All Is True (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 101 minutes

PG-13

Director/star Kenneth Branagh makes movies that highlight Kenneth Branagh. His remake of Murder on the Orient Express (2017) was almost without question the worst film ever made of an Agatha Christie novel lowlighted by Branagh’s performance as Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, and the film was deadly dull.

But Branagh has outdone himself with this horribly misguided tale of William Shakespeare’s return to Stratford after he gave up acting (and some say writing) in London.

I say “some say” because I had always been a champion of the idea that Shakespeare did write the plays attributed to him. But that was before I read the extremely well-documented book, “The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality” by Charlton Ogburn that sets forth chapter and verse of why Ogburn (and lots of others) believe that Edward DeVere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, really wrote most of what is credited to Shakespeare.  I’m not alone. In addition to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman who both believed this, Orson Welles once said, “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t, there are some awful funny coincidences to explain away.”

Conterbalancing the Oxford argument is the fact that DeVere died in 1604 and several of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, like “King Lear” and “Macbeth” are thought to have been first performed in 1606 and “The Tempest” is thought to have been first performed in 1610-11. However, the key words there are “is thought,” because they could have been written and performed for the Queen long before that and not performed publicly until those years or they could have been performed publicly earlier, too. But, who knows? Ogburn makes a good case.

There is an amazingly almost total lack of written evidence about Shakespeare, considering that he is supposed to have been the greatest writer of his time. As Sarah Pruitt, a writer for History.com, wrote in 2015, “…actual documentation of his life is pitifully scarce: little more than several signatures, records of his marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of their children, a three-page will and some business papers unrelated to writing.”

This film is total speculation about the last three years of Shakespeare’s life, after he returned to Stratford to live with Anne (Judi Dench) and one unmarried daughter, Judith (Kathryn Wilder, in the best performance in the movie, totally outshining Branagh’s typical overacting). The other daughter, Susanna (Lydia Wilson), is married and doesn’t live with her mother but she’s close by.

Branagh and writer Ben Elton make up a story about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (Sam Ellis), who died in 1596. In fact, everything in this film is totally made up, belying its title, “All is True.” What’s true is that very little in this film is true. They even make up a story that makes Shakespeare’s devising to Anne in his will his “second best bed” appear to be thoughtful and sweet.

So if you believe as I do that Oxford was the true writer and William Shakespeare a sham, this movie is difficult to stomach. Even if you believe that William Shakespeare really did write all the plays attributed to him, its greatest fault as an entertainment is that it is unremittingly boring and uninvolving.