Film Review: Henry V
How Kenneth Branagh Took on Lawrence Olivier and Came out on Top
This week, we look at Kenneth Branagh's antiwar masterpiece, Henry V, made from one of Shakespeare's most jingoistic and humorless plays.
"O for a muse of fire..."
Kenneth Branagh's filming a version of Shakespeare's famous play about the famously martial English king Henry V (1387-1422) in 1989 seemed like a dumb idea when Branagh set about to do it. It was a rather bombastic play done to an ultrapatriotic and seemingly unassailable turn by Shakespearian giant Lawrence Olivier only a generation before in 1944. And yet, it works so well, far better than its six predecessors and two succeeding versions in 1990 and 2003.
Branagh's version rescued a rather stodgy play from jingoistic obscurity. The events of Shakespeare's Henry V center heavily around the political machinations behind Henry's rekindling of his predecessors' war with France (now known as the Hundred Years War), which culminated in a stunning victory for the English against the French at Agincourt in 1415, the most decisive battle of the Hundred Years War since Poitiers in 1356, when the French king had been captured in battle. Shakespeare wrote his play circa 1599, nearly two centuries after Agincourt. But that was still four centuries closer than we are now.
Case in point--Shakespeare lived in a time of great hostility between England and France, hostility that still stemmed pretty directly from the Hundred Years War. He would no more paint the French fairly than an American popular historian today would call the Canadian privateer "Black Joke" during the War of 1812 anything but a pirate.
So, Shakespeare plays up Henry's youth and relative inexperience in being talked into going to war, ignoring that Henry had been King for two years when he invaded France and was already 28 when he fought at Agincourt, a fourteen-year veteran of Owain Glyndwr's guerilla warfare. Not exactly wet behind the ears. Shakespeare also plays up the internal plots against the King. His world, the golden age of Elizabeth's reign, saw England under constant internal siege from continental spies and discontented English nobles.
Branagh plays up these elements, too, even to the point of turning the aftermath of the battle into a moving polemic against war in general. This is a complete switch from Olivier's version. But a quick look at the historical background for both films explains why-Olivier's version came out in 1944 during WWII, when the Allies were fighting the Nazis and Japan. Branagh's version came out at the very end of the Cold War, in an England sullenly frozen under Margaret Thatcher. War was definitely no longer in style in 1989.
Also, see this week's book review on Ellis Peters, author of the Cadfael series.
