All Is True is Kenneth Branagh’s biopic of Shakespeare’s last years and All Is Not Very True, apparently, which we could live with, but All Is Not Very Interesting either, which is harder to endure, particularly at the midway point when you feel a nice doze coming on. I don’t get it. I mean, if you are going to conjecture, why not conjecture inventively as they did, say, with Shakespeare in Love? If you’re going to soar freely into the realm of imaginings, soar high! But this is leaden, lifeless, sentimental and afflicted by too many sub-plots that just don’t go anywhere. Also, if this portrait of the greatest writer of any age were to be believed, he was a walking cliché. As well as a bit of a moron.
Written by Ben Elton, who also writes the Shakespeare TV sitcom Upstart Crow, this is directed by Branagh, who stars as the Bard, wearing a prosthetic nose that may be even more distracting than Margot Robbie’s in Mary Queen of Scots, which is saying something. It opens in 1613, with the Globe Theatre in London burning down after which, we are told, Shakespeare never wrote another play. (Untrue, apparently, but we’ll not worry about historical veracity from here on in, particularly as it’s the least of this film’s problems.)
He returns to his family in Stratford-upon-Avon. Here, he has his wife, Anne Hathaway, played by Judi Dench. Hathaway was eight years Shakespeare’s senior while Dench is 26 years Branagh’s senior. I am all for age-blind casting, but you can’t not notice, I’m afraid. Meanwhile, she serves as Chief Home Truth-Teller, repeatedly informing her husband how he has neglected his family down the years, which always brings tears to his eyes while a piano tinkles away on the soundtrack.
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