Luke: In "All that Glitters", Shakespeare's ghost coaches an apathetic schoolboy in life and love

Ah, those awkward teenage years. Stumbling, gangly and still-growing through unfamiliar terrain as your body, mind and very being changes by the minute. 

Each step is a potential pitfall of social and personal error. Slowly, surely and after much embarrassment, we emerge as adults equipped with a catalogue of cringey moments that still haunt our dreams and idle moments years later. 

Wouldn’t it have been something to have a guiding light through this darkest of journeys? And what if, that guiding light was the most celebrated playwright of his, or any other time? 

Such is the premise for Peter Lavery’s feature film debut All That Glitters, a coming-of-age story in which the ghost of William Shakespeare coaches an apathetic schoolboy in life and love. 

If it sounds silly, it is. But it’s also charming, heartfelt, moving and much else.

Ryan (Elliot Grihault) is coasting through the last year of secondary school, hardly working at his studies, and with no plans for the future. 

His father, Phillip (Tim Downie), the school’s English teacher, is anxious about his son’s prospects. But try as he might to encourage his boy to take interest in something, anything, Ryan shrugs off advice and continues as is. 

In classes Ryan is distractible he daydreams of romance with his classmate Jasmine (Flo Thompstone), and is encouraged and mocked in his quest for her affections by his friends Cassie and Hugo.  

Awkward

Early school scenes make a lot of Ryan’s bumbling awkwardness. 

Lavery’s script and camerawork enjoy those agonising seconds where words hang in the air and tension builds. It’s a clever comedic trick because even if the jokes don’t land, the relief of something to cut through the tension raises frequent chuckles. 

There’s an awkwardness in the writing itself in these early interactions between Ryan and his friends, a half-formed attempt at laddish banter that recalls The Inbetweeners and other Only Having a Laugh Britcoms of that era. 

Lavery’s attempt to capture this cadence comes off as half-hearted because the sense is that his heart isn’t in it. The film, tonally, pace-wise, comedically, is much more assured when Lavery works in a gentle, somewhat silly, mostly earnest register. 

The sparse set decoration in Ryan’s room seems to belong to someone much younger. There’s a handful of drawings and generic posters hung haphazardly – reflecting his lack of ambition and goals perhaps. 

But when that same room is taken up by a guy dressed in a convincing but somewhat ropey Shakespeare costume, the visual identity of All That Glitters begins to sit right alongside The Queen’s Nose, My Parents are Aliens and other comedy programmes aimed at children.

Summoning Shakespeare

Ryan’s summoning of Shakespeare is a puzzling sequence. 

Pushed by his friends to join Jasmine at tennis practice Ryan does what any newbie in his position would do. He gets a book from the library on the rules of the game and knuckles down. 

Later, in a moment of frustration, Ryan tosses the book aside, which causes the ghost of William Shakespeare to materialise. It’s a headscratcher, but again, recalls the same suspension of disbelief that we carry to ALF or Harry and the Hendersons. 

Why is an alien eating the neighbourhood cats? How does nobody see that that’s a sasquatch wearing that Hawaiian shirt? Why is Shakespeare sleeping on the pull-out cot? It matters not, it’s fun!

Paul Ready’s Shakespeare is played broadly, and the comedy that comes from the man-out-of-time antics and clashing values and culture is amusing. 

But it’s not always consistent. Some scenes have him acting hip to the modern world, only to be dumbfounded by something else in the next scene. 

For the most part, the manic, avuncular Shakespeare does what’s required. Ready is the source of most of the film’s big laughs, and he can play serious too. 

The uneasy mentor/mentee relationship between Ryan and Shakespeare sees Ready lean into a lively, very physical performance style. Invisible to the rest of the world, he still tries his best to big-up Ryan. 

Shakespeare in tennis whites even though he can’t play the game in any tangible real-world way is very funny. Likewise, his constant interjections and outdated advice are presented with equal parts gusto and frustration. 

He is always encouraging Ryan toward spur-of-the-moment advances, spontaneity, dramatic, whirlwind-romance stuff. Madly emoting and gesticulating, shouting at Ryan to “Kiss her!”

Following his advice would lead Ryan to do things that are not only out of character for him, but out of step with the times we live in as well. 

Shakespeare as the Cyrano de Bergerac voice in Ryan’s ear is, in almost all cases, a bozo by any other name.

Kissing a scarecrow

Lavery squeezes a lot of drama into the script and out of his characters. 

Ryan’s trying out for the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet with acting pointers from the Man Himself presents some meaty conflict as Ryan doubts his abilities and surprises his father with the depth of his performance. 

Elliot Grihault carries an expression that teeters on the edge of despair. He plays Ryan as nervous, volatile and highly strung. Moments away from disaster at any given time. 

When set against Thompstone’s Jasmine, who seems to have it all together, there’s some good interplay, and as we discover both characters are similarly at sea in their lives. 

There are a handful of scenes that really highlight Lavery’s visual sensibilities. A party sequence employs some canted camerawork and dissolves to show drunkenness and refers back to Lavery’s earlier work in shorts. 

This sequence is one of the more serious in the film, but in it, Lavery still finds time for jokes, interspersing the emotional high points with cringey low points.

It’s that willingness to play, to go a little bit further with the material, to take a chance on coming off slapdash, that makes All That Glitters such a charming film. 

You just don’t see William Shakespeare coach a kid on kissing using a scarecrow dressed in a blond wig in any other films. 

All that Glitters is showing at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield today (27 February) at 1.30pm as part of the Dublin International Film Festival. A wide release is forthcoming.