Review: All Is True

All Is True (12A)
UK 2018 101 mins  Dir: Kenneth Branagh  Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson

It’s Shakespeare’s alternative title for Henry VIII, in case you’re wondering, and not a further provocation to historians still smarting over Mary Queen of Scots. What is perhaps surprising is just how much of Ben Elton’s script actually is true – according, that is, to the Bard boffins, to whose scholarship we must defer. Indeed, it seems the main factual errors are those mandatory #MeToo ones which must now be imposed on all historical dramas. In this instance, Shakespeare’s illiterate younger daughter Judith (Wilder) is re-purposed unconvincingly as a proto-feminist and mouthpiece for modern gender politics, railing against how she is “destined to become the property of another man”.

It’s the summer of 1613. The Globe has just been razed to the ground by a misfiring cannon and old Bill (Branagh) has scuttled home to Stratford to spend more time with his garden and scandal-prone family. In particular, he’s haunted by visions of his late son Hamnet, whom he barely knew, such was his devotion to the theatre during the preceding couple of decades. So can our boy learn to be a better hubby and dad, in the style of a gazillion lame and sappy Tinseltown dramedys? He’s got his work cut out. Mrs Bard, Anne Hathaway (Dench, essaying an accent that seems to stray south to Wurzel country on occasion), has got the hump – as well she might given the suggestion that he swings both ways. Mouthy, resentful Judith is the late Hamnet’s twin who’s convinced her father would rather she’d died than the lad he imagines to have been possessed of great talent. Her troubled older sibling Susanna is married to a ghastly puritan and carrying on with another man who’s about to give her the pox. All this in a backwater where you can be fined for not turning up to church. To cap it all, thief’s son Bill is anxious about his social status, despite his manifold achievements.

Ken Branagh’s small-scale, twilight years biopic is an oddly soapy domestic drama with an A-list cast. Although the film is attractively shot using authentic natural light, Upstart Crow creator Ben Elton gives Bill plenty of oddly anachronistic dialogue. Would he really have used the teary-eyed movie trailer line, “I’ve lived so long in imaginary worlds, I think I’ve lost sight of what is real”? Or anticipate Mark Twain by a couple of centuries by remarking, “I’ve never let the truth get in the way of a good story”? (After this, you half expect him to pop up again after the end credits to say, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.) Building on his tonsorial extravagance in Murder on the Orient Express with a hairdo, whiskers and stick-on snout that make him look more like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull circa 1976 than the image we have of the Bard, Branagh can’t really do much about the jarring age difference between himself and Judi Dench. Sure, Anne Hathaway was older than Shakespeare, but not the best part of three decades older.

There is, to be fair, one absolutely terrific scene that crackles with creative energy. We have to wait 40 minutes for Ian McKellen to turn up, and he seems determined to out-wig the director as the Bard’s condescending, aristocratic patron. But what follows proves well worth the wait with a beautifully written and played exchange between these Shakespeare veterans in which McKellen’s Earl of Southampton mocks the submissive Bard for living “a small life” and lures him into making a romantic declaration, which is airily rebuffed by turning his own sonnet back on him. This alone makes All Is True almost worth the price of admission.