiration. And Queen Bess, near the end, says what I feel about Branagh's All Is True: Kill that moping Hamlet! Give us fat Falstaff! At least we can laugh whilst we await our separate scaffolds.

[ando]

What I suspect (and I could be wrong, though my instincts tell me otherwise) is that this film is a sort of nod to parents in the Baby boomer generation who achieved the highest professional success at the expense of ruinous, or at least, dysfunctional immediate family relationships. Everything in the film speaks to it - certainly more than to the "truth" of the last days of William Shakespeare.

[J Wilson]

The film is a real drag, but it drove me nuts at how much Branagh looked like Ben Kingsley in this.

[ando]

The film does illustrate, unintentionally, the old maxim that if you want to know about the inner life of an artist look at their work. To wit:

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown
And put a barren scepter in my grip,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding.
- Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 1

Macbeth is a late Shakespeare play, apparently written ten years before his death. The quote is the chief preoccupation in the film [All Is True] for the main character though, ultimately, it's not much of a motivator - in the play or the Branagh film. In the play Macbeth wants to secure his life and his throne. Branagh's Shakespeare wants his dead son back. If you've seen the latter try the former. It's an unfair contest, but I'd say the master thesbian asked for it.