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| Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinste in Sentimental Value. (Photo: Neon.) |
The house that provides the key setting in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a real beauty – a late 19th-century Oslo domicile in a Norwegian style known as Dragonstil (“dragon style”) that looks like a candy house, built of dark blue wood with cherry trim and a gabled roof. (In real life it’s called Villa Filipstad and belongs to Lars Lillo-Stenberg.) Luxuriously lit by Kasper Tuxen Andersen, it’s the most gorgeous house at the center of a movie since the gracious country residence in Olivier Assayas’s 2008 Summer Hours, loaded with the art made and collected by Edith Scob’s uncle, which she leaves to her three grown children when she dies early in the film. That picture could also have been called Sentimental Value; like Trier’s it’s about legacy, but of a different kind. Sentimental Value is about a famous filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who inherited the house from his aunt; she lived there after Borg’s mother, a Resistance fighter during the Second World War who was imprisoned and tortured by the SS, hanged herself in it. When Borg and his wife divorced, his wife got it in the settlement, and now his younger daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) occupies it with her husband and young son. Agnes and her sister Nora (Renate Reinsve) identify it with their childhood and especially with their mother, a therapist who has recently died of cancer. We see in a flashback that as kids they used to listen to her sessions with her patients through an old stove that carried their voices up to the second floor. Gustav, now seventy, wants to make a comeback film in this house, and he’s anxious for Nora, a well-known actress, to play the lead, a woman he insists is not based on his mother but whose story bears significant resemblance to her. Borg plans to end the movie with the protagonist’s suicide, by the same means and even in the same room as his mother’s. (When he makes the dramatic claim that she’ll even kick aside the same chair his mother did, Agnes comments quietly to her sister that the chair that now occupies that room came from IKEA.)
Nora is conscious that her involvement with the project would bring her father the financial backing he needs; she assumes that’s why he’s brought her the idea and walks out on him. She’s been angry at her father for years. A philandering alcoholic who put his career before his family, he was mostly absent from their lives, and as far as she can see he takes no interest in her work – he doesn’t make an appearance at her opening nights, and when he refers to her movies or her recent successful TV series he merely complains that the material isn’t worthy of her; she has no evidence that he’s even seen any of it. We’re startled to learn that the daughter he once directed on the screen isn’t Nora but Agnes: as a child she starred in the picture widely considered to be his masterpiece. It’s fascinating that Nora was the one who made an acting career, while her sister became a historian who sometimes conducts background research for Borg’s film projects. Trier doesn’t make the point that Nora compensated for his lack of interest in her by making a triumphant acting career; he doesn’t have to. Agnes settled down into a happy domestic life. Nora is lonely – she’s having an affair with a fellow actor, Jakob (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, the star of Trier’s movies Reprise and Oslo, August 14th), but he’s married, and as soon as he splits from his wife he distances himself from Nora. Clearly he’s about as accessible emotionally as Gustav. Nora suffers from anxiety and depression, even stage fright: in the opening scene of the movie, she almost doesn’t make it on for opening night of a new production – an episode that inevitably makes us think of Liv Ullmann’s breakdown at the beginning of Persona. (Trier includes a second visual allusion to Bergman’s movie later on, and the two generations of performers in Sentimental Value form a link to his final theatrical feature, Fanny and Alexander.)
This twisty, complicated family saga is deeply compelling, and the narrative is full of surprises. All three of the main characters are beautifully written – Trier worked on the script with Eskil Vogt – and the actors are magnificent. Reinsve garnered a great deal of enthusiastic notice for playing the leading role in Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World (also co-written with Vogt), but I thought that Lie, in a supporting part, was more interesting, though the problem may have been in the writing. Her performance in Sentimental Value rests on the tension between Nora’s toughness and her fragility. Her first scene, where she struggles to get herself in front of the audience, is mesmerizing – it’s cut up in a series of precise actions, each more ferocious than the last (she even tries to get Jakob to make love to her in the wings), until she retreats to her upstairs dressing room, and her emotions rush over her in a frightening cascade.
