POP FICTION

Aging Shakespeare vs self-delusion in tender, wistful All Is True

With summer (finally, almost) here, regional Shakespeare festivals, including our own Santa Cruz Shakespeare, are ramping up for their summer seasons. What better time to launch a movie about Shakespeare himself, reflecting on art, love, family, and reputation, at the end of his life?

That movie would be All Is True. The sardonic title refers to the act of adapting historical fact into fiction (we're told it was the original title of the playwright's Henry VIII), as well as to the little equivocations and outright falsehoods we cling to in the act of getting through our daily lives.

Written by Ben Elton (longtime scriptwriter on the Black Adder TV series), All Is True is produced and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars as Will Shakespeare. These guys know their Bard, and they've come up with a wonderful homage — witty, atmospheric, at times heartbreaking — to both the towering genius of myth and the oh-so-fallible man within, trying to separate fact from fiction in the story of his own life.

Branagh, Dench: well-met by candlelight

When his Globe Theatre burns down in London, Will Shakespeare (Branagh) returns to Stratford-on-Avon, and the family he's scarcely seen in twenty years. His homecoming is not exactly triumphant. Obedient, but long-neglected wife, Anne (the ever-formidable Judi Dench), puts him in the guest bedroom. Lively daughter, Susannah (Lydia Wilson), is happy to see him, but unhappily wed to a theatre-hating Puritan.

Touchier still is Will's relationship to his spinster daughter, Judith (Kathryn Wilder), twin sister to the couple's only son, Hamnet, who died years earlier at the age of 11.

The themes are a bit darker than you might expect from the lighthearted trailer, although the story is handled with plenty of dry humor.

McKellan in close-up: All-terrain

Then into the midst of it all rides dear old Ian McKellan as the visiting Earl of Southampton, patron of Will's theatre company (and reputed to have once been the object of the poet's romantic sonnets).

In a private fireside chat with Will, where they discuss past glories and future legacies, both Branagh and McKellan have a go at the "Fortune and men's' eyes" sonnet. Each man’s delivery of the lines is completely different from the other, and yet equally captivating and powerful.

In an act of extreme generosity, director Branagh shoots in close-up on McKellan's expressive face, the all-terrain roadmap of McKellan's eyes; the tart and wistful working of his mouth. If they gave Judi Dench and Oscar for ten minutes of screen time in Shakespeare In Love, McKellan deserves at least knighthood — wait, he's already a knight; sainthood, maybe? — for this one delicious scene.
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