Remember that Gus Van Sant's movie about the last days of Kurt Kobain? To be fair this is slightly more cheerful. But not by much.... I don't know, the last moments of the Bard on this Earth may really have been an insufferable slog, spent mourning the death of his only son ( Hamnet) gardening his lot, signing redacted versions of his will, and getting pussy-wept by the women of the house, - who ( this is never stated, but somewhat laughably implied) were just as talented as he was, but could never prove It because they were banned in the kitchen by a society of pesky white man ( I say white, because blacks are built different, we'll come to that) - maybe It really ended like this: but poor me! From the man who created a whole World! I was hoping for something a little marrier. It came to a point where I was suffering through scene after scene just to get to the epic Ben Johnson's drunken night that ( allegedly) put an end to It all. When It finally arrived, I won't lie.. I chuckled. But I guess It was more about the Falstaffian scene I had in mind rather then what Branaght had put on the screen, which was as dreary and miserable as everything else here. When Ben acknowledges Will's greateness with a " you, bastard" I thought yes! That's the way to go.. humor! lifullness! That's what this movie needed.
We know a little more then nothing about William Shakespeare, the most enigmatic of geniuses. So little in fact, that his very identity has been put into question throughout time. Some people seriously thought that Francis Bacon had written his dramas. They couldn't take the fact that an " illiterate actor" from Stratford could be the greatest writer in the English language. People are funny like that.
Moral of the story: the scarcity of historical evidences left the writers of this movie with a great deal of freedom. Of which, in my humble opinion, they have made the worst possible use. I really didn't know what to expect coming into this: whether It would be an explosive meta experiment, in the vein of the excellent Looking for Richard or Greengrass' A Cock and Bull story: a documentary- style exercise in paranoia, like JFK, where the factual as well as the counter factual theories about the Bard would be put into question, or a stylized homage to the Bard's many creations, maybe ( making this up as I go along) staged as a version of the Tempest, with Prospero, the great wizard, retreating to Stratford, and breaking his stuff " bury It certain fathoms in the Earth"...
It was none of the above. It was a dreary depressing ( sorry!) "Elegiac" account of Shakespeare's relation with the women of the house, with a tired subplot about the rising of that very Puritanism that would before long put an End to the Theater that Will loved so much, and, more importantly, make the life of Will's daughters a whole lot harder. Them poor souls now are gonna be buried in them fuckin kitchens! With no plays to cheer them up, and no sex.
There is a single visual reference to a play, Coriolanus. It involves a flashback of a big black guy, played by an actor who was once in love with one of Will's daughters. You can kiss goodbye to da thing gals! Under Puritanism these poor girls are getting none. Let alone from Blacked.. sorry Black. Mistyping there.
Final note: Judi Dench and Ian McKellen are in this. They made me wanna go back and watch their glorious rendition of the MACBETH. That was great. Truly, truly great.