This twisty, complicated family saga is deeply compelling, and the narrative is full of surprises. All three of the main characters are beautifully written – Trier worked on the script with Eskil Vogt – and the actors are magnificent. Reinsve garnered a great deal of enthusiastic notice for playing the leading role in Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World (also co-written with Vogt), but I thought that Lie, in a supporting part, was more interesting, though the problem may have been in the writing. Her performance in Sentimental Value rests on the tension between Nora’s toughness and her fragility. Her first scene, where she struggles to get herself in front of the audience, is mesmerizing – it’s cut up in a series of precise actions, each more ferocious than the last (she even tries to get Jakob to make love to her in the wings), until she retreats to her upstairs dressing room, and her emotions rush over her in a frightening cascade.
Agnes is the reasonable sister, the patient one, the calming influence, and she insists that Nora has a habit of exaggerating their father’s flaws. But Agnes carries around her own resentment at him, as we find out. When he invites her son Erik to appear in the movie as the protagonist’s child, she gets furious that he didn’t consult her first. For the first time she confronts him over their relationship when she was a little girl. The weeks she spent on the movie were the high point of her childhood because she got his uninterrupted attention; when the movie wrapped, he disappeared again. She doesn’t want Erik to experience the same disappointment. (As Erik, the young Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, with his soft blonde Scandinavian looks, is a stunning camera subject.)
Gustav makes great entrances and can command any room; he’s also temperamental – he throws a reporter out of a press conference when he objects to a question – and he’s a blowhard who’s prone to pretentious generalizations about acting and film. But he’s a complicated figure who can’t be reduced to his most theatrical impulses or his worst ones. Not everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit, and his grandeur is authentic, even when he’s in his cups. And, as it turns out, he’s a man whose feelings run deep – for his mother and even more for his actress daughter, whom he understands, we learn toward the end, in ways we wouldn’t have suspected. And we can’t help sympathizing with his anger at the reporter – it’s a stupid question, and Borg is protecting his star. Skarsgård gives the performance of a distinguished career in this movie; his nomination last week for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar ignores the fact that he towers over the picture. In one potent scene he goes to see his favorite cinematographer, Peter (Lars Väringer, in a moving single-scene performance), with the hope that he’ll sign onto the picture and then discovers how frail the man has become; Gustav doesn’t say anything but Peter gets the message. This exchange is, of course, as much about the filmmaker as it is about the cinematographer: Borg is seeing his own age in his former collaborator’s. Skarsgård plays it for all its complexity – for the pity mixed with both sorrow and denial.
The actress Borg is defending in the press conference isn’t Nora, who has turned him down flat, but an appealing Hollywood star of the moment, Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning. Rachel is a serious, industrious performer, but she struggles with the role. She can’t understand why he wanted an American; she floats the idea that it might be better if she affected a Scandinavian accent. (Borg says no.) When she finally meets Nora, she expresses her confusion that Nora isn’t playing the character herself. Fanning does a fine job with a necessary but thankless part, that of an actress who isn’t connecting with the material; it’s a generous performance by a marvelous actress because for once Fanning can’t show off what I think is a dazzling talent. Borg has written a big speech for the character, but when Fanning rehearses it all we can hear is that Rachel hasn’t figured out how to make it work. Toward the end of the film Agnes shows up at Nora’s house with the screenplay, which she has just looked at for the first time, and insists that Nora read it out loud. And in this cold reading we hear everything that Rachel missed. This fantastic scene comprises a series of revelations that point the way toward the most satisfying finale of any movie of the last year.
I can’t think of a greater living dramatist than the English playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett, and The History Boys (produced in 2004 and filmed two years later) would be my choice for the best play of the twenty-first century. But the man will be ninety-two in a few months, so I didn’t really expect to see his name in the credits of a new picture. (The National Theatre produced his most recent play, Alleluia, in 2018.) The Choral, set in a Yorkshire town in 1916, isn’t among Bennett’s finest work; some episodes are misjudged and the mix of tones is sometimes jarring. But it has a becoming sweetness and considerable charm, and the large ensemble, costumed by Jenny Beavan in lovely late-Edwardian garb, performs impeccably. The director is Nicholas Hytner, formerly the artistic director of the National and currently of the Bridge; Hytner has long been associated with Bennett, and he helmed The History Boys on both stage and screen.
