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. 

Out of Sight: NO SUDDEN MOVE

Steven Soderbergh’s small and satisfying No Sudden Move gets by on style and the sheer propulsive pleasure of plot. His filmmaking is so slick and precise that he can serve both at once. He’s a master of aesthetic detail — here a 50’s period piece shot with vintage anamorphic lensing and modern digital sheen — and of storytelling. Together the images pop with meaningful blocking and striking compositions, while the tight compelling story unfolds and unfolds and unfolds. The screenplay sets up an Elmore Leonard-style schemes-within-schemes Detroit crime caper that locates that town’s mid-century power structures: cops, cars companies, and mobsters. Then it watches as one little scam grows out of control simply because it pops off and cuts across all three lines of influence. We start with low-level criminals (Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Kieran Culkin) hired to help watch the family of an accountant (David Harbour) as he’s forced at gunpoint to go to the office and take some car component designs out of a safe. It’s not so simple. The intelligence of Ed Solomon’s screenplay, beyond the clever wit to the dialogue and clockwork connections between people, is to catch all the characters in the middle of their own complicated lives, with unexpected interpersonal variables and cross-conflicts. This is just one more thing to throw a wrench into so many plans. Soon we have murder and infidelities and home invasion and bags of money and calls up the chain of command. Everyone needs to get their hands on this problem, ostensibly to solve it to their liking, but really to try to come out a little richer. 

Along the way, we get a little wiser to the corruption floating through Detroit at the time, and Soderbergh sharply draws our attention to the futility behind the characters’ competing goals. They scurry around, and there’s always someone higher up to swoop in to wave a gun, to make new deals, or to propose a better scam on top of the other scams. It’s the kind of crime picture that can introduce new big name actors to step in with a complication an hour or an hour and a half into the proceedings and it feels like yet another pleasurable twist. The large, well-cast ensemble — also including Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Noah Jupe, Frankie Shaw, Bill Duke, and more surprises throughout — expertly navigates the twists and turns by being locked in on their own particular duties and struggles. Some show marvelous in-over-their-heads exasperation, while others are rattled and sidelined, and still more think they’re in total control. Maybe. Maybe not. Some are too smart for their own good; others can’t even grasp how behind they are. There’s no sudden move out of this when the motor city’s most corrupt are out to stop forward progress. This trust-no-one caper is briskly, crisply entertaining on a scene by scene level as it adds up to yet another of Soderbergh’s pleasurable genre experiments, and a recapitulation of his oft returned-to maxim: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

Hush-Hush: A QUIET PLACE PART II

To watch A Quiet Place Part II is to realize that the premise behind A Quiet Place had only about enough to sustain that movie’s run time. The novelty of monsters attracted to sound — hence the title — ravaging the world and a tight focus on the plight of one small family to stay alive by making as little noise as possible did make for an exciting watch. But once you know the solution — and it’s not not the one from Mars Attacks! — the air goes out of the balloon a little. Where do they go next? Well, this time the surviving members of the family carry their monster repellent as they try to find a new safe place, but it only works when the plot allows it. But that’s really the answer to why anything happens in this sequel. The whole thing ends up an exercise in decisions made simply to extend the suspense. Why do they stop at the hideout of a lonely Cillian Murphy? To make us wonder if he’s trustworthy. (They don’t even know his 28 Days Later post-apocalyptic bona fides.) Why do they split up? The better to cross-cut between two, and sometimes three, little missions. Why do they need to go to a place to get a thing to another thing? To try to save their little corner of the world, of course. It’s what dad would want, the daughter says. Fair enough.

That this flimsy construction works at all has to be a tribute to director John Krasinski (here taking over scripting duties as well, in his spare time when not living on screen but for one extended flashback). He proves a perfectly fine button-pusher of a filmmaker, stringing his characters and his audience along through one moderately effective suspense sequence after the next. There is nothing else to it. (There was nothing else about the first one either, although I do enjoy Wesley Morris’ take that it’s a horror movie about White fears of cancel culture, ha ha.) Here there’s a baby in a box and oxygen dipping. There’s the son (Noah Jupe) with his leg in a bear trap. There’s a deaf girl (Millicent Simmonds) off on her own. There’s the looming threat of nasty others lurking somewhere out there. Maybe they’re by a crashed train or an abandoned boat. And there are those monsters, too, sometimes stalking unnoticed in the background of one of the film’s handsome longer takes. It’s all too elemental to entirely ignore. Of course you don’t want a slimy thing bursting out and chomping on the sweet kids doing their earnest best to play notes between scared silly and steely resolve. Giving the movie over to them, with Emily Blunt and Murphy playing support is a smart move. They’re easy to care about, and Krasinski knows how to play the child-in-danger card mercilessly.

There’s real pressure-cooker qualities to the cross-cutting that works up a decent head of steam in the back half, even if I could feel the grinding gears and clunking mechanics moving the pieces into place. Why’s he standing there? Why’d she stop over here? Why can’t he take a few more steps? Why does the monster hear this but not that? To keep the movie going, that’s why! If anything the delay dealt the movie by the pandemic — it was one of the first big movies pushed, due to its spring 2020 date, and now gets to be one of the first big movies welcoming us to something like back to the multiplex — served to make the whole thing marginally more believable. (It also lends the opening flashback to the last normal moments before the monsters arrive a certain poignancy.) After all, it’s a straight-faced slightly-silly thriller about a mysterious critter that’s actually pretty easy to avoid, but people are just out for themselves and not thinking about sharing this information or even using it effectively if they do know. A solution that humanity nonetheless hasn’t figured out how to implement effectively? Yeah, sounds about right.