Grief and The Goshawk: H Is for Hawk and Other Recent Movies

Claire Foy in H Is for Hawk. (Photo: Roadside Pictures.)

Among the books I brought with me on a trip at the end of my semester break this year was a lovely recent memoir called Raising Hare in which the author, Claire Dalton, who has grown up with the principle that human beings should never interfere with the workings of the wild, chronicles the discovery of a leveret on her land, close to death. Despite her predilections, Dalton makes the decision to try to save the young hare’s life and then, instinctually, begins to share her home – exterior and interior – with this creature with which she’s fallen in love, redesigning it to accommodate its needs and comforts.

Raising Hare is an intimate, continually surprising delight. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s 2014 book about how her devastating grief over the unexpected death of her photographer father, to whom she always felt closest, compelled her to train a goshawk, is more; it’s a small masterpiece. Macdonald was a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge when she lost her father, studying the history and philosophy of science and animal behavior – especially ornithology. A fascination with animals was a passion they shared, but it would be reductive and not terribly interesting to say that training Mabel, her hawk, was simply a tribute to him. Macdonald never explains how her sense of loss plummets her into this radical and intensely challenging activity, but the book is full of unspoken answers. She finds a creature to love in a wild, intense, immediate way that grabs her by the heart and bypasses reasoning. She gets in touch with an elemental side of life. And – as her mother warned her not to do – she loses herself. She hides at home, pushing away visitors. She forgets about a session of a class she’s teaching. She doesn’t apply for a scholarship she’d counted on. She doesn’t get around to figuring out where she’s going to live after her research fellowship is finished. She comes close to falling out of touch with her mother and brother. She almost tumbles off the edge of the world. What seems to save her is the eulogy she has promised to deliver at her father’s memorial, which she doesn’t write until the last minute – well, the eulogy and Mabel, who simultaneously pulls her away from her life and offers her a new one.

Her obsession with training a goshawk begins with a series of dreams. Macdonald is a magnificent writer. Here’s an excerpt from the section where she describes one of her dreams after her father’s death, which is also a memory:

A few years earlier, I’d worked at a bird-of-prey centre right at the edge of England before it tips into Wales; a land of red earth, coal-workings, wet forest and wild goshawks. This one, an adult female, had hit a fence while hunting and knocked herself out. Someone had picked her up, unconscious, put her in a cardboard box and brought her to us. Was anything broken? Was she damaged? We congregated in a darkened room with the box on the table and the boss reached her gloved left hand inside. A short scuffle, and then out into the gloom, her grey crest raised and her barred chest feathers puffed up into a meringue of aggression and fear, came a huge old female goshawk. Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thundercloud. She completely filled the room. She had a massive back of sun-bleached grey feathers, was as muscled as a pit bull . . . So wild and spooky and reptilian . . . Then she turned her head to stare right at me. Locked her eyes on mine down her curved black beak, black pupils fixed. Then, right then, it occurred to me that this goshawk was bigger than me and more important. And much, much older: a dinosaur pulled from the Forest of Dean. There was a distinct, prehistoric scent to her feathers; it caught in my nose, peppery, rusty as storm-rain.

The movie version of H Is for Hawk slipped in and out of theatres like a furtive guest around Christmas. I missed seeing it during the single week it played in Boston, screening once or maybe twice a day, but it’s now available on Prime. It’s marvelous – beautifully directed (by Philippa Lowthorpe), scripted (by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue) and shot (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen). And it’s flawlessly acted by a cast that features Claire Foy as Helen and includes Lindsay Duncan as Helen’s mother, Denise Gough as her best friend Christina – who fights calmly but persistently against Helen’s efforts to keep herself in isolation – and Sam Spruell as Stuart, who finds her a hawk and counsels her throughout its training. Brendan Gleeson plays her father in flashbacks: they’re only glimpses, but they display the often rambunctious camaraderie between them. (We realize that one of the many priceless lessons he taught her was to refuse to let the world determine which rules you should follow; together they’re a pair of joyous misfits.) It’s a supporting role, of course, but Gleeson is sensational in it. It’s one of those small performances that dominates a film, like Vanessa Redgrave in Julia, and lives on in your head when the actor’s not on camera. Gleeson is one of my favorite actors, and I thought his work in The Banshees of Inisherin was a career high for him, but in a way what he does here is just as profound, just as revealing. We learn in the course of the picture that Helen had a twin brother who lived for just a few hours. In one scene she brings up the subject, and in perhaps a minute and a half of screen time Gleeson conveys her father’s own undying grief, as resistant as an eternal flame.