Gustav makes great entrances and can command any room; he’s also temperamental – he throws a reporter out of a press conference when he objects to a question – and he’s a blowhard who’s prone to pretentious generalizations about acting and film. But he’s a complicated figure who can’t be reduced to his most theatrical impulses or his worst ones. Not everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit, and his grandeur is authentic, even when he’s in his cups. And, as it turns out, he’s a man whose feelings run deep – for his mother and even more for his actress daughter, whom he understands, we learn toward the end, in ways we wouldn’t have suspected. And we can’t help sympathizing with his anger at the reporter – it’s a stupid question, and Borg is protecting his star. Skarsgård gives the performance of a distinguished career in this movie; his nomination last week for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar ignores the fact that he towers over the picture. In one potent scene he goes to see his favorite cinematographer, Peter (Lars Väringer, in a moving single-scene performance), with the hope that he’ll sign onto the picture and then discovers how frail the man has become; Gustav doesn’t say anything but Peter gets the message. This exchange is, of course, as much about the filmmaker as it is about the cinematographer: Borg is seeing his own age in his former collaborator’s. Skarsgård plays it for all its complexity – for the pity mixed with both sorrow and denial.
The actress Borg is defending in the press conference isn’t Nora, who has turned him down flat, but an appealing Hollywood star of the moment, Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning. Rachel is a serious, industrious performer, but she struggles with the role. She can’t understand why he wanted an American; she floats the idea that it might be better if she affected a Scandinavian accent. (Borg says no.) When she finally meets Nora, she expresses her confusion that Nora isn’t playing the character herself. Fanning does a fine job with a necessary but thankless part, that of an actress who isn’t connecting with the material; it’s a generous performance by a marvelous actress because for once Fanning can’t show off what I think is a dazzling talent. Borg has written a big speech for the character, but when Fanning rehearses it all we can hear is that Rachel hasn’t figured out how to make it work. Toward the end of the film Agnes shows up at Nora’s house with the screenplay, which she has just looked at for the first time, and insists that Nora read it out loud. And in this cold reading we hear everything that Rachel missed. This fantastic scene comprises a series of revelations that point the way toward the most satisfying finale of any movie of the last year.
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| Ralph Fiennes in The Choral (Photo: Sony Pictures.) |
I can’t think of a greater living dramatist than the English playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett, and The History Boys (produced in 2004 and filmed two years later) would be my choice for the best play of the twenty-first century. But the man will be ninety-two in a few months, so I didn’t really expect to see his name in the credits of a new picture. (The National Theatre produced his most recent play, Alleluia, in 2018.) The Choral, set in a Yorkshire town in 1916, isn’t among Bennett’s finest work; some episodes are misjudged and the mix of tones is sometimes jarring. But it has a becoming sweetness and considerable charm, and the large ensemble, costumed by Jenny Beavan in lovely late-Edwardian garb, performs impeccably. The director is Nicholas Hytner, formerly the artistic director of the National and currently of the Bridge; Hytner has long been associated with Bennett, and he helmed The History Boys on both stage and screen.
The movie’s focus is on the upcoming concert by the local choral society, whose ranks have been thinned by the war, and at the beginning of the picture the choirmaster, Gilbert Pollard (Thomas Howes) has decided to join up. So while its administrators, Alderman Bernard Duxbury (Roger Allam), who owns the mill that employs many of the locals, and Joe Fytton (Mark Addy), are beating the bushes for tenors, they also have to replace Pollard. The only real candidate is Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), who is currently playing piano in a hotel restaurant. Guthrie is a gifted vocal director but he has two marks against him. Before the war he was living in Germany. When a matronly gossip, one of the sopranos, whispers to one of the others that Guthrie checks the papers in the library for the naval report, her insinuation is that at worst he’s a spy, at best a German sympathizer. She doesn’t suspect the real reason – that his German lover, one of the chief reasons he was so happy living abroad, enlisted in the Navy in the first wave and Guthrie is tormented by his inability to find out if the young man is still alive. Guthrie’s homosexuality is the other mark against him; he’s not out, of course (or he’d be in prison), but Duxbury is aware of his predilection, and he’s not alone. But once Guthrie is hired and Duxbury gets him to stop quoting Goethe, the singers accept him easily enough, and the real topical problem becomes the difficulty of finding great religious music that wasn’t written by Germans. They start to rehearse the St. Matthew Passion, but someone throws a brick through the window of the church, even though they’re singing the Bach in English. Guthrie hits on an idea: to substitute The Death of Gerontius, Edward Elgar’s setting of a poem by Cardinal Newman. The piece was not received kindly at its premiere, but Guthrie is a fan. So he writes to Elgar for permission.
