This is like watching the Ben Elton sitcom The Upstart Crow and finding out that the cast has been replaced by different actors.
Written by Ben Elton who this time has cut the jokes. Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as William Shakespeare in his retirement years in Stratford Upon Avon after the Globe theatre burnt down in London.
It is disconcerting to see Branagh looking like Ben Kingsley in this film. Judi Dench plays his wife Ann Hathaway, although the real Ann was eight years older than her husband. Judi Dench is twenty six years older than Branagh, the age difference is noticeable.
This is a melancholy and fictionalised film. The autumnal colour palette sees Shakespeare at the end of his life haunted by the death of his son Hamnett many years earlier. He died at the age of eleven during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.
Shakespeare feels guilty that he was not there when his son died and after all these years he has unanswered questions. Being at home he needs to connect with his estranged wife and also need to deal with his daughters, one is still unmarried, the other has marital issues.
Despite his fame, Shakespeare suffers from an inferiority complex due to his family's social standing. His father had debts and this is touched upon when Shakespeare has to put up with barbed comments from local landowner and when he receives a visit by the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen.)
I think there was no need for so much prosthetics on Branagh. It was distracting. The story is superficial, it really is meditating on loss, grief and old age. Yet is was heavy going and only livened up when McKellen showed up.
I liked Elton's The Upstart Crow and this needed the cheeky zippy fun of that series.
e film imagines Shakespeare coming home to Stratford for good after the fire, yearning for a prosperous and peaceful retirement but now forced to confront long-suppressed feelings about the death of his son 17 years before. He must deal with the angry, conflicted and still unmarried Judith, and her troubled sister Susanna, married to Dr John Hall - and also his stolidly unimpressed wife Anne. Both daughters create social upset for Shakespeare, who despite his fame is yearning for bourgeois respectability in the provinces. But the awful memory of Hamnet keeps coming back. He angrily disputes ownership of grief with Anne and Judith, pointing out that he feels as deeply as they. But Dench brings an acid rebuke to Anne's reply that, at the time of his Hamnet's death, he was writing The Merry Wives of Windsor.
