It was not easy for me to resist watching Sir Ken Branagh’s most recent addition to his Shakespeare oeuvre. My year-long project has been a journey through not only William’s plays, poems, and essential criticism curriculum, but a process of personal emotional exploration and development. I don’t know what I would have made of all the madness from within or without if I didn’t have the constant companion of thousands of pages of text to absorb. Out of respect for the chronological guideline of the project, Shakespeare himself, and my contemporary hero-worship of Sir Ken, I saved this film for what felt like the most appropriate moment, to vouchsafe the most educated viewing possible.
I only read as much and study as many films as I do in the hope to discover those exceptional creative works that will strike both my intellectual as well as emotional core at some wonderful nexus point. In that way, All Is True felt like it was tailor-made to ever so tenderly squeeze my Bard-loving heart.
I was squeezed. Like a lime into a cocktail. And I drank that cocktail made of happy tears.
It is a quintessential Branagh-directed project, imprinted with all the idiosyncratic elements of all his past films—musically, thematically, visually, hermeneutically. This may sound obvious—Sir Ken is, by all accounts, the most influential Shakespearean filmmaker of the last 30 years—but there’s more to it than what we’ve come to expect from him. He poured his soul into it. In every one of his films, he’s masterfully portrayed or molded portrayals of Shakespearean characters in their own right with voices drawing straight from the text. In this one, playing Shakespeare himself, Sir Ken had a unique opportunity to graciously inject a bit of his own voice for once. He’s earned it, if you ask me.
The entire film is necessarily speculative about Shakespeare’s personal life, which is infamously opaque at best. This fact has just as infamously led to mountains of theories regarding authorship of the these most illustrious plays in English literature. For the sake of personal curiosity, Branagh simply focusses on the premise that Shakespeare was a man from Stratford and no one else. Anything endeavouring to paint a realistic portrait of this man in his retirement is going to have to use a lot of imagination based on a mere handful of solid documentation. Branagh employs his rich creative resources to deliver a soulful, relatable, aching human who’s a celebrity in his own time but has and still is suffering life’s slings and arrows.
The nonpareil Dame Judi Dench buttresses both Ken the actor and the character as Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway. With her usual grace and sensitivity, she anchors everyone around her, especially in the many scenes involving William and his headstrong daughter Judith (Kathryn Wilder). The screenwriter Ben Elton, a Shakespeare lover of Blackadder and Upstart Crow fame, spins a mystery surrounding the tragic death of William and Anne’s only son, Hamnet, fraternal twin to Judith. Officially, Hamnet died of plague in Stratford when he was only eleven, and his London-based father allegedly dealt with it by simply continuing to work, and possibly conjuring everyone’s favorite Prince of Denmark as a kind of idealized version of his son had he survived to adulthood. Totally hypothetical of course, but a juicy idea.
At the opening of the film, in a shot reminiscent of a John Martin painting, we see The Globe theatre burning on the bank of the River Thames in 1613. William heads home to Stratford. Faced with the memory of his long-dead young son Hamnet, he resolves to plant a garden as a means of mourning, and his family members, Judith especially, are perturbed by his belated reaction to the tragedy. He has to attend church—something he never did while in London—and in the middle of a service, some clotpole accuses William’s younger daughter Susanna of adultery. Judith herself gets involved with a man who is notorious around town for his philandering, and a woman who was pregnant by him eventually dies in childbirth.
These scandals, along with the lingering familial strife over Hamnet's death and William’s absence, comprise the main events of the story. The cast processes this material with palpable friction and genuine depth. The candlelit and fireside night scenes in their homes are a visual metaphor for the shroud of informational darkness that surrounds Shakespeare's family life. Technically, this is a total bitch to photograph, and not since Barry Lyndon have I seen such a strict lighting paradigm enforced, and with such an effective storytelling effect. In interviews, Sir Ken has mentioned that the daytime lighting was modeled after Vermeer and the night after Rembrandt, and the DP totally nailed it in both respects.
This film marks the first time Sir Ian McKellen has ever worked with Sir Ken, which is about as mind-blowing as it is miraculous. Sir Ian plays the notable Earl of Southhampton (the "faire youth" of the sonnets). When Anne finds out that he is to visit her husband, she tells William outright that she resents this, as it is plain from the dozens of poems that were published that William had romantic feelings for the Earl. Southampton arrives and he and William share a fantastically nuanced and intimate scene as only such accomplished actors can. We are tantalized with each of them reciting the same sonnet to one another, expressing volumes about what may have been between them. It was an absolute treat to watch, and gratifying to see Shakespeare's long-debated bisexuality portrayed with respect, dignity, and heart.
