This blog entry is part of my "movie year countdown round #2". Read more about that here.
Henry V
I'm not sure if I ever found Shakespeare easy to follow, but for some reason before I stuck this DVD in to start watching this film, I think I had created the illusion that I did. Maybe because I had read a lot of it before in school. I've seen many Shakespeare plays performed. I've even seen some performed by the worlds most renowned Shakespeare performers in Shakespeare's own local of London and Stratford-upon-Avon. I've seen several Shakespeare films. And I've even performed in Twelfth Night. I guess that was a while ago, because it seems that I forgot that unless the performers or the staging goes to extra length to make a modern audience like myself get the gist, the words take a lot of reading over and over and usually excessive research to really understand what the heck is going on or really being said.
Lawrence Olivier's Henry V did not really help me out here. I was actually pretty intrigued at the beginning when the film begins in a sincere recreation of London's Globe theatre. We see the audience members enter. We see real actors as they would have looked like at that time. We see them both on stage, and behind the stage. We recognize them more as actors than as their characters. We see the reactions of the crowd and the rowdy behavior. We see how the weather can affect an outdoor performance of the time when it starts to rain. I couldn't understand what was happening in the story for a while, but I was becoming interested in the story as a kind of recreation of what it was like to be in the Globe theatre at that time.
But then we actually enter conventional Shakespeare movie mode. And since I still have little clue about what is going on, and the interest in seeing what might happen in a recreation of a live theatre performance in a rowdy crowd has been crushed when this context is removed, I start to get bored. And I get more and more bored. I understand from the audio commentary (yes, I'm obsessed with watching audio commentaries even on [or especially on] movies which at first I did not enjoy) that this was a product of it's time and was supposed to be a jingoistic kind of propaganda piece for Britain to boost morale in WWII. But I'm having enough trouble getting into the story to concentrate on that context. In fact, listening to the commentary, I realized that I was being buried with layers upon layers of references to previous times. So I'm sitting here in 2009, listening to an audio commentary that was probably recorded some time around 1999, about a movie that was released in 1944, about a play that was probably performed some time in the early 1600s, that was cultivated from sources written several years earlier, about events that actually occurred around 1415. Yikes! And not only that, the whole history of the English monarchy is somewhat assume knowledge for the original audience.
Maybe other Shakespeare plays just have more universal appeal, and that's why I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. But as the biggest icon of modern Shakespeare performance, I would have hoped the Olivier could have impressed me more. Maybe his heir to the title Kenneth Branagh's version would be more appealing to me, but at this point I'm not in any hurry to find out.
Rating: 4/10