With some movies, it’s best not to allow worries over historical accuracy to derail our enjoyment. And there’s plenty to enjoy in “All Is True,” Kenneth Branagh’s fondly poignant look at William Shakespeare’s final years. Not much is known about that time, after the playwright’s beloved Globe Theatre burned to the ground in 1613 and he returned to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s not a peaceful retirement. Reconnecting with his neglected wife (Judi Dench, brilliantly huffy) and two variously troubled daughters (Kathryn Wilder and Lydia Wilson) is challenging, to say the least. But if Ben Elton’s screenplay benefits from dramatic imaginings and factual fudging, I’m content that Branagh — who stars as well as directs and whose devotion to Shakespeare is inarguable — be the one to approve them. The result is more country soap than biopic, a slow and soothing tale of family secrets and festering resentments. A little soppy and a tad dull — Will putters constantly in the garden, mourning the long-ago death of his young son — the movie is so sedately paced that Branagh’s distracting prosthetic nose can seem to enter scenes well before the rest of him.<doc-sep>Sir Kenneth Branagh has spent a major part of his career interpreting the works of William Shakespeare. His 1989 breakthrough in film featured Branagh as the star and director of Henry V (he won Oscar nominations for both jobs). So it only seems fair that Branagh should be the one to play the Bard in All Is True, directing a mesmerizing meditation on the last days of the greatest writer in the English language. Such a grandiose statement may lead you to fear that Branagh and screenwriter Ben Elton mean to inflate their film into a bloated, and-then-I-wrote biopic. Nothing of the sort. Little is known for sure about the details of Shakespeare’s life. But as Shakespeare says in the film, “I never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Neither does Branagh. The concept here is that the artist whose plays had the largest scope is now leading the smallest life. As All is True begins, in 1613, Shakespeare has returned to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to retire after years of prodigious productivity. The catalyst is the fire that destroyed the Globe Theater, where Shakespeare’s plays were regularly performed. A spark from a stage cannon during a performance of All Is True, the original title of Henry VIII, reduced the Globe to ashes. So now Will, as his family calls him, is done with it all. He’s no good at gardening, but gardening is what he’ll do. That and reconcile with the family he neglected for all these years. His wife Anne Hathaway (Dame Judi Dench), eight years his senior, treats him like a guest in his own house. His daughters harbor festering resentments. Susanna (Lydia Wilson), who is publicly denounced as a whore by Puritan society for cheating on her husband (Hadley Fraser), keeps her distance. And the unmarried Judith (Kathryn Wilder) believes her father holds a grudge against her for surviving her twin brother Hamnet, Shakespeare’s beloved only son, who died at 11, possibly from plague. Scholars have speculated about the connection between Hamnet to Hamlet, but Branagh’s film isn’t having it. Yet the ghost of his beloved boy is everywhere in Will’s thoughts and waking dreams. It’s a telling irony that the women in Shakespeare’s time were never taught to read and write. Yet Dench, in a magisterial performance that never misses a trick, makes Anne a woman you trifle with at your peril. The closest All Is True comes to romance is Will’s relationship with his patron, the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), believed to be the inspiration for several of Will’s most famous poems and sonnets. A conversation between the two men, wittily and movingly acted by Branagh and McKellan, is a high point in a film that cinematographer Zac Nicholson bathes in the autumnal light of time remembered. Those expecting All Is True to replicate the romp of 1998’s Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love are at the wrong movie. And Branagh is even less interested in a fawning tribute. Though screenwriter Ben Elton is best known for the farcical zest of his TV sitcom work on Blackadder and Upstart Crow — a teasing kick at the young Bard — All Is True looks with gentle humor and stirring gravity at a lion in winter, who died in 1616 at 52, at home but hardly at peace. Branagh, who directed five other Shakespeare film adaptations — including Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing — and appeared in countless more on stage and screen, clearly holds All Is True close to his heart. Modeling his appearance on the best known painting of Shakespeare with an elongated nose accented by long hair on the sides and practically none on top, Branagh is the Bard incarnate. But his real achievement lies in capturing the internal life of an aging genius who claims that he’s so lived so long in fictional worlds of his own imagining that he’s “lost sight of what is real.” Branagh’s performance is a triumph of ferocity and feeling that shuns Shakespeare the literary rock star to find the flawed, touchingly human man inside.<doc-sep>
All Is True (2019 movie) Close this dialog window Streaming Options When it comes to Shakespeare movies, you at least know you’re in good hands with Kenneth Branagh. In All Is True, the British actor and director does double duty in front of and behind the camera, speculating about the Bard’s bittersweet final years. And even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love. Written by Ben Elton, who acted alongside Branagh in 1993’s screen adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, the film begins in 1613, shortly after the playwright’s beloved Globe Theatre burned to the ground. Afterward, he’d never write another play again. It’s as if something inside of him was snuffed out along with the Globe. Instead, Shakespeare returned to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he lived out his retirement alongside his estranged wife (a winningly crabby Judi Dench) and his two daughters. A son named Hamnet, who died years earlier at age 11, is an additional presence – mostly as a source of Shakespeare’s ghostly, late-life regrets as an absentee father. He’s a stranger in his own home, mourning a son he never truly knew. With an unconvincing putty nose and a pointy beard only slightly less distracting than the mustache he recently sported as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh putters around in the garden and receives admiring visitors, such an Ian McKellen’s rascally Earl of Southampton (the liveliest scene in this too-tame film). Meanwhile, greedy ulterior motives, infidelity scandals, and years of repressed family secrets keep spilling out, robbing Shakespeare of the peace he seems to yearn for. While it may be hard to buy that the Bard’s final years were packed with as much Downton Abbey-style soap opera intrigue as the film suggests, Branagh’s easy-on-the-eyes (and the ears) drama still offers enough small, detail-rich pleasures to make it worth checking out. B Close this dialog window Streaming Options Related content: