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Kenneth Branagh plays the Bard himself in this engrossing, and rather moving, biography |
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Cast: Kenneth Branagh (William Shakespeare), Judi Dench
(Anne Hathaway), Ian McKellen (Earl of Southampton), Kathryn Wilder (Judith
Shakespeare), Lydia Wilson (Susannah Shakespeare), Hadley Fraser (John Hall),
Jack Colgrave Hirst (Tom Quiney), Gerard Horan (Ben Jonson)
There are few actors alive associated as much with
Shakespeare as Kenneth Branagh. So it was probably only a matter of time before
he played the man himself. Returning to smaller, more intimate projects after
some colossal Hollywood epics, Branagh’s film is a beautifully shot, gentle and
elegiac drama about loss and family life.
After the burning down of the Globe Theatre in June 1613
during a production of Shakespeare’s final play Henry VIII (otherwise known as All
is True), William Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) returns home to
Stratford-upon-Avon. There he must confront long-existing tensions with his wife
Anne (Judi Dench) and daughters Judith (Kathryn Wilder) and Susannah (Lydia
Wilson), and face the raw grief of the loss of his son Hamnet 18 years ago.
The script is intelligent and well thought out by Ben Elton,
weaving a bit of fiction and sensitive theorising between the lines of what we
know about Shakespeare’s final days. It makes for something that I will admit
is not always awash with pace or events, but does have a quiet, magnetic
emotional force that eventually casts a sort of spell.
It’s a film that gently explores the dynamics and tensions
of family, and the all-pervading power of grief and how it can colour the
relations between those left behind. Made worse of course by the patriarch of
this family having effectively lived on another planet for the last 30 years, coming
back so rarely from London that he now hardly knows the people he left behind (a
sense of isolation that several skilful shots at the start establish).
Especially when that patriarch is a genius, who is out of place and uncertain
about where he lies in relation to the family. Nearing the end of his career,
Shakespeare wants to know what it has been for and who will inherit whatever
legacy he has left.
And that is particularly complex in the sense that he has no
son to continue the family name, and no-one in his family (most of whom are
illiterate) who can continue his artistic legacy. In death, young Hamnet has
been sanctified by Shakespeare, made into a young proto-genius, a perfect son
who was has set to continue his legacy. It’s blinded him to the qualities or
depths of his other children, and powered an obsession in many of his later
works with the loss of children. While the rest of the family have learned to
set Hamnet aside, Shakespeare still mourns him as if he died yesterday – griefs
that seem as tied in with the lack of future he sees ahead for his heirless
family.
So we get a series of heart-felt and universal vignettes as
Shakespeare channels his loss into building a garden for Hamnet, and is
eventually forced into confronting deep-rooted truths about himself and his
family. The film is punctuated with his speaking to the ghost of his lost son,
but he seems as unable to understand him still as he is to understand his
family. His conversations with them are based around lost memories, faded past
and a total inability to see the people they have become. He seems equally lost
in the petty dynamics of the town, so alien to him from the larger concerns of
London.
Much of this works so well as the film is so beautifully
played by an exceptionally assembled cast. Branagh leads the film superbly with
a restrained, quiet, contemplative performance with elements of comedy in among
the sensitive touches. The make-up job takes a few beats to get used to, but
once you are past that, the film focuses in on “the truth” below the surface
with Shakespeare. Branagh gives Shakespeare a rich, sad inner life, a life that
faces two traumas – the loss of the theatre he built, leading on to finally
confronting the truths behind the loss of his son and the damage it has caused
his family. Proud, intelligent, sensitive but also blind to so much, Branagh’s
Shakespeare is an exquisite performance of great intellect, married to very
everyday concerns.
It’s a balance that is explored in one of the film’s finest scenes,
in which Shakespeare meets with the Earl of Southampton, played with scene-stealing
charisma by Ian McKellen. Southampton for his part questions the Bard’s
obsession with such middle-class concerns as status and money (from his
comfortable position of being loaded) and clearly understands the greatness of
Shakespeare in the way no one else really can. Shakespeare can’t feel in the
same way that he has led a small life, and the film clearly addresses head-on
his own sexual attraction to Southampton, present from the start in his giddy
excitement at the Earl’s arrival. Southampton, aged, seems surprised and almost
touched by Shakespeare’s continued love – gently turning him down. It’s part of
the complex interior world that film explores around the poet – a man obsessed
with social position and concerns of others, who was still willing to express
his love for another man.
The film draws superb performances from the rest of the cast
as well, with Judi Dench extremely good as the sensible, dedicated,
long-suffering Anne. Kathryn Wilder is superb as Shakespeare’s overlooked
daughter Judith with Lydia Wilson also fine as the more conventional Susannah.
The rest of the cast are equally strong.
The film is beautifully shot, with the interiors lit with
candles and the outside shots showing a marvellous inspiration from paintings
that mount the film with a handsome beauty. While the film is not always
blessed with pace, and has a feel at time of a sort of heritage-laced Bergman
film, it carries without a certain emotional force that really ends up
delivering a tender picture of difficult family dynamics and a man who has
spent his life telling stories beginning to understand the story of his own
life. Directed with a real measured passion from Branagh, and very well acted,
there is a richness and depth to this that makes it one of Branagh’s finest
films.
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