It's clear that this potent whisper of her father’s sense of irreparable loss is meant to reflect Helen’s anguish, which we have seen throughout the film. (Her mother calls her with the terrible news just a few minutes into the movie.) And I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor express grief in quite the way Foy does in H Is for Hawk. It’s disfiguring – it pebbles her face, cracking it into a mosaic of conflicting emotions. It dribbles out of her quavering mouth; it burrows into her eyes. When, especially in the early stages of Mabel’s training, Helen is terrified that she’s going at it all wrong and she’s bound to fail disastrously and lose her hawk, Foy drags us into the depths of her horror and shame at what she’s sure is an unforgivable inadequacy. We understand without explicatory dialogue – the understatement of this screenplay is, I think, a genuine achievement – that she’s transferred her feelings about her father to her feelings about her very much alive hawk. No one who’s seen Foy on The Crown or caught her in All of Us Strangers needs to be told that she’s a brilliant actress; her lesser-known work in Breathe and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and the British miniseries Little Dorrit confirm that impression. She scales an entirely different peak in H Is for Hawk. The performance has two indelible scenes: Helen’s presentation of her experience with Mabel at a seminar, where the superficial, argumentative interruptions of one of the attendees drives her almost to the point of hysteria, and her reading of the eulogy for her beloved father. The second is a revelatory moment where she suddenly sees – as we do – what she has missed, or forgotten: that the essential thing her father taught her throughout her life by embodying it himself was to engage with life with her very soul, not to distance herself from it.

And finally, Mabel the goshawk is exquisite.

Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. (Photo: A24 Pictures.)

Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie from a script he wrote with Ronald Bronstein, is terrible, but it isn’t exactly boring. It bops along for two and a half hours as its anti-hero, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), manipulates everyone around him into (mostly) doing what he asks of them through a bewildering mix of seduction, desperate pleading, and talking louder and faster than they do, drowning out their objections by refusing to shut down his motor mouth. The film is set in New York in 1952. Marty works in his Uncle Murray’s shoe store but wants to make his mark by beating the world’s table tennis champion, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), in the games in Tokyo. His first challenge is Murray (Larry Ratso Sloman), who doesn’t want to lose him because he’s such a good salesman so he refuses to pay him until he signs a contract to stay on; the only way Marty can wangle his wages out of him is at gunpoint. Once he no longer has a job, Marty has to rely on friends and relatives to keep him afloat. Searching for a way to get to Japan, he almost manages to persuade a pen-and-ink millionaire named Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) to bankroll him, but Marty is so arrogant and obstinate that he loses his chance – evidently convinced that chutzpah will get him what he wants when reasoning doesn’t, he actually makes a crack about Rockwell’s son, who died in the Second World War. (To be fair, Rockwell is at least as obnoxious as Marty is.) He also sleeps with Rockwell’s wife Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), a one-time movie star making a comeback on stage in a third-rate Tennessee Williams knock-off. Marty’s other obstacle is Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), a married childhood friend he has been sleeping who insists that the child she’s carrying belongs to him and not to the scuzzy, unappetizing guy she’s married to (Emory Cohen, whose work in Brooklyn and Roofman demonstrated talents he doesn’t get to use in this picture). Marty also gets involved with a gangster (played by the film director Abel Ferrara) whose dog he promises to take care of when the bathtub Marty is using in a low-rent hotel room crashes through the floor and Marty has to wedge dog and owner out from under it. (This scene may chart a new low in cringeworthiness.)

Some of these plot points are rearrangements of details from a movie I love, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which is about a folksinger struggling through the end of the folk movement in the clubs of Greenwich Village – though the tones and styles of the two pictures are so different that it took me most of the running time of Marty Supreme to make the connection. Both movies ask us to feel compassion for a character who’s essentially unlikable, but I didn’t have a problem with that idea in Llewyn Davis because the title character is a gifted, hard-working artist stranded in an era he’s outlived and cursed with a back-breaking load of dreadful luck. Marty is a great ping-pong player, which, if you’ll excuse my narrow-mindedness, doesn’t strike me as a comparable talent. Llewyn keeps going despite all the signs that he’s never going to get anywhere because it’s who he is. When he hitchhikes to Chicago and talks his way into an audition with a legendary folk manager (F. Murray Abraham, in a role based on Albert Grossman), his performance is so mesmerizing that we expect one of those moments in a musical bio (Inside Llewyn Davis is a fictionalized version of the life of Dave Van Rock, one of Bob Dylan’s influences) where a virtual unknown blows his listeners away – like Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash singing “Folsom Prison Blues” for Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Walk the Line. So we hold our breath, but Abraham’s only response is that he doesn’t hear the sound of money. Marty Supreme gives its protagonist a moment of triumph followed by an unconvincing happy ending, but it isn’t the same. Why the hell should we care what happens to him?

