Watching: All Is True

[white_hart]

You can say one thing for Kenneth Branagh, and that's that he makes very beautiful films. I thought that about his otherwise rather pointless Murder on the Orient Express, which had lots of gorgeous snowy landscapes and long vistas and one stunning scene clearly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and his latest film, All Is True, is similarly chock-full of lovingly-filmed (or possibly lovingly-CGIed) landscapes, beautiful old buildings and lots and lots of foliage; it really is a delight to look at.

The gorgeous visuals go a long way to make up for what is otherwise really quite a slight film about an ageing Shakespeare returning to Stratford-upon-Avon after the Globe Theatre burnt down in 1613, becoming reacquainted with the family he had neglected for so long and finally mourning the death of his son Hamnet in 1596. There are some great performances - Judi Dench predictably wonderful as Anne Hathaway, Kathryn Wilder excellent as Shakespeare's bitter, resentful elder daughter Judith (a Judith Shakespeare who I thought owed at least as much to Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare of the generation before as she did to Shakespeare's historical daughter), and Ian McKellan putting in a stunning cameo as the Earl of Southampton, tarnished golden curls framing an ageing face and giving a hint of the beauty of the young man who was immortalised in Shakespeare's sonnets - but Ben Elton's script seems to be trying so hard not to slip into being Upstart Crow by mistake that it's sometimes a bit po-faced, and the best moments are when Shakespeare is allowed to use his own words instead (the moment where Shakespeare recites Sonnet 29 to Southampton, who mirrors it back to him with subtly changed emphasis, was probably the high point of the film, as well as obviously being a shipper's delight).

It's not dreadful, and was an enjoyable enough way to pass a couple of hours on a February evening, but this was the seventh biopic we've seen so far in 2019: The Year of Biopics and was definitely the least good.

Next week, in a shocking twist of events, we get to see a film that isn't a biopic! (If Beale Street Could Talk.)

Comments

[alithea]

Ah, I saw the trailer and was tempted but that sounds like a firmly Sunday evening on the TV film. I'll be interested to hear about 'If Beale Street Could Talk' though.

[white_hart]

There are advantages to seeing it on a big screen because you get the full impact of just how pretty it is, but I was expecting it to be a lot more fun than it actually was.

[nineveh_uk]

So I'll definitely cross that one off the list to see with my parents this weekend! Beale Street looks really good and Dad is very keen, but the times aren't great for fitting in with other things so I suspect we'll see that on another occasion (not least because my parents can go to the cinema at home for half the price here).

[white_hart]

It was fine in a "we've seen a film every week this year so far and would like to carry on as long as we can" kind of way (and the alternative was Green Book, which the reviews made me a bit chary of), but I wouldn't recommend making a special trip to see it.