For all Kenneth Branagh's cinematic achievements -- feel as we may about them -- All is True is far and wide the most impressive to me. As director, here he exhibits the closest he has come to an arthouse film, and its understated but passionate sincerity is the most controlled and restrained he has ever been. I admire him for that, and of course for bringing Judi Dench and Ian McKellan along for the ride.
After the Globe burns to the ground, William Shakespeare (Branagh) leaves the London theatrical scene and returns to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Memories of his career haunt him as he attempts to reconnect with his family, his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench) and daughter he had all but estranged years prior. He actively mourns the death of his son Hamnet some twenty years previously, a death his family has processed and moved on from. Though he may claim to desire uniting his family, his obsession with death and his depression over arrogance and genius wasted serve more to tear what filial connections he has asunder.
True or not is the sort of winking charm of this film. The oft-repeated titular phrase seems to genuinely want the plot here to ring true, though almost nothing is known or even suspected of the Bard's retirement. Rather the film strings together what amounts to fanfiction of the highest order, combining melodrama and costume drama and some nice meditations on Shakespeare's work. Case in point: an unbelievably delicious scene in which the aging Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellan), pays his friend and idol a visit, and the two sit before a fire musing on the value of the latter's sonnets, which they make clear were written about Wriothesley. While they do not speak of that love that dare not speak its name, the subtext is only too clear and heartbreaking.
It's all great fun for any Shakespeare fan or English major, but I can't imagine it's terribly accessible (much less entertaining) for anyone else. There are lots of tidbits of interest, especially for those of us highly suspect of the popular conception of Shakespeare's supposed life, but the film is generally a sweet and melancholy view of the artist as an old man piecing together the ruins of his life. The breakout performance belongs not to Branagh, though, fascinating as he may look under the heavy makeup, but rather to the actor playing his daughter, Kathryn Wilder. Ultimately, even with her powerhouse performance under the titans sharing her screen time, the film is the kind of thing I would pair with Roland Emmerich's magnificent Anonymous in class I'd teach on Shakespeare. A lot of fun, terribly interesting, gorgeous to behold, and fabulously conspiratorial.
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