Timothée Chalamet was awful in his early movies – the ones that made him a star, like Call Me by Your Name – but then, slowly, his acting seemed to acquire a consciousness, and he turned out to have a sense of humor. I wasn’t enchanted with his Bob Dylan, but I didn’t think that was the actor’s fault. A Complete Unknown was deliberately structured around Dylan’s mystery, so aside from his remarkably skillful imitation I couldn’t find much to connect to. I didn’t buy the idea that we weren’t supposed to get inside the character because he was, you know, a complete unknown; I thought the logical response to all that praise was Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, whose character was ultimately unfathomable yet Scorsese and the actor placed us squarely inside him. In Marty Supreme, though, Chalamet seems to be moving backwards. He does exactly the same thing in every scene; both his female co-stars, Paltrow and A’zion, are wittier and more compelling, but he has twice as much screen time as the two of them put together. His reviews and Academy Award nomination seem to be automatic outgrowths of the fact that he played Dylan the last time out and now everyone assumes he’s the one to watch. There was a great deal of truly dazzling work from male performances from last year – Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value, Hugh Jackman in Song Sung Blue, Channing Tatum in Roofman, De Niro’s utterly neglected double turn in The Alto Knights and, God knows, Ethan Hawke’s breathtaking portrayal of Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon. Chalamet makes more sheer noise than any of them, but he didn’t even get on my radar.

The table-tennis acrobatics are amusing, and the movie contains one good joke: Rachel turns out to be just as much a scam artist as Marty is. And Marty Supreme has an indisputable virtue, Darius Khondji’s luminous cinematography, which works ingeniously against the grungy New York settings and the even grungier cast of characters. (Every time Ferrara shows up you want to step out for some fresh air.) Josh Safdie and his old directing partner, his brother Benny, have gone their separate ways for the moment, but you don’t get the sense that this movie was made by someone whose sensibilities have changed since Good Time and that insufferable screamfest Uncut Gems. I guess you could say that the general enthusiasm for movies like Marty Supreme and last year’s Oscar winner Anora is generational, but I don’t get the appeal of being trapped for two and a half hours with relentless narcissists whose ranting comes without an “on/off” button. I walked out on Anora because Mikey Madison’s screeching was starting to make my head pound. At least Chalamet only shouts.

Jodie Foster in A Private Life (Vie privée). (Photo: Jérôme Prébois.)

In A Private Life (Une vie privée), Jodie Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American-born shrink living in Paris, who receives the startling news that one of her patients, Paula Cohen-Solal (played by Virginie Efira in flashbacks), has died suddenly. Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) invites Lilian to the memorial but when she arrives, Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) becomes hysterical and throws her out. It turns out that Paula committed suicide with the pills Lilian prescribed for her, and Simon blames her for his wife’s death. Lilian is cautious and doesn’t do well with feelings; her son Julien (Vincent Lacoste) has always found her emotionally withholding, and she seems reluctant to spend any time with her new grandson. She’s a skeptic, yet Paula’s demise unsettles her enough that she winds up seeing a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) and arriving at the conclusion that her patient was murdered.

The movie was directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, who filmed Other People’s Children, a superb drama that Efira starred in a few years ago as a woman who makes a close connection with her boyfriend’s daughter and then has to deal with an unexpected sense of loss when he returns to his wife. (Efira is still unknown here but she’s a star in France, where the range of her work suggests that of Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1980s and 90s. Her role in A Private Life is a cameo, but she brings elegance and sophistication to it.) I enjoyed A Private Life very much, but it certainly isn’t what I’d expected. The script, which Zlotowski wrote with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, has fun with the subject of psychiatry and handles the murder mystery with a light hand -- which is just as well, because the plot is scrappy and the dreamy hypnotics stuff is baffling. Though it isn’t a farce, it’s nutty, and the film it brought most strongly to mind for me was Woody Allen’s 1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery, where Diane Keaton plays a woman who becomes convinced that her neighbor (Jerry Adler) has killed his wife and drags at first a playwright friend (Alan Alda) and then her husband (Allen) into her attempt to prove her theory. In A Private Life Lilian confides in her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) and he becomes her amateur detective partner. At the beginning of Manhattan Murder Mystery Keaton’s engagement with the supposed crime makes Allen crazy, while Alda encourages her, but as soon as she and Allen discover a piece of evidence together he’s down for the ride. The movie is really about a middle-aged couple who refresh their marriage through adventure, and A Private Life follows the same path. Foster and Auteuil are terrific together – witty, warm and sexy. And it brought another bonus: the day after I saw it I settled down with Manhattan Murder Mystery, which I hadn’t seen in more than three decades. 

– 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.