All Is True (2019) - Movie Review

After spending most of this decade adding his approach to period fidelity to a wide range of other literary adaptations, from the Arthurian tinges of Thor to the whodunit conservatism of Murder On The OrientExpress, filmmaker and thespian Kenneth Branagh has returned to his Shakespearean roots to direct and lead a production all about the man himself. Specifically, a story covering the last three years of the Bard’s life, from the destruction of the Globe Theatre to his untimely death.

Death itself is at the core of the film’s punchiest emotional moments, as it depicts Shakespeare in a period of delayed mourning for his son Hamnet, finding the now-retired writer coming to terms with the mortality of those around him. He spent so long fixating on his career as one of Britain’s greatest dramatists that he wound up neglecting his own family, even missing the initial burial of his son, and most if not all of his contemporaries had already met their end. For a man who once found inhuman ease in articulating man’s ultimate fate, he finds himself struggling to come to grips with what has happened.

After what happened last time we touched on Ben Elton’s scripting with Three Summers, this film almost makes me angry because the dialogue is positively sparkling. Whether it’s touching on the inevitability of death, the Bard’s lost relationship with the Earl of Southampton, or just reiterating the need for entertainers like Shakespeare, it carries sentiment with a suitable balance of sharpness and poetic phrasing. And as spoken by the actors, with the larger players all having their own experience with the prose of the main subject, it is truly stunning to watch unfold.

Branagh hasn’t been able to dissolve himself within a character like this in quite a long time, imbuing the Bard with the right amount of world-weariness and regret to make his final arc that much more enthralling. Judi Dench gives a nice and understated performance as his wife, wearing a lot of the neglect on her sleeves while giving her hushed words a heaviness that bring a lot out of the film’s more revelatory scenes. Ian McKellen as the Earl, while mostly relegated to a single scene of conversation, ends up adding a lot to the undercurrent queerness of the Shakespeare canon, giving it legitimacy and emotion in a way few other actors still alive could manage.

Then there’s Kathryn Wilder as William’s daughter Judith, and here’s where the film ends up throwing one hell of a left hook in its storytelling. Specifically, because her own character arc ends up involving an authorship question. No, not the authorship question, AKA the prevailing conspiracy theory that Shakespeare didn’t write his own works, but an authorship question. One of the key aspects of Shakespeare’s mourning on-screen is how his connection to his son, as strained as it wound up becoming, is largely out of William seeing a lot of himself in his kin. Including his way with words, making him posthumously attached to his son out of artistic merit more than anything else. An attachment that ends up being cut once Judith reveals who was really behind the writings he holds so dear, and what truly became of the one he believed to have written them.

Along with depicting Shakespeare at a particularly tragic time in his life, the film also delves into elements of the culture around him, like the influence of Puritans in his home town, the reluctance to teach women how to read and write the same as men, and ultimately how limited life prospects were for the ‘fairer sex’. Reflecting on Shakespeare’s own artistic history, between regularly staging men in drag to play female parts in his plays and how, during the film’s time frame, women playing female parts has become more accepted, it wields just enough retrospective insight to further the elements of queer in the story of Shakespeare himself, along with adding texture to just how strained his familial relationships have become. He is surrounded by women, and yet he finds himself fixating on the only other male who is no longer with them.

And just in case the text isn’t enough to sell this whole thing, the film looks terrific too. The approach to period detail and costuming makes for a quite vibrant visage, the recurring scenes of Shakespeare tending to his garden give a good homeliness and natural beauty to the story of a man nearing his end, and the framing… it is genuinely strange how striking it can get at times. For the most part, there’s plenty of natural lighting, but when the script takes the characters inside after-dark, it generates some of the most striking visuals I’ve seen all year.

Conversations in the family living room, along with the scene between William and the Earl, are light solely by candles, lanterns and fireplaces. Rather than spreading throughout the room, they become small, burning oases against the vast pockets of void in the rest of the frame. All used as backdrop against William conversing with the dearest people in his life, his own little oases against the cloud of death that continues to haunt him.

Beyond just being a welcome return to form for Kenneth Branagh as a thespian filmmaker, and a very pleasant surprise from Ben Elton as a writer, this is an incredibly potent offering, musing on death, art and the importance of family, all wrapped around the life and works of one of humanity’s greatest writers. And with its commentary on contemporaneous gender roles and even a dip into more LGBT material, it manages to articulate a lot of emotional truth on top of doing justice to the legacy of a man who could do that articulating better than anyone.