David Michôd’s version of the Henry plays looks the part, with grey stone, wet fields and a weary, worldly Falstaff from Joel Edgerton. But it removes Shakespeare’s speeches and puts little in their place, and Timothée Chalamet’s king spends much of 140 minutes staring at one fixed point.
David Michôd and Joel Edgerton have taken the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, thrown out the verse, and rebuilt them as a realist drama about a young man who thinks he has refused a war and finds it has been arranged for him anyway. That is a decent idea and the film means it. The King is handsome, well cast at its edges and slow through its middle, and the slowness is not the mud’s fault. It is the writing’s.
The first act is the best of it. Hal is a sulking drunk in a tavern; his father is coughing in a cold hall; a rebel army is forming in the north. When Hal offers to fight Hotspur alone to spare both sides, the film gives us two men in full plate in a wet field, no music, a great deal of clanging and falling over, and a fight that ends because one of them can no longer get up. Tom Glynn-Carney’s Hotspur is loud and young and plainly frightened under the shouting. We felt, for the only time in the film, that a boy might die in front of us, and we were not sure which one.
Chalamet plays Hal as a scowl that hardens into a stare. He is watchful and quiet and he never raises his voice unless the scene demands it, and we can see the thinking behind the choice: a prince who has decided that stillness is the same as strength. The trouble is that he arrives at the throne already shut, and the remaining hundred minutes give him nowhere to go. When he speaks to his army before battle he does it in short plain sentences, and it is over quickly. Shakespeare gave the actor a saint’s day and five minutes; this gives him a raised voice and a field.
The supporting cast does the work he does not. Edgerton’s Falstaff is not the fat clown but a tired veteran who drinks because he has seen fighting and would rather not see it again, and the screenplay gives him the film’s one properly good idea, which is that the man who knows mud is more use than the men who know maps. Sean Harris plays William as a soft, tilted whisper, every line a suggestion rather than a statement, and we trusted him about as far as he intended. Pattinson arrives late as the Dauphin, blond and lolling and giggling in a French accent that dares you to object, and the film sits up for the first time in an hour. Mendelsohn sweats and spits and gives Henry IV a bitterness that the film does not spend long enough with.
Adam Arkapaw shoots it in flat grey daylight and candlelight, faces half in shadow, and he makes the English weather look like a policy. Fiona Crombie’s halls are bare stone, high and cold, a long table and not much else, so that power looks like an empty room with a chair in it. Jane Petrie keeps Hal in black wool and saves colour for the French, which tells you where the film’s eye is. Nicholas Britell’s score is low strings and a slow pulse; it is right for the battle and a little insistent everywhere else, asking for solemnity in rooms that were already solemn. Peter Sciberras cuts the hour between the coronation and the Channel crossing at the pace of the tables it is set around, and it is here that we were bored, and then annoyed at being bored by a film this carefully made.
Agincourt wakes it up. Michôd shoots the battle close and low, a long muddy scrum in which men drown in their own armour and nobody can see who is winning, and the not-seeing is the point. We were gripped and faintly sick, which is presumably what was intended. After it, the film has one turn left, which we will not describe; it is the most interesting thing in the screenplay, and it comes too late to change how the previous two hours felt.
Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010) was also about a quiet young man pulled into a family’s violence, and it made the quiet frightening. Here the quiet mostly sits there. Watch it for Edgerton, for Pattinson’s twenty minutes of nonsense, and for the mud. Keep something to read to hand for the hour in between, and do not feel guilty about it.
