Mark Reviews Movies: ALL IS TRUE

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2019

William Shakespeare has become more an idea than a person. All Is True doesn't quite bring the greatest playwright in history back down to earth, even though it tries—in a very literal sense—to do so. The film comes close, though—close enough that it works as a character study of one of history's most significant figures.

Here is a Shakespeare in retirement. He has written what officially would be his last play, and during a 1613 performance of Henry VIII, the Globe Theatre, which the playwright partially owned and helped bring to prominence, would burn to the ground, thanks to a defective prop cannon. As far as any historians can tell, Shakespeare left London for his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born—the son of a glove-maker-turned-criminal and a farmer's daughter—and, three years later, would die—regarded as, at least, the most financially and artistically successful contemporary playwright or, at best, already the greatest to ever dramatize the human condition.

There's a lot of celebration for Shakespeare here. That is, one supposes, to be expected—not only because of the fact of his oeuvre, but also because the film was directed Kenneth Branagh, one of the great translators of the Bard's work for the screen.

The director also plays the retired playwright, under a prosthetic nose and a bald cap-wig combination that makes him look pretty close to the famous portrait that adorns almost every printed collection of the writer's work. If any presently working actor has earned the right to play Shakespeare, it would have to be Branagh, who has honored and smartly toyed with the plays, while making them more accessible to a wider audience, more than almost any other filmmaker. With this performance, he makes the man behind the words just a little more accessible.

The screenplay was written by Ben Elton, who cleverly turns Shakespeare's homecoming into the broad outline of one of the playwright's dramas (minus the iambic pentameter and explanatory soliloquies). Since there isn't much by way of recorded history for Shakespeare's final years, this option seems like the right one—especially because so much of this story is about the relationship between the truth, the fictions these characters believe, and the ones that they tell themselves and others to avoid the truth.

There are many scenes of familial disagreement and turmoil. There is a sense of the politics of the day, as well as an open challenge to them by overt and covert means. Characters have long-held secrets, which could change the very lives of others, and there's even a ghost in the form of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 under unknown circumstances.

Much of the drama has to do with Hamnet's death. Upon returning to Stratford, Shakespeare decides to plant a garden (hence, literally trying to bring him down to earth) in his son's memory, since he has never properly mourned the boy. By the time word reached the father in London, the son already had been buried. Shakespeare spent most of his life in the city. On occasion, he would visit home, where his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench) and their surviving daughters, Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder), never really had a chance to know the man.

Now, the four, along with Susanna's Puritan husband John Hall (Hadley Fraser) and the couple's daughter, live together on Shakespeare's considerable estate. There's tension amongst them—unspoken by most but definitely spoken by Judith, who feels the pressure to marry and provide her father with a male heir. Anne sleeps in a separate bedroom from her husband, and while the playwright dithers in the garden and wallows in grief, his family's honor and legacy come under attack multiple times.

The attacks are religious and, because of the nature of religion in this time and place, political, as Susanna is (rightly) accused of having an affair, leading to a slander trial against her accuser. Judith's own love life becomes a scandal, when it's discovered that her soon-to-be husband Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), who sells wine (Shakespeare jokes about the oddity his family has become—one son in law who runs a wine shop and another who wants to close it), has impregnated another woman.

All of this provides some heightened drama, as well as a view of the more liberal attitude of the playwright and his immediate family. Most of the film, though, is reserved and mournful—that mood escalated by cinematographer Zac Nicholson's natural lighting, with candles highlighting faces against pitch-black interiors.

When Shakespeare receives visitors from his past, he's constantly reminded that most of his contemporaries have died young and/or unknown. Henry Wriothesley (Ian McKellen), a nobleman who commissioned Shakespeare to write him sonnets, comes calling, and the two men recite one of those poems: Shakespeare with the personal longing of a man still in love and Henry with the distanced admiration of an elegant piece of writing.

The central idea, though, is confusion over the reality of Hamnet. Shakespeare is convinced his son was a promising writer, only to have the dream taken away by the truth of the matter. In seeing the depth of the playwright's grief, we can gather an understanding of how Shakespeare, despite his circumstances and any personal experience of the wider world, could write with such authority. In accepting the truth, we see how much his career interfered with a life and an understanding of those close to him that could have been.

In dramatizing the writer's final years, All Is True gives us a sturdier appreciation for the man's work and a new understanding of the fraught relationships he likely would have had to reconcile. It's a fine—handsome and intelligent—piece of speculative fiction.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray