Kenneth Branagh’s scattershot energy and flagrantly romantic flare tends to work best when least expected and on the strictest of tethers, but at least never feels as contrived as, say, Richard Curtis’s or Danny Boyle’s. Mislaid as a quickie overture to his colossal and uneven Hamlet (1996), Midwinter is actually the superior of the two films, shot in gorgeously lucid black and white, a strong stylistic choice that Branagh seems satisfied enough with to ease off elsewhere, with some of his most crisp and restrained staging since his still untouchable debut, Henry V. He doesn’t resist some unnecessary clichés, and Midwinter still tries a bit too hard to be jaunty and warm, but it’s also genuinely funny and populated by accurately observed theatre types, looking for the actual people behind the showy facades, and the resulting experience would be familiar to anyone who’s dabbled in the performing arts.
Branagh gives the leading role to the terrific Michael Maloney (whose moments of actually playing Hamlet are better than Branagh’s), as a dramatic, depressed, 33-year-old aging wunderkind who’s at the end of his unemployed tether, having lost out in a major role in a sci-fi trilogy, deciding to push ahead with his pet project, a communal-effort production of the play about the melancholy Dane in a church hall in the town he grew up in. He ends up with a cast of flakes and crumbling never-weres, but their dedication and growing skills come together eventually into a halfway decent production. The film stumbles finally with a dreadful caricatured performance by Jennifer Saunders that reeks of the smugness that afflicted Peter’s Friends (1992), but it’s still a breezy little fillip.