There’s a great deal going on in the picture. Bennett wants to deal with the way wartime and the limited availability of singers strain social traditions in the town (working-class singers, mostly Duxbury’s employees, now swell the roster of a choir that was formerly distinctly middle-class); with the ways in which the community has been affected by the losses at the front; and with the feelings of the young tenors who are approaching their eighteenth birthdays and will be recruited as soon as they do. (Pollard is too old to be conscripted; he goes voluntarily.) Fytton has the town’s photographic studio, and most of his business these days is to frame the recruits. When the singers visit a local tea room (partly to dance), a woman waves a white feather at one of the tenors, Ellis (Taylor Uttley), but he’s not cowed; he replies with an insult that drives her out of the establishment in tears, and one of his cohort offers the explanation that her son died in battle. Duxbury and his wife (Eunice Roberts) are grieving their son, and her mourning has made her reclusive and almost silent. The film’s treatment of this character is a weak point – it’s a platitude. More interesting is the dilemma of Bella Holmes (Emily Fairn), one of the sopranos. Her fiancé is missing in action, and after a while she confesses to her friends that she’d rather get the telegram announcing his death than have her life stalled indefinitely. (Ellis’s pal Lofty, played by Oliver Bascombe, has the awkward job of delivering those missives.) When Ellis begins to court her, she falls for him, and then her intended, Clyde (Jacob Dudman), shows up at her door with one arm missing, out of the service forever.
The singers find the Elgar challenging, but as the concert approaches they begin to get the music into their bones. In a montage we see them practicing as they bike and swim, and for a few glorious moments The Choral becomes an old-fashioned backstage musical. But in essence that’s what it’s been all along, though enhanced by the wartime trauma and social commentary: just like Babes in Arms or Topsy-Turvy, it’s about putting on a show despite all the obstacles in its path. During auditions Guthrie finds his principal soprano in a mill worker named Mary (Amara Okereke) who belongs to the Salvation Army; she’s wildly talented – the obvious choice – though it’s unconvincing that no one in this time and place seems to mind that she’s Black. (Tia Jordan Radix-Callixte sings for Okereke.) But Duxbury is bankrolling the choral society so he’s always been awarded the leading bass parts, and he’s a terrible singer. Guthrie is stuck with him until Clyde, who sang in the choir before he went to war, appears and it turns out he sings splendidly. (Dudman’s singing is dubbed by Hugo Brady.) Guthrie’s pianist, Robert Horner (Robert Emms), who chooses to be a conscientious objector when he’s called up, is offended by the fact that, while young men are dying every day on the front, the choral society is preparing a piece about the death of an old man, and he persuades Guthrie to update the narrative, with the Angel, Mary’s role, as a nurse. But of course Guthrie can’t let Elgar know, or he’s sure to withdraw his delighted permission.
Fiennes and Allam give the strongest performances and Simon Russell Beale scores a scene-stealing cameo as Elgar, but the younger actors, none of whom I recognized, are excellent, especially Fairn and Emms, whose character is not only morally opposed to the war but also a gay man who’s hopelessly in love with Guthrie. Hytner has given some of the supporting players lovely grace notes, like Lyndsey Marshal as Mrs. Bishop, the local prostitute (she’s in the choir too), who gives Lofty a freebie the night before he goes off to war; before he leaves her bedroom, she tells him to be careful, then turns away sadly as she realizes how useless her advice is. It’s a perfect acting moment. Bennett has given Dudman most of the melodramatic scenes; it’s to the actor’s credit that he doesn’t disgrace himself. On the other hand, the staging of the handmade battle scene where Gerontius, newly reconceived as a young soldier, is killed, is legitimately affecting.
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet is a sometimes touching examination of grief over the loss of a child, and it has a wonderful ending, where Shakespeare’s wife attends Hamlet by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in London at the dawn of the seventeenth century and understands it as an expression of his anguish over the plague death of their young son, Hamnet. But O’Farrell’s writing isn’t distinctive; it’s on the level of a moderately skilled creative writing grad student. And her refusal to identify the main characters as William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway – he’s never referred to by name and she’s called Agnes - struck me as affected, as if she were playing games with the reader, who obviously knows who they are. It can’t be that O’Farrell wants us to think that their story can be generalized to that of all parents in mourning over a child; only the death of this child prompted the writing of Hamlet. It’s an idea she didn’t think through, and it’s a stupid one.
