This was the first of Branagh’s string of Shakespeare movies, and is justifiably regarded as one of his best. Released in 1989, it set off a wave of Shakespeare film adaptations, and is often credited with beginning the revival of the genre. Both because of its quality and its significance for the genre, this is a very impressive movie.
Despite major issues with the makeup department, it is very well-visualized overall. Branagh stuck to extreme realism in the sets and costumes, aiming to look as authentically medieval Europe as possible. He achieved that hard-to-define quality of looking genuine instead of costumey, and this sort of raw authenticity was really important in defining how he told Harry’s story. This was most apparent in way the battle scenes were done: there was no idealized, glamorous battle here. Harry could give as many motivating speeches as he liked, but at the end, war was dirty, chaotic and bloody, and at the end of the Battle of Agincourt, Harry was feeling just as defeated as the French were. As his army trekked through France, they became increasingly demotivated, dirty, sick and exhausted, until his men looked like a sorry excuse for an army by the time Agincourt rolled around. The realism was reflected in acting style, costuming, sets and interpretation, and helped to elevate it from the mindless British propaganda that Henry V can become.
One flaw in this realism was a slight tendency to veer into excessive dramatics. The speech at the beginning of the Battle of Harfleur was an especially bad offender; the yelling and face-pulling was just too much and didn’t work. However, the other big speeches worked extremely well. Branagh’s Crispian’s Day speech was wonderful because he reined in the dramatics and delivered it with some real feeling. Not only was it well-delivered, it was extremely stirring, even for me, a pacifist who is the least likely person to be stirred by a call to war. Part of the effect was no doubt due to the rousing music, but Branagh’s performance perfectly toed the line between public address and personal conviction. His men gathered around him, wonderstruck, and I felt like I was among them, elbowing the men closest to me to get closer to the hero giving this great speech. The success of his Crispian’s Day speech shows how misguided his dramatics in the Harfleur speech were; as with the rest of the movie, personalized realism was the most effective.
One thing I disliked in this movie was the way scenes from Henry IV were introduced. They wanted to use them to set up Harry’s character better, as a man with a past he had recently repudiated, but it didn’t work because they didn’t do enough of it. There weren’t enough scenes with Falstaff and his companions for their relationship with Harry to become clear, so the significance of his rejection of them didn’t come through. It doesn’t matter how well you do it, if you show a relationship for three minutes, the ending of it won’t feel important or emotionally significant (Unless you’re Pixar and the movie is Up). They either needed to go full out and include a lot from the earlier plays to establish his past, or cut those parts. As they were, they seemed slightly insignificant and extraneous. They also gave a couple of Falstaff’s lines to Bardolph and set them in a different context than they were in Henry IV, changing their meaning significantly. They included Harry’s exchange with Falstaff about hanging thieves from 1.2 of Henry IV Part I, but they gave Falstaff’s lines to Bardolph and made it a public conversation, so it came off as a serious declaration that Harry would hang Bardolph when he was king. I didn’t think it worked very well, and it seemed to be a little bit dishonest to what the lines were actually referring to.
However, I thought Harry’s reaction to the hanging of Bardolph was well done, and demonstrated how torn he is between his kingly duties and his personal allegiances. That split in loyalty and duty ran through Harry’s character throughout the play, and helped show how he clearly grew and changed as the story progressed. Instead of being just an example of a “noble” king in a patriotic tale, he was a real character who the audience invested in as more than just the leader of the army.
In the beginning he sets the character up very well: he’s young and has a high opinion of himself, with his dramatic entrance and his confident, almost cocky slouch as he sits in his throne. However, he’s also intelligent and an adept leader, which he demonstrates with his cold resolve and calculation, and his ability to bring the nobles into his plans and make them feel included in the war effort. He undoubtedly has their loyalty, and he proves himself wily enough to eliminate those who are not loyal.
