TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.043

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 9KB | 159 lines

CINEMA, Page 119

King Ken Comes to Conquer

A brash British star turns Henry V into an antiwar war movie

By Richard Corliss


    The great doors swing open to reveal the caped figure of King
Henry V, sexily backlighted. His bishops and courtiers gaze at him
like apostles at the unseen Jesus in some old biblical epic. And
finally the monarch of Britain -- and of this robust new movie --
shows his face and speaks. It is an entrance angled to register awe
for Kenneth Branagh. But how much awe can a 28-year-old actor,
little known outside Britain and directing his first film, expect
to inspire? Branagh recalls that when Judi Dench, who plays
Mistress Quickly, first saw this scene, "she laughed in my face and
said, `I've never seen an entrance like that! Who do you think you
are?'" He retorted, "The film is not called Mistress Quickly the
Fourth." No, but it might be called King Ken.

    He doesn't look like a Shakespearean matinee idol, this
thin-lipped Irishman with puddingy skin and a huge head piked like
a pumpkin on his stocky frame. He lacks conventional star
magnetism: the athletic abandon, the flaming sexuality, the
audacity of interpretation that risks derision to achieve
greatness. Expect no swooning teenagers to queue at his stage door,
no desperate fan to write him suicide notes. Anyway, he would
reject that form of hero worship, for his personality radiates
shopkeeper common sense. He is a model of Thatcherite initiative
in a British arts scene of radical distemper.

    In short, Branagh seems as remote from Laurence Olivier as,
say, Sandra Bernhard is from Sarah Bernhardt. Yet the English press
praises him -- damns him too -- as "the new Olivier." If the label
is unfair to both men (at 28, even Olivier was not yet "Olivier"),
it is correct to suggest a family resemblance. For, like Olivier,
Branagh has a resume to match his notoriety.

    He is the most accomplished, acclaimed and ambitious performer
of his generation. In 1984 he dazzled audiences as the youngest
actor ever to play the title role in Henry V at the Royal
Shakespeare Company (RSC). He starred in the Masterpiece Theater
mini-series Fortunes of War. He built his own repertory company and
led it through sold-out seasons in London and the provinces. He has
written two plays and an autobiography, Beginning. He even married
his leading lady, TV star Emma Thompson. No doubt about it: Branagh
has conquered Britain. This week he invades U.S. movie theaters (in
New York City and Los Angeles, with a dozen other cities to follow
next month). He will buck the odds as he did when making his film
-- as Henry V did on his French campaign -- and with no smaller an
appetite for success. Did Olivier make a landmark film of Henry V
when he played in and directed it in 1944? Then the new Olivier
would do it again -- bloodier and maybe better -- in hopes of
luring the unlettered moviegoer for whom Shakespeare is a synonym
for Sominex.

    Just to make the challenge sporting, Branagh would plan his
film while starring in three roles with his Renaissance Theater
Company. And he would shoot his Henry, for a pinchpenny $7.5
million, in seven weeks, less than a third of the time Olivier
took. On the first day, the novice director didn't know to shout
"Action!" until someone poked him in the ribs. How could he make
a decent film under so daunting a shadow?

    Well, he's done it: created a Henry for a decade poised between
belligerence and exhaustion. He found a camera style that
illuminates the actors with torch power and Rembrandt lighting. His
elite cast reads like a Burke's Peerage of British acting: stage
eminences Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, Derek Jacobi, Alec McCowen and
Robert Stephens; TV comedians Richard Briers and Robbie Coltrane;
Brian Blessed and Christopher Ravenscroft from Branagh's RSC Henry;
most of his own rep company; and his bright bride Emma. This galaxy
surrounds a director who, like Henry, can orchestrate a magnificent
sally, manipulate diverse talents, bend them to his will. And
temper artistry with efficiency: Branagh completed the shooting
ahead of schedule and under budget.

    Olivier's Henry V, commissioned by the wartime British
government, was a handsome piece of morale boosting. It said all
the war's a stage. And on this stage a tiny band of English heroes
defeated the evil French (read German) army at Agincourt. It's
Robin Hood vs. the Nazis. Olivier's pageant was sunny and
sumptuous, and so was his Henry: resourceful in battle, generous
in victory, ever cheery and brimful of confidence. Why, he might
be Kenneth Branagh!

