A Grief Observed: HAMNET

A problem with every movie about Shakespeare’s life is that it constantly invites comparison to Shakespeare's works. Shrugging off a middling movie by saying “well, what’d you expect, it’s not Shakespeare” is a lot harder when the Bard is actually on screen. Add to that the known unknowns of his life, and any attempt at dramatizing it becomes a tantalizing case study in speculation at best. If I could wish any author’s autobiography into existence, it’d be his. Not only would it clear up a lot of conspiratorial wishful thinking surrounding him, it’d be, one hopes, further examples of his richness of language and ear for dramatic depth of character. But, in its absence, I suppose it’s only fair that other writers take a crack at getting in his head. He certainly used historical figures for his own dramatic flourishes and poetic license, so why not? In the case of Hamnet, we focus in on Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) through the birth of his children with Anne (Jessie Buckley) and then skip ahead to the death of one of their children in the plague. It’s the exact mirror image of Shakespeare in Love. (Call it Shakespeare in Grief.) Where that film is clever fanciful froth, this is quiet speculative sorrow. It is subtle to the point of emptiness at times, but builds to a considerable tearful conclusion. 

It keeps his career largely off screen until a climactic abridged and reduced Hamlet. Instead the focus is on the wind through the trees and murmuring in dimly lit rooms and the spoken and unspoken emotional transactions of life in a family. Sometimes they trade kisses and care; other times they cry in intense close up. It’s a movie about child death, after all. It’s not difficult to make that hit hard. Other times the period details of muddy boots and inky parchment squish or scritch scratch away on the margins like a casual reenactment serving as a replacement for memorable scenes. It’s a movie that’s all mood. Because it's a largely quiet, domestic movie, it earns its interest in grace notes and fleeting moments. But there’s also a sense that it’s gliding along the surface, trading off its actors’ fine interiority and patience instead of digging in and making meatier scenes beyond sniffling and staring and murmuring. Writer-director Chloé Zhao is usually pretty good at the surface details like that, attentive to the quality of light across a landscape or the flicker of expressions across an actor’s face. Given the right words, her aesthetic sparkles to life. Her Nomadland’s best scene is an extemporaneous recitation of a Shakespearean sonnet bringing strangers closer. It matches the transcendence of the natural world with the uplift of art. 

Here, co-writing with Maggie O’Farrell adapting her novel of the same name, the moment where the movie goes from interesting and small and cold to something grander and moving, is in that final performance, where we see his deep loss transmuted into theatrical tragedy. It’s a sequence teetering on the edge of preposterous as it begins, but suddenly we fall into the rhythms of Hamlet on stage. With Noah Jupe playing an actor playing the lead, its power draws an audience out of itself into a pure communion of catharsis between actor and crowd. It’s a deeply powerful moment that also pulls the movie out of itself and into something greater than everything before. The problem of every film about making a real work of great art is if it could possibly add meaningfully upon the experience of the art itself. (The dreary Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere struggled mightily there just a month ago.) And not many movies would survive direct compassion to Hamlet. Indeed, not even many Hamlet adaptations do. And nor does Hamnet. But Zhao’s film somehow manages to pull off a finale so moving it dilutes any complaints the rest of the movie accumulates. It’s a movie merely playacting something painfully real, but somehow gets realer when it’s about literal play acting. 

Almighty Then: ETERNALS

The first thing we see in Eternals, before the first sequence and even before the Marvel Studios logo, are the words “In the beginning…” Lifting from the Bible for an opening info dump sure sets a tone. You can tell right away this is a superhero movie of unusual hubris. Here we find the creators of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, high off the smash culmination of their first multi-franchise finale, 2019’s absurdly popular Avengers Endgame, starting to mistake their comic book lore for actual mythology and take it as seriously as the ancients did.

The result is a centuries-spanning story following immortal beings sent to Earth to guide humankind’s development by protecting people from carnivorous computer-generated critters until such time that enormous intergalactic celestial masters send for their return. They’ve mostly done that job, and are in their 500th year of waiting for the next assignment, when the Eternals must confront an apocalyptic threat of which only they are aware, since the seeds of this destruction have been incubating since prehistoric times. So, although the main thrust of the movie is the far-flung members of the mostly-disbanded team wandering around collecting their compatriots one at a time to confront this crisis, the movie begins with the dawn of the Bronze Age and contains numerous flashbacks to a number of ancient cultures and modern historical moments. The mix of real myth and history with Marvel’s filigrees is sometimes fun—I liked how the Eternals are an explanation for gods and heroes of yore (Athena, Gilgamesh, and so on)—but just as often it is slathered with a phony religiosity that amplifies the sometimes chintzy visual thinking and cliched writing on display. It’s a cosmic leap with an anvil tied to its feet.

Inspired by characters from Jack Kirby, the movie lacks his spark of divine madness in dashing out incomprehensible intergalactic gods and monsters. But it does have ambition I want to admire. It stretches across time and space, concerns itself with the birth and death of the universe and the alien midwives of solar systems. That’s potentially profound nonsense. The movie is at its best when it deals casually with the intersection of the mortal and immortal. Some of their kind seems to float above it all—Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek dimming their bright star-power to intone exposition and disappear into muddy colors. But others are in direct collision between their ageless powers and human fragility. Leader Sersi (Gemma Chan) tentatively romances a mortal teacher (Kit Harington). Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) has enjoyed being every member of a Bollywood dynasty, hiding his finger-gun powers for a song-and-dance screen heroism. A perpetually-preteen Sprite (Lia McHugh) has some pathos derived from never growing older. (There are also some odd questions about her the movie just barely skirts around.) Technologically inclined Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) laments what humans have done with his gifts to them, while the mind-controlling Druig (Barry Keoghan) wishes he could just zap the minds of the masses and quell all conflict. (Worth a shot, right?) The movie gazes at their conflicts from an inhuman remove, but the camera hovers close to their whispered melodrama and angst. We can see why they haven’t done more to help stop humanity’s problems—they’re too busy moping around about it. They love us from afar, distant gods shaking their heads and wandering away for awhile.