Given the book’s critical and popular reception – and of course its subject matter – a movie adaptation was inevitable. But it’s hard to think of a worse choice to direct it than Chloé Zhao, though I suppose that was inevitable too. Zhao won the Oscar for Nomadland, that phony-baloney trek through the lives of nomads in the days following the 2008 financial downturn with Frances McDormand posing as an unmoored working-class woman. When McDormand won her Academy Award (her second), her acceptance speech was framed as a feminist declaration. It was also, even by Hollywood standards, shamelessly self-promoting, and in a way it was a mirror image of the offensively fake performance she’d won for. The movie won too – a clean sweep. But Oscar or no Oscar, putting Zhao at the helm of a film taken from a high-profile novel with a period setting that is supposed to take us through the very differently experience of grief of a mother and a father is a dreadful choice. She’s hopeless at directing actors, she has no eye (her camerawork is graceless, and Hamnet isn’t even lit decently) and she doesn’t have a dramatic impulse in her.
Zhao’s collaborator on the screenplay is O’Farrell herself, which doesn’t help because the book is completely undramatic, and they treat it like a sacred object that needs to be presented in all its purity. A novel doesn’t need to be dramatic, but a movie had better be. And it should make sense, filling in the empty spaces in the book. Transferred to the screen, Hamnet exposes all the holes in the narrative; it’s like one of those bad Tony Award-winning plays that look much more glaringly bad under the merciless eye of the camera. In the movie, when Shakespeare (Paul Mezcal) sits down to write his first play, you wonder where he got the notion, since we never see him attend a play or even read one. Yet one day he leaves Stratford for London and somehow gets hooked up with the most important theatrical company of the age. Would it have been a sacrilege for Zhao to insert some basic scenes showing him discovering London and the theatre? When he starts making enough money to build his family the biggest house in Stratford, it never occurs to Agnes (Jessie Buckley) to ask him what he does for a living. Some months later he returns to London. Eventually her stepmother comes by to tell her he’s written a play whose title is a variation on the name of their child. So she and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) travel to the Globe Theatre to see it performed, and she behaves as if had no idea what a play is. Stratford isn’t some backwater. At the very least she would have seen the Corpus Christi plays performed annually in the town square, as they were all over Europe. Has Agnes been living on Mars?
Instead of plot logic we get an overlay of hippie-dippy nature-girl feminism: the opening shot places Agnes, whose mother taught her homeopathic medicine and spells, under an ancient tree, and she wants to birth her children in the woods. (Nomadland had a worked-up feminist aura, too that contradicted the film’s premise: its protagonist’s longing for freedom was at odds with the idea that it’s society that abandons her, not the other way around. Also there was something creepy about presenting a woman who loses her job and her home as the embodiment of some romantic ideal.) And though the movie’s two leading actors are highly respected veterans of quite a few films, for acting values Zhao substitutes pompous showboating (in Mezcal’s case) and blurry emotionalism (in Buckley’s). Buckley is one of the most talented young women acting in movies right now, but she has nothing to play in Hamnet but emotions, and without actions and objectives a performance has no dramatic shape. So she’s stuck – snagged on writing that lies on the screen like a series of tree stumps. If you want to observe the difference between emoting and real acting, take a look at what Emily Watson does in her scenes as William’s mother, especially the one where she recounts her realization that our children aren’t given to us – that they can be snatched away at any moment.
Aside from Watson’s scenes the movie doesn’t come to life until the end, when we see pieces of Hamlet through Agnes’s eyes – first the appearance of the Ghost (played by Shakespeare himself), then “To be or not to be,” and the blood-spattered finale. Hamlet is played by Noah Jupe (who made an impression in Honey Boy and Ford v. Ferrari and the Quiet Place pictures); he stumbles over the most famous soliloquy but does rather well with “too too solid flesh,” and the fact that Zhao has featured his kid brother Jacobi as Hamnet is smart casting. Suddenly Mezcal stops playacting and drops into the character for the first time. But we’re focused on Buckley, whose rendering of Agnes’s unspoken thoughts and feelings is, for the first time, precise and evocative.