The most signature Branagh moment comes when a local asshole Sir Thomas Lucy meets William in the street and insults his wife as well as pokes fun at him for not doing “real business.” With the same verve of Hamlet rattling off his advice to the players, Ken’s inner voice peeps through an articulate shpiel wherein William simultaneously defends the sincere efforts of every playwright, poet, and artist of every stripe in the world and puts snobs like Sir Thomas (and acid-tongued film critics) to shame:
“Oh I thought you meant real business, like building, owning, and operating London’s largest theatre for instance, actors, carpenters, seamstresses, crew to pay, bribes to pay, security to mount, politics to navigate, 3000 paying customers to be fed and watered every afternoon, each promised a spectacle greater than the last. One hundred and seventy Royal Command Performances for our queen and our king. Have you ever considered the logistics of mounting the Battle of Shrewsbury in the banqueting hall at Hampton Court? Please don’t. It would make you so tired. And yet, in all the years that I have run my vast, complex, and spectacularly successful business, Sir Thomas, I have indeed found the time to think and write down the pretty thoughts you mention and which, in my experience, bring immense pleasure to those who seek mere diversion or respite from this veil of tears, without which, it would all be about as pointless as... you, Sir Thomas. And since you mention her, my wife Anne, has more decency and wisdom in her daily shit than you have in your entire body.”
Any true fan of Shakespeare would agree with Ben Elton’s words here. In the mouth of Sir Ken, it is the most eloquent “Piss off” anyone could want. I clapped so hard.
As time passes, and the biggest wrinkles in the Shakespeares' family cloth get ironed out, they all come together in love and joy over Judith's marriage and pregnancy, just like in one of William's late romances. Or at least by the time the film comes near the end, we are so affected by the verisimilitude of all the acting that we truly hope that this unique family had a reconciliation as this. Not long after William spends the night outside and comes down with some ague, William's girls have a surprise for him: Susanna taught her mother how to read and write, and they dig up the old town marriage register so she can pen her own signature after all these years. After he compliments his wife on her penmanship, William gifts Judith a penknife so she can start to learn as well. He goes to quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in an improvised moment that remained on screen, Judi completes the passage, since apparently Ken kept cocking it up IRL.
It's a simple, lovely moment, framing perfectly how much Judi has been by Ken's side throughout his career, always willing to join the fun. Ultimately, it's a testament in microcosm to the sense of camaraderie evident within every collaborator he has ever managed to round up for his projects for decades. It has always been an inspiration to watch this pseudo-repertoire troupe mount movie after movie about our favorite playwright.
Sir Ken really brought it this time. He always brings it, but damn did it hit hard. It always bemuses me how some people still roll their eyes at anything Branagh does, writing it off as egotistical or hammy, while in the same breath admitting that his enthusiasm for his work is infectious and affecting. Some critics have and will regard this film as a foppish piece of Olivier-style acting and bare-faced Bardolotry, and I entirely pity them. Sure, I have my finger on the scale of my own opinion, but if my fangirlish tendency has taught me anything as I’ve grown older, it’s that you would have to be a vinegary bastard indeed not to recognise the value of genuine enthusiasm in quality artistic expression. Cynicism is cheap and so often used as a shield against frippery and chicanery that we forget to set it aside when faced with true emotion in this fucking world.
There are greater sins than celebrating Sir Ken’s earnestness. He’s not the absolute greatest filmmaker or actor on the planet—there are no absolutes in art—but he’s one of the most respectable and respected due to his natural talent, generosity as a director, and sheer work ethic. After a dumpster fire of a year like this one, and reading Shakespeare every day, play by play, scene by scene, I felt every moment in this film. I picked up every Shakespearean breadcrumb and in-joke and it was delightful. It was a respite from the mind- and heart-numbing time sucks that compete to fill our quarantined lives now. It served as my reminder that to be earnest is to believe there is something in humanity that makes our existence worthwhile. To love Shakespeare’s work is to be earnest. Sir Ken and his friends remind us all that despite the suffering of human existence, there is beauty to enjoy—art that raises our experience above mere survival—and it is of our own making.
There’s a sweet sorrow that grows within me every day that I progress toward the end of my Shakespeare project. Like David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in his moment of transforming into Eleven, I don’t want to go. I adore Shakespeare, but God knows he is not my only passion. My deep appreciation is at odds with my impulse to expand my intellectual pursuits. The final scene in this film where everyone takes turns reciting that touching elegy from Cymbeline was a lightbulb moment for me. I realized that I have yet one more thing to thank Sir Ken & Co. for in my moment of panic: reassurance. The leisurely, elegiac tone of All Is True feels like a farewell, but it taught me that actually, we're always just saying au revoir to Shakespeare. Until the seeing again.
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