The movie perches this massive idea on the usual Marvel mechanics—super-beings on a MacGuffin quest in route to a final effects reel—and writing. The gears turn. The simple story is told complicatedly to preserve meager surprises. The balance is all out of whack, cosmological woo-woo cut with a soupçon of deflating quips. As the team assembles for the climactic showdown, they banter and quip and feel sorry for the state of humanity and themselves. The apocalypse is well on its way, and the only way to stop it is for them to take drastic action on the margins of our awareness. Somehow the movie gathers both real portent and dopey interpersonal japes. There are some lovely or amusing character beats bubbling up in what’s otherwise drowned in the po-faced pseudo-spirituality draped over the sunlit hero shots and awestruck sentimentality. The film comes to us from writer-director Chloe Zhao, who has so often been good at that exact balance, a neo-Malickian flair for star personas set against quotidian beauty of her cultural tourism. But here it lacks the poetic gleam that animated her indie character studies against the backdrop of the American West, like The Rider or her Oscar-winning Nomadland. It does film most of its big sequences outdoors, which does lend the images a different texture than the usual Marvel green-screen, parking-lot blandness.

Small pleasures in an enormous, occasionally confused bore is par for the course with this mega-franchise lately, but this one wrestles over it more than most. The issue sits in the unbalanced approach, spinning wildly, if cheaply, to humanize characters who are themselves entirely apart from us. The usual Marvel cutting-down-to-size works with heroes who deal with real human emotion. Here, though, we’re in the realm of myth, and the lightness sometimes clangs. So, too, the attempts to stare up at these deities, which is the more interesting cosmic philosophical tussling—faint echoes of Snyder’s DC approach. (Interestingly Superman and Batman are referenced as often as Iron Man and Captain America in this movie.) It literalizes the latent authoritarianism that sits uncomfortably beneath the MCU’s worst impulses of the sort that assure us the powerful have our best interests at heart and we should just let them take unilateral action on our behalf. (It still chafes that Civil War made this argument flat out.) Eternals wrestles with the idea, with a calamity that truly only these heroes could address, and makes the villain ultimately think bringing about the end of the world will benefit him personally. (He must vote Republican.) But it also goes easy on its Eternals, with obvious decisions to make amid jokes and juggling tones that cheapens the film’s fleeting ideas. The machinery doesn’t let the movie express its philosophy visually, dumping it into the cast’s poses and monologues before making them just another set of action figures to move around the board. It ends as they all do, with last-minute rescues, slam-back fisticuffs, swirling pixels, and a chain of teases for future MCU projects. So it goes.

On the Road Again: NOMADLAND

Fern lives out of her van. “I’m not homeless,” she insists. “I’m houseless. There’s a difference.” She does build occasional community around herself, but even then she just as often floats on the margins at truck stops, and RV parks, and national parks, in addition to whatever odd jobs she picks up throughout the year we follow her. There’s the seasonal help at an Amazon fulfillment center, the maintenance at a park, the help in a kitchen. She drives from Nevada to Arizona to the Dakotas. She meets people who are also on the road for a variety of reasons — they’re off the grid, impoverished, retired. They’re largely friendly, and contain multitudes. Money is tight, but Fern rarely seems to mind. She keeps to herself, exchanges pleasantries, hangs out with some good buddies. She shows off her van—how she’s built room for a bed, and counter space, and storage for the bucket she uses as a bathroom. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland sticks close to her, building a plainspoken portrait of this life on the road. A nomad, Fern roams the highways and backroads of American landscapes, dwarfed by mountains, deserts, cliffs, and rolling hills dotted with tiny restaurants, gas stations, and laundromats. In this role, Frances McDormand’s commanding charisma still draws in people (a cast of mainly non-professionals who fill out the authenticity of these places), but is recessive, inward, transactional, tight-lipped oftentimes. It’s clear she’s holding the world at arm’s length distance, though she’s capable of surprising when her words lift into poetry, quite literally in a quietly astonishing moment when she recites a sonnet from memory to help a young man’s love letter to the girl he left at home. We hear she’s lost a husband; their town, having rested on a now-defunct factory, disappeared, too, in the recession. And so here she is, alone yet not alone.

The movie takes a hard look at these marginalized people, not to pity or persuade, not to explore or explain, but simply to witness. Zhao, whose previous films include settings on a reservation (Songs My Brothers Taught Me), or the ranch of an injured roper (The Rider), has become quite the chronicler of the modern-day American west, seeing with lyrical clear-eyed specificity the rhythms and pleasures, the struggles and psychology of folks left at the edge of society by happenstance or choice. Or both. Her camera floats with an observational eye for casual detail, for flukes of behavior, for cracks into wellsprings of emotion in the closed off and taciturn, for pale natural light and natural beauty. (One wonders how this preoccupation and style could possibly translate in Zhao’s next planned feature, an entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Here with McDormand’s effortlessly natural performance she finds a figure equally interested in inhabiting the tangible qualities of a person rarely given the space in our society to be the center of attention. There’s nothing overwhelmingly dramatic to the incidents here, and no false narrative engine. There's simply the patient accumulation of fleeting acquaintances, employment, and sights. It imbues humanity in every frame, and reminds us that everyone has worth.