There’s a great deal going on in the picture. Bennett wants to deal with the way wartime and the limited availability of singers strain social traditions in the town (working-class singers, mostly Duxbury’s employees, now swell the roster of a choir that was formerly distinctly middle-class); with the ways in which the community has been affected by the losses at the front; and with the feelings of the young tenors who are approaching their eighteenth birthdays and will be recruited as soon as they do. (Pollard is too old to be conscripted; he goes voluntarily.) Fytton has the town’s photographic studio, and most of his business these days is to frame the recruits. When the singers visit a local tea room (partly to dance), a woman waves a white feather at one of the tenors, Ellis (Taylor Uttley), but he’s not cowed; he replies with an insult that drives her out of the establishment in tears, and one of his cohort offers the explanation that her son died in battle. Duxbury and his wife (Eunice Roberts) are grieving their son, and her mourning has made her reclusive and almost silent. The film’s treatment of this character is a weak point – it’s a platitude. More interesting is the dilemma of Bella Holmes (Emily Fairn), one of the sopranos. Her fiancé is missing in action, and after a while she confesses to her friends that she’d rather get the telegram announcing his death than have her life stalled indefinitely. (Ellis’s pal Lofty, played by Oliver Bascombe, has the awkward job of delivering those missives.) When Ellis begins to court her, she falls for him, and then her intended, Clyde (Jacob Dudman), shows up at her door with one arm missing, out of the service forever.
The singers find the Elgar challenging, but as the concert approaches they begin to get the music into their bones. In a montage we see them practicing as they bike and swim, and for a few glorious moments The Choral becomes an old-fashioned backstage musical. But in essence that’s what it’s been all along, though enhanced by the wartime trauma and social commentary: just like Babes in Arms or Topsy-Turvy, it’s about putting on a show despite all the obstacles in its path. During auditions Guthrie finds his principal soprano in a mill worker named Mary (Amara Okereke) who belongs to the Salvation Army; she’s wildly talented – the obvious choice – though it’s unconvincing that no one in this time and place seems to mind that she’s Black. (Tia Jordan Radix-Callixte sings for Okereke.) But Duxbury is bankrolling the choral society so he’s always been awarded the leading bass parts, and he’s a terrible singer. Guthrie is stuck with him until Clyde, who sang in the choir before he went to war, appears and it turns out he sings splendidly. (Dudman’s singing is dubbed by Hugo Brady.) Guthrie’s pianist, Robert Horner (Robert Emms), who chooses to be a conscientious objector when he’s called up, is offended by the fact that, while young men are dying every day on the front, the choral society is preparing a piece about the death of an old man, and he persuades Guthrie to update the narrative, with the Angel, Mary’s role, as a nurse. But of course Guthrie can’t let Elgar know, or he’s sure to withdraw his delighted permission.
Fiennes and Allam give the strongest performances and Simon Russell Beale scores a scene-stealing cameo as Elgar, but the younger actors, none of whom I recognized, are excellent, especially Fairn and Emms, whose character is not only morally opposed to the war but also a gay man who’s hopelessly in love with Guthrie. Hytner has given some of the supporting players lovely grace notes, like Lyndsey Marshal as Mrs. Bishop, the local prostitute (she’s in the choir too), who gives Lofty a freebie the night before he goes off to war; before he leaves her bedroom, she tells him to be careful, then turns away sadly as she realizes how useless her advice is. It’s a perfect acting moment. Bennett has given Dudman most of the melodramatic scenes; it’s to the actor’s credit that he doesn’t disgrace himself. On the other hand, the staging of the handmade battle scene where Gerontius, newly reconceived as a young soldier, is killed, is legitimately affecting.
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| Jessie Buckley, center, and Joe Alwyn, just right of Buckley, in Hamnet. (Photo: Agata Grzybowska, Focus Features.) |
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet is a sometimes touching examination of grief over the loss of a child, and it has a wonderful ending, where Shakespeare’s wife attends Hamlet by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in London at the dawn of the seventeenth century and understands it as an expression of his anguish over the plague death of their young son, Hamnet. But O’Farrell’s writing isn’t distinctive; it’s on the level of a moderately skilled creative writing grad student. And her refusal to identify the main characters as William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway – he’s never referred to by name and she’s called Agnes - struck me as affected, as if she were playing games with the reader, who obviously knows who they are. It can’t be that O’Farrell wants us to think that their story can be generalized to that of all parents in mourning over a child; only the death of this child prompted the writing of Hamlet. It’s an idea she didn’t think through, and it’s a stupid one.
