Dear Kenneth Branagh, You Can Do Better Than Cinderella

Branagh at the red carpet of Cinderella at the Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 13, 2015. Berlin Film Festival

Dear Sir Branagh,

Congratulations! Not only have the last two movies you directed been most financially successful of your career—Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recriut—but after a $70 million opening weekend, your live-action Cinderella already handily surpassed one of them. (The one that isn’t Thor.) But while you’ve managed to forge a path as a reliable director of big-budget films, you’ve forgotten what made you a significant creative force in the first place: wildly ambitious and distinctive adaptations.

You’ve been compared to Sir Laurence Olivier for decades, and considering you earned your most recent Oscar nomination for playing Olivier in My Week With Marilyn, it’s not as though you’re shrinking from that comparison. You directed Henry V and then a four-hour unabridged film adaptation of Hamlet—that’s the exact order Olivier went in back in the 1940s. Though “Greatest Shakespearean Actor Of His Generation” is a term about as meaningful these days as “Heavyweight Champion Of The World” or “Fastest Man Alive,” it’s as more of a distraction than an accolade, because it ignores how impressive your offstage work really is.

Your best directing work has one thing in common: you explore how our most cherished stories—archetypal myths, plays, novels—endure over centuries. You took the title Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein quite literally (as opposed to, say, Coppola’s loose adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula), and while that adaptation didn’t necessarily sell tickets, it was still a striking effort. Same went for your verbatim Hamlet, a nearly unprecedented undertaking among movie versions. It might have floundered (four hours? Really?), but you knew it was better to fail nobly with high ambition than to aim low.

Perhaps it was that affinity for classic material that justified taking on Thor; Asgard’s son is the Marvel character not just rooted in comics, but actual Scandinavian mythology as well. But in practice, the movie proved why directorial choices matter so little to Marvel Studios—it contains none of the passionate ambition or attention to literary detail that drives your best work. Trying to suss out what makes Thor a “Kenneth Branagh film” is fruitless; it’s just another coal car hitched to the churning engine of the MCU. Then there was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a rote spy thriller that didn’t know if it wanted to be a Bond or Bourne. Sure, it still gave you the chance to twirl your mustache as a Bond-style villain, Russian accent and all—but if “timeless source material” is what you’re after, Tom Clancy ain’t it.

And that’s why Cinderella is the most disheartening of the three big films you’ve directed. The original French folk tale is tailor-made for you: no glass slipper, no pumpkin, no fairy godmother, just boundless potential to tell a tale of subjugation and redemption. But the nicest thing to say about the latest Disney live-action remake is that it’s a perfectly adequate love story. It’s just…wholly unnecessary. (Though it’s also an insurance policy for a lifetime of Blu-ray royalties.)

But we’re guessing you knew that, because at every possible opportunity, you diverge from the story Walt Disney told 65 years ago and do something silly. Helena Bonham Carter feels freer and funnier as the Fairy Godmother than she has in years. Robb Stark from Game Of Thrones pushes Lady Rose from Downton Abbey on a giant swing in a secret garden in what might be the most thinly veiled sexual metaphor of 2015. Somebody actually defends the idea of marrying for love by arguing it’s more patriotic than marrying a foreigner for strategic advantage! You also added a handful of flourishes that remind us of the stories you used to treat with meticulous authenticity: Royalty hiding their true identity (Measure For Measure); tragic parental deaths (The Winter’s Tale); issues of succession (Henry IV). There are even visual similarities to Hamlet (a fencing scene and the excessively gaudy palace) and Henry V (Cinderella’s attic recalls the empty theatre Derek Jacobi walks through as the narrator).

Look, big studios trust you for their adaptations; that’s great, but it’s also constraining. Your ceiling is just too low. Some might argue that’s a good thing, given what happens when you get full creative control. But no one keeping Shakespeare alive on film these days—Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline, Julian Fellowes’ Romeo & Juliet—can touch you.

You triumphantly returned to the stage in 2013 for a production of Macbeth, but you haven’t yet taken the same comeback risk in film. So here’s a thought: go back to the Bard. Laurence Olivier’s directorial trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations concluded with Richard III, a production often credited with re-popularizing Shakespeare in America. The time is ripe for another production—that weird 1930s fascist adaptation starring Ian McKellen was 20 years ago! But whatever the choice, one thing is clear: enough with the serviceable base hits. It’s time for to swing for the fences again.