    But not Branagh's new Henry. This is a headstrong lad evolving
into a strong King. He can betray as well as be kind, renouncing
old friends like Falstaff and Bardolph even if it means they die
heartbroken. He can threaten rape and murder of the innocents, then
summon God to provide divine artillery and lead the English "once
more unto the breach." The Agincourt battle, which Olivier staged
as a fantasy joust, is a muddy, brutal fellowship of death here.
It has the acrid tang of World War I carnage and the guilty
aftertaste of victory in the Falklands. In its crafty heart, Henry
V is an antiwar war movie.

    Henry knows that at Agincourt he has won a great upset, with
all of France as his booty. Yet Branagh has to show the awful cost.
In an elaborate, chilling tracking shot that lasts nearly four
minutes, the exhausted King staggers across the battlefield, the
dead weight of Falstaff's boy page across his shoulders, past a
tableau of casualties. Instead of a triumph, then, a requiem -- for
youthful ideals tested in war and found lacking. Not until film's
end, when Henry plays the soldier unsuited to seduction, does the
sly dazzle of Branagh's charm break through the heavy clouds of
Henry's majesty. He is an earthy Olivier and his worthy avatar.

    For the man who would be King, early life did not promise much
in the way of spotlights. The Branagh family, working-class
Protestants in Belfast, produced craftsmen, not stage stars. Ken's
father was a carpenter who moved the family to Reading, England,
in 1970, when the Troubles roiled too close to home. Within a year,
as Branagh recalls in his breezy autobiography, "I'd managed to
become English at school and remain Irish at home." It was his
first acting challenge, and it fueled his resolve to perform.

    As a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Branagh
displayed the salesman's knack of charm and fearlessness -- the
seductive intelligence, so crucial to performing, managing and
directing. He wrote to Olivier for advice on the role of Chebutykin
in Three Sisters. He took notes on playing Hamlet from John
Gielgud. He determined to play the Dane at a performance attended
by the Queen and Prince Philip. Later, preparing his RSC Henry, he
won an audience with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace to discuss
the isolation felt by a national leader. Wooed and won by the young
actor, Charles became a patron of the Renaissance.

    But there was more to Branagh than blond ambition. Says Hugh
Cruttwell, then RADA's principal: "He had all the talent and
initiative you can see in full flood now." Other people soon saw
it too. Just out of RADA he won the plum role of Judd, the cynical
Marxist student in Another Country -- a performance whose laser
intelligence and subversive edge announced an actor at the start
of a brilliant career. He would fulfill that promise when the RSC's
Adrian Noble cast him as Henry V.

    "Ken's got the general's gift of being the man you
automatically follow," says Richard Briers, who plays Bardolph in
the film Henry and will assay King Lear in the Renaissance's tour
of the U.S. next year. Branagh needed that royal self-assurance to
build a major acting company and mount a large film. He will need
more of it to sustain his career at its current velocity. "Quite
soon," says Terry Hands, the RSC's artistic director, "Ken must
decide whether he will be an admin man or a great actor. If a
leading actor is also running the whole show, he's worried about
the box office, the creaking floorboard, the divorce of his cast
member. All these can sap that tunnel vision, and the performance
can become too controlled."

    Tunnel vision is no problem for Branagh -- but in the service
of the play, not the perks. "I'm not interested in being rich and
famous," he avers, "in smoking a big cigar and driving a big car.
I want to stay human-size, just as I wanted to make Henry V as
manlike as possible." He plans to shoot two films in 1991: a
Shakespeare comedy, perhaps Much Ado About Nothing, and a modern
story set in Chicago. Meanwhile, he may write a novel. And at night
he will read himself to sleep with a good book.

    So we ask: What are you reading these days? "Wuthering
Heights," he replies. Ah, yes. Hollywood made a movie from that one
50 years ago, and made a star of the actor who played Heathcliff.
Larry something. What ever happened to him?