Given the book’s critical and popular reception – and of course its subject matter – a movie adaptation was inevitable. But it’s hard to think of a worse choice to direct it than Chloé Zhao, though I suppose that was inevitable too. Zhao won the Oscar for Nomadland, that phony-baloney trek through the lives of nomads in the days following the 2008 financial downturn with Frances McDormand posing as an unmoored working-class woman. When McDormand won her Academy Award (her second), her acceptance speech was framed as a feminist declaration. It was also, even by Hollywood standards, shamelessly self-promoting, and in a way it was a mirror image of the offensively fake performance she’d won for. The movie won too – a clean sweep. But Oscar or no Oscar, putting Zhao at the helm of a film taken from a high-profile novel with a period setting that is supposed to take us through the very differently experience of grief of a mother and a father is a dreadful choice. She’s hopeless at directing actors, she has no eye (her camerawork is graceless, and Hamnet isn’t even lit decently) and she doesn’t have a dramatic impulse in her.
Zhao’s collaborator on the screenplay is O’Farrell herself, which doesn’t help because the book is completely undramatic, and they treat it like a sacred object that needs to be presented in all its purity. A novel doesn’t need to be dramatic, but a movie had better be. And it should make sense, filling in the empty spaces in the book. Transferred to the screen, Hamnet exposes all the holes in the narrative; it’s like one of those bad Tony Award-winning plays that look much more glaringly bad under the merciless eye of the camera. In the movie, when Shakespeare (Paul Mezcal) sits down to write his first play, you wonder where he got the notion, since we never see him attend a play or even read one. Yet one day he leaves Stratford for London and somehow gets hooked up with the most important theatrical company of the age. Would it have been a sacrilege for Zhao to insert some basic scenes showing him discovering London and the theatre? When he starts making enough money to build his family the biggest house in Stratford, it never occurs to Agnes (Jessie Buckley) to ask him what he does for a living. Some months later he returns to London. Eventually her stepmother comes by to tell her he’s written a play whose title is a variation on the name of their child. So she and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) travel to the Globe Theatre to see it performed, and she behaves as if had no idea what a play is. Stratford isn’t some backwater. At the very least she would have seen the Corpus Christi plays performed annually in the town square, as they were all over Europe. Has Agnes been living on Mars?
Instead of plot logic we get an overlay of hippie-dippy nature-girl feminism: the opening shot places Agnes, whose mother taught her homeopathic medicine and spells, under an ancient tree, and she wants to birth her children in the woods. (Nomadland had a worked-up feminist aura, too that contradicted the film’s premise: its protagonist’s longing for freedom was at odds with the idea that it’s society that abandons her, not the other way around. Also there was something creepy about presenting a woman who loses her job and her home as the embodiment of some romantic ideal.) And though the movie’s two leading actors are highly respected veterans of quite a few films, for acting values Zhao substitutes pompous showboating (in Mezcal’s case) and blurry emotionalism (in Buckley’s). Buckley is one of the most talented young women acting in movies right now, but she has nothing to play in Hamnet but emotions, and without actions and objectives a performance has no dramatic shape. So she’s stuck – snagged on writing that lies on the screen like a series of tree stumps. If you want to observe the difference between emoting and real acting, take a look at what Emily Watson does in her scenes as William’s mother, especially the one where she recounts her realization that our children aren’t given to us – that they can be snatched away at any moment.
Aside from Watson’s scenes the movie doesn’t come to life until the end, when we see pieces of Hamlet through Agnes’s eyes – first the appearance of the Ghost (played by Shakespeare himself), then “To be or not to be,” and the blood-spattered finale. Hamlet is played by Noah Jupe (who made an impression in Honey Boy and Ford v. Ferrari and the Quiet Place pictures); he stumbles over the most famous soliloquy but does rather well with “too too solid flesh,” and the fact that Zhao has featured his kid brother Jacobi as Hamnet is smart casting. Suddenly Mezcal stops playacting and drops into the character for the first time. But we’re focused on Buckley, whose rendering of Agnes’s unspoken thoughts and feelings is, for the first time, precise and evocative.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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