However, he also has a special inwardness: a sense that he is isolated, betrayed and introverted, despite his ability to put on a show and deliver a great speech. At times he seems almost Hamletesque; his real motivations always remain opaque. Branagh chose to portray him unironically, but he is neither a heartless, callow machiavel nor a wholly sympathetic character. He toes the line between viciousness and tenderness, calculation and sentiment. He’s not only a king torn between the necessities of his job and his real desires, he’s also a man naturally split between these two competing instincts. They went out of their way to show his nastier side: he flies into rages at tiny slights, he tricks his friends into confessing their guilt, he orders the murder of the French prisoners, and he silently assents to the hanging of Bardolph. However, by taking the pains to portray his vulnerable human side, Branagh creates a character who is defined by more than just his actions, and who is genuinely sympathetic. By the end of the movie he is both a better leader and a better man, though the character is still deeply ambiguous.
Harry is really the only major character in this play, but skilled actors demonstrated throughout that a small part does not have to be an insignificant one.
Derek Jacobi nearly stole the show, and he was playing the Chorus. I hadn’t thought it possible to do much with the part of Chorus; even when I’ve seen Gielgud play the chorus, he was pretty dull. Miraculously, Jacobi’s chorus was never boring, and at times risked being more interesting than what was actually going on. He framed the entire movie as a story and therefore not real, which would have had the effect of pulling the audience a little bit away from its horrifying realism, if it weren’t for the fact that he was in on all the action. He was watching from a distance as Henry executed his three traitor friends, he was at the Battle of Harfleur, dirt-covered and laying in the mud, he walked under Bardolph’s dangling body and slowly shook his head. By first setting him up clearly as the story-teller who talked directly to the audience about the nature of this story, and then throwing him into the midst of it, the movie acknowledged that we were the audience and then brought us with him into fifteenth century England. In a way, we followed him along as he physically journeyed through this story-world.
Emma Thompson was a lively, charming Katherine, and she played the role with enough of a sense of autonomy and independence that her marriage to Harry didn’t feel like quite as much of a spoils-of-war marriage as it can. She also afforded the play both of its two brief moments of humor, mainly at her attempts to learn English and her miscommunication with Harry at the end. Though it’s questionable how happy their marriage will be, her natural chemistry with Branagh and her portrayal of her charmed reaction to him make the final scene significantly less uncomfortable than it is on page.
Judi Dench lent quite a bit of weight to the small role of Mistress Quickly, and was one of the major redeeming factors in the scenes discussing Falstaff’s death. The significance and extremity of her reaction was the only thing in those scenes that brought any reaction out of the audience, since it’s generally a bit tough to get too worked up about the death of a character who hasn’t been introduced yet. However, her beautiful acting wrung some real pathos out of it, and out of the leaving of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym.
The entire French court was excellently done, with each actor leaving a distinct impression of character despite the few lines they had. Paul Scofield was the depressive king, defeated almost from the get-go and slowly caving under the pressure of his bold, impatient son. Michael Maloney as the Dauphin was exactly the sort of man who would sent a gift of tennis balls to his touchiest enemy, and he spent the whole time chafing against his more restrained, defeatist father. He made a formidable enemy for Henry to face, and he didn’t come off as a caricature of a Frenchman.
Christopher Ravenscroft as Montjoy had a real presence on screen, and with his slowly developing respect for Harry, he became much more than a setpiece character. Because of his relationship to Harry developing over time, he made real magic out of what was one of the most impressive scenes in the film. After the battle of Agincourt that seemed to stretch on forever in dirty, horrible chaos, Montjoy came to greet the English, and Harry was forced to admit that he did not know who had won the day. In the confusion, it would have been impossible. But when Montjoy told him that he had won, it was clearly with utter respect for his enemy king. The two of them together made the moment sheer magic.
In my opinion, this is one of the best Shakespeare movie adaptations out there, both for narrative structure and excellent acting all around. What flaws there were, were more than made up for by the rest of the brilliance around them.
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