85/100
Hadn't seen this in at least 30 years, was a little worried that three decades of mediocre-to-terrible Branagh movies (with his Sleuth remake as the nadir) might render me less receptive than I was back when he emerged from nowhere seemingly fully formed at age 29, aspiring to be first the next Olivier and then, with Dead Again (for which I was stoked beyond belief, based on the trailer), the next Welles. None of his subsequent Shakespeare adaptations had the same galvanizing effect on me, though I liked (and still like) both Much Ado and Hamlet. (Love's Labour's Lost not so much, never did see As You Like It.) Maybe it was just the novelty of seeing one of the plays performed, after years of reading them in school.
Nope. This remains, for my money, the pinnacle of cinematic Shakespeare, not just in English (as I'd thought might be the case, given Throne of Blood and the kinda sorta case that is Ran) but across the board. And its weaknesses are largely the Bard's fault, inherent to the text! For Henry V is of course actually Richard II, Part 4, or at the very least Henry IV, Part 3, following directly on from its predecessors and assuming that audiences know all the principals and their backstories, in the same way that The Force Awakens doesn't bother explaining who Han and C-3PO and Luke are when they appear. A truly ruthless filmmaker might have opted to just cut everything Falstaff-related, letting Exeter's warning to the Dauphin ("And be assured you'll find a difference, as we his subjects have in wonder found, between the promise of his greener days and these he masters now") suggest Henry's remarkable transformation. Branagh throws in a few Henry IV flashbacks, featuring Robbie Coltrane as Falstaff (a role he seems born to play), and these work reasonably well, but there's still a noticeable downshift in energy during the Quickly/Bardolph/Pistol/etc. scenes. The film also unmistakably peaks, and should probably conclude, with Henry carrying the limp teenage body of a future Oscar-winning star (forgot he was in this! I of course already knew him in '89, from Empire of the Sun) across what seems like several miles of muddy battlefield carnage. Henry wooing Katharine (hilarious as that often is, with jokes that sound surprisingly modern—"Canst thou love me?" "I cannot tell." "Can any of your neighbors tell, Kate? I'll ask them") and "negotiating" with France represents a bizarre, anticlimactic tonal shift, but hey, that's the play Will wrote.
Is it among his greatest? I wouldn't say so. Like Macbeth, however, it's more inherently cinematic than most of its fellows, even as it expressly begins with Chorus apologizing to us—needlessly, in this context, though any excuse to have Derek Jacobi deliver Shakespeare is a good one—for the company's inability to present realistic battle sequences. Branagh does reasonably well by Agincourt (though actually seeing it staged makes the already ludicrously ahistorical "10,000 French killed, only 30 English" bit simply impossible to swallow) and knocks Harfleur out of the park via judicious deployment of flames in darkness; you can also tell, right from the first few minutes (placing Chorus on an empty soundstage strewn with filmmaking equipment; introducing Henry via his shadow and cutting away briefly just as he turns to sit on the throne), that he's thought long and hard, as Olivier and Welles did before him, about how to tell the story as much in images as in words. But it's his own intimate performance in the title role that's most electrifying. Branagh had previously played Henry for Royal Shakespeare, with this film ostensibly adapted from that production...yet it's nearly impossible to imagine his soft-spoken intensity at key moments even registering onstage. Take this exchange:
That's all verse, and as a young actor I'd have gotten unprofitably sucked in by the iambs, asking Henry's question in one rhythmic breath. Branagh shoots himself in close-up and speaks those ten alternately stressed syllables slowly and softly, hitting terminal consonants ultra-hard, giving each of the last three words a chasm of weighty space. If you can imagine how someone would ask "If I press this button, will the planet explode?", whilst thinking it quite possible even as an adviser urges him to press the button and thereby get candy bars for everyone, that's basically the degree of gravity Branagh invests in what's textually a fairly unmemorable line. When I think about this Henry V, it's not the St. Crispin's Day speech (stirringly delivered, with a cresting wave of pure joy) that I tend to remember, nor even something like "Upon the King." What sticks with me is Henry's slightly strained hail-fellow play-acting with the three traitors before his mask drops, or the bone-deep weariness with which he informs Montjoy the herald that England would really rather not engage in battle right this second but will if they must. (See also the envious way Henry always elongates the word "sleep," suggesting that the man hasn't slept well for months if not years.) It's a life-size performance that honors Shakespeare's grandiloquent mythmaking while simultaneously seeking ways to puncture and humanize it. 'Twas amazing to see it arrive from essentially nowhere (and be introduced to Emma Thompson at the same time, though you don't get a real sense of her gifts from Katharine mangling English). Oh, and then Branagh was also lucky enough to stumble onto Patrick Doyle, who'd never previously composed a film score and turned in one of the most rousing orchestral action themes in cinema history, worthy of comparison to Korngold and Tiomkin. Just a case of everything coalescing beautifully, setting me up for one of the major moviegoing disappointments of my life when Dead Again did not in fact turn out to be a throwback masterpiece.