Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)

 

Cast: Jude Hill, Catríona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench, Ciarán Hinds, Lewis McAskie, Lara McDonnell, Colin Morgan, Michael Maloney. Screenplay: Kenneth Branagh. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Production design: Jim Clay. Film editing: Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. Music: Van Morrison. 

Viewing terrible times from the point of view of a child is a familiar movie trope: In 1987, for example John Boorman did it in Hope and Glory and Steven Spielberg in Empire of the Sun. And Kenneth Branagh did it quite well in the semi-autobiographical Belfast, set in the titular city during 1969, the year when his family decided to emigrate to England to escape the bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Branagh has been a middling director of films except for his Shakespeare outings, particularly his Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993) – I’d also include his Hamlet (1996), but it’s a little too gimmicky with its cameo roles for actors like Billy Crystal, Charlton Heston, and Robin Williams. Belfast, however, is a heartfelt personal project, which is its greatest strength but also – in a certain lack of distance and sentimentality in the storytelling – its chief weakness. The standout performances come from Catríona Balfe as the mother, whose grit and determination are finally undermined by the rioting, and Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as the grandparents. For once, Dench is not cast as a crusty old dame in the mode of her Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria, but rather as a sweet and slightly dotty old woman devoted to her husband, played also somewhat against type by Hinds. The whole thing is set to a score and songs by Van Morrison, another move in the film’s favor. Solid, somewhat old-fashioned moviemaking. 

All Is True (Kenneth Branagh, 2018)

Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in All Is True

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson, Hadley Fraser, Jack Colgrave Hirst, Sam Ellis, Clara Duczmal, Alex Macqueen, Gerard Horan, Nonso Anozie. Screenplay: Ben Elton. Cinematography: Zac Nicholson. Production design: James Merifield. Film editing: Úna Ní Donghaíle. Music: Patrick Doyle.

Not much of All Is True is true; most of it is extrapolated from the scraps of documentation we possess about the life of William Shakespeare and turned by screenwriter Ben Elton into a domestic drama about the playwright's last years. It might have been called Shakespeare in Retirement. In Elton's imagining, Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh hidden beneath a prosthetic nose and forehead) has left London after the Globe burns down during a performance of Henry VIII, which was also known as All Is True. He goes home to Stratford to mourn his son Hamnet, who had died many years earlier, and to plant a garden in his memory. Reunited with his wife, Anne (Judi Dench) and his daughters Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder), he is plunged into various family difficulties. Susanna's husband, John Hall (Hadley Fraser), is a stern Puritan who, as Shakespeare says, would like to close the theaters from which the poet made his fortune. In fact, Susanna may be cheating on her husband and have contracted syphilis, as a scene in which she orders mercury -- then a treatment for the disease -- implies. Judith is a sulky 28-year-old self-declared "spinster," who resents her father for his preference for her dead brother. Eventually she marries Thomas Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), only to find out that he has impregnated another woman, whereupon Shakespeare strikes Quiney from the will in which he has also left Anne the "second-best bed." (A real Shakespeare conundrum that gets a sly explication in the film.) It turns out that Shakespeare thought Hamnet to have inherited his gifts on the basis of some poems the boy supposedly wrote, when in fact Judith was the author of the poems. And though Hamnet was said to have died of the plague, the truth comes out that he committed suicide when Judith threatened to expose her authorship. The preposterous melodramatics of the screenplay and the plodding direction by Branagh fatally undermine the film, which has occasional good moments. There's a scene in which Shakespeare meets the Earl of Southampton, the beautiful youth of the sonnets now grown old, that's mostly a showpiece for Branagh and Ian McKellen as Southampton. Branagh/Shakespeare recites Sonnet No. 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes") and McKellen/Southampton repeats it. I think the scene was intended to introduce a frisson of homoeroticism, but it's not strong enough. Still, there's pleasure to be had in hearing two great actors speak Shakespeare's words. 

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

Cast: James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Alec Guinness, Anjelica Huston, Pip Torrens, Stephen Fry, Jackson Kyle, Christopher Godwin. Screenplay: Tim Sullivan, Derek Granger, Charles Sturridge, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Eileen Diss, Chris Townsend. Film editing: Peter Coulson. Music: George Fenton.

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a sharp-edged, cold-hearted satirical novel whose plot turns on the death of a child. Any adaptation needs to be willing to be as ruthless as the novelist in its portrait of the feckless upper classes of Great Britain in the period between two World Wars, but instead Charles Sturridge's version gives us yet another handsomely mounted, elegantly clad film in the Merchant Ivory vein -- without the intelligence of Ismail Merchant's producing, James Ivory's direction, and particularly Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplays, which managed to capture the tone of the novels they adapted with precision. Its leads, James Wilby as the ill-fated Tony Last and Kristin Scott Thomas as his unfaithful wife, Brenda, are handsome but a little too attractive to capture the fatal emptiness of the characters. Scott Thomas almost suggests the depths of Brenda's vanity in the crucial scene in which she receives the news of her young son's death -- at first she thinks she's being told that her lover has died, but when she hears that it's her son, she impulsively mutters, "Oh, thank God," before realizing the enormity of what she has just said. Unfortunately, Sturridge hasn't prepared us for the moment -- he has made Brenda too engaging a character for so wicked a reaction. Nor has Sturridge allowed Tony to be enough of a silly ass for him to deserve the fate he receives at the end of the film. The supporting players fare better: Rupert Graves lets us know from the start that John Beaver is a callow gold-digger; Judi Dench is suitably brassy as his upwardly mobile mother; and Alec Guinness makes a convincingly subtle monster out of Mr. Todd. Anjelica Huston brings her usual smartness to what amounts to a cameo role as Mrs. Rattery, a rich American whose perspective on the Brits and their preoccupation with class and the past opens Tony's eyes, even if a bit too late. Unfortunately, any substance that the film carries over from Waugh's novel has been slicked over with glossy production values and sapped by a timidity about depicting the characters as sharply as the author did.

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr., Tom Bateman, Penélope Cruz, Josh Gad, Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Willem Dafoe. Screenplay: Michael Green, based on a novel by Agatha Christie. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Production design: Jim Clay. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Patrick Doyle.