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. 

As the Romans Do: GLADIATOR II

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movies work by wrapping sports movie logic around the trappings of ancient warfare. They meet in the bloody overlap between the two genres. Armies clashing are distilled down to opponents in the arena. It has the basic structure of competition—the athlete with promise rising through the ranks, suffering some precarious setbacks, and then emerging victorious in the end—to drive it through its Ancient Roman intrigue. The sequel even adds a complicated coach for its scrappy warrior, as Denzel Washington, wielding his charisma with a light, playful touch, swoops in to mentor an underdog gladiator. That underdog, played by Paul Mescal, who here adds a flavoring of muscle to his sad-young-man persona, turns out to be the long lost son of Russell Crowe’s heroic gladiator from the first film. So it’s the Creed of Gladiator movies, though never quite that serious, despite its efforts to bend a knee to its predecessor. Scott clearly has the urge to enjoy recreating the earlier film’s setting and mood. He whips up the spectacle of the Colosseum with all its attendant echoes of our modern stadiums—box seats, preening announcers, and a crowd clamoring for action. The combat is as bone-crunching, blood-spouting, and brutal as expected. Add a rhinoceros or a monkey and it gets even gnarlier.

Overall, the sequel is a little less interested in wallowing in tragic backstory, although it’s there, and a little more amped up with political intrigue and class warfare. This Rome is crumbling under vain boyish twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), a fine vector for Scott’s recent interest in the slimy eccentricities of the super-wealthy. Sensing their weakness, Washington’s scheming aristocrat is planning to use his gladiators to grow his social status and angle for more power. Meanwhile, a celebrated general (Pedro Pascal) and his wife (Connie Nielsen, returning from the first film) plot a coup of their own. Mescal will end up a pawn in these competing plots unless he can wrest control of the narrative for himself. Hard to do in chains. Easier when given a sword. (Also, good luck having us root against Washington’s ostensible villain, who elevates the movie in his every moment on screen.) The result is a fine, thin sword-and-sandal spectacle, with galloping horses and hurtling weapons and splats of gore. Its actors are having fun, and Scott’s such a pro at helming these period-piece action efforts that he could do it in his sleep. (With his worst movies, you might suspect he has.) It’s not a great movie, but it’s often a fun one, full of diverting period detail and exaggeration and committed to its live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword ethos. Washington stares Mescal down early in the movie and explains: “Violence is the universal language.”

All Those Lonely, Lonely Times: ALL OF US STRANGERS

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a palpable portrait of loneliness and the long tail of childhood grief. It’s a film that feels haunted with the intense emptiness that comes from a solitary life. It stars Andrew Scott as a writer just south of middle age who lives alone in a small apartment in a mostly uninhabited new building in London. Though the movie will technically leave this cramped home, in all the really important ways it stays trapped there with him, and within his head. He meets another inhabitant of the building, a troubled younger man (Paul Mescal) with whom he strikes a hesitant romantic interest. They’re drawn together as two loners, clearing their throats to speak like they're unaccustomed to doing so. There’s a sense even as they open up emotionally, sharing stories of their pasts, their coming outs, and their romantic interests, that they’re holding something back. They’ve been hurt before.

The writer is currently working through some of his hurt with an autobiographical project about his parents. He imagines them as they were when he was 12 years old. They were dead before he was 13, killed in a car crash at Christmastime. How awful. Now this writer will sometimes return to his childhood home and see them. Hardly ghosts, they are flesh and blood memories he inhabits, having conversations he wishes he could’ve had, and still could have but for that fateful black ice—reminiscences explanations, apologies, a coming out. The parental presences are projections of the son, but Claire Foy and Jamie Bell play them with full personalities. These aren’t dream parents; they’re not always parroting ideas their now-grown child would hope they’d share with him. They’re real, and unreal. (There's a productively weird cognitive dissonance of seeing actors of roughly the same age playing parent and child, too.) He’s happy to see them, but there’s that spectral distance, too. They’re part of him, and yet not. Here’s a man so used to being alone he holds everything at arm’s length, from that potential new boyfriend to the grief he’s never quite addressed.

Haigh is a filmmaker always so closely attuned to the subtleties of human interactions—the way a shift in information or understanding ripples imperceptibly across a face, and then out across an entire relationship or community. It's in the intimate close-ups and spaces for quiet contemplation. He makes movies in which people sit and talk to each other, revealing as much in their silences and implications as with their conversations. There’s the hookup coupling that tentatively teases the idea of something more in Weekend or the anniversary that teeters on the precipice of a breakup in 45 Years. His works are always careful to conceal and reveal his characters interiority in conjunction with softly naturalistic performances that capture their humanity. He also expert at getting deft, delicate drama out of symbols lesser directors would fumble as obvious underlining. Here’s a movie about a man literally haunted by his grief, and has trouble bringing someone new into his lonely life. That core specificity gives its abstractions their power.

It’s about the disconnection he feels from the world around them, and from some essential part of himself and his past. So of course there’s that huge empty building, and a cozy memory place of childhood memory. The two blur. There’s a mid-80s photo from right before the incident. It becomes a vision of the past with a child actor; it’s also a recreation with the adult. Past and present are joined by the Pet Shop Boys’ swirling synths. That’s a peak of hazy sadness in a movie that’s a most tender, melancholic ghost story. Later, a simple move of the camera swaps one ghostly presence for another, although we might not quite know it until we reflect on it later. The movie builds to a climax of emotional revelation, and nods to the power of love to last. Because the performances are so natural, and the filmmaking so attentive, it gathers considerable metaphoric force. It feels heavy with depressed yearning in every gesture.

Tender is the Night: AFTERSUN

They say poetry is about the words that aren’t written, music is the notes that aren’t played, and sculpting is a matter of carving away everything that isn’t the intended shape. Aftersun is a movie like that. It is precisely told. It builds up the unspoken and the unsaid so fully and so evocatively that its pinpoint emotional turns hit all the more overwhelmingly for having been suggested instead of stated outright. Writer-director Charlotte Wells, in her debut feature, here tells the story of an 11-year-old girl on a vacation with her thirty-something father sometime around the most recent turn of the century. (My, how quickly our present became past.) We gather she spends most of her time with her mother in Scotland, so this summery week at a mid-range resort in Turkey is clearly meant for a rare sustained moment of father-daughter bonding. The movie is exactly that simple: an anecdotal story that observes these two characters in a tender moment. It’s also delicately perched on a precipice—a last fleeting moment before tipping over into something new. She’s naturally on the edge of massive change—curious in tentative ways about the opposite sex, about her place in the world, about how others perceive her, and how she sees others. She’s trying to figure out how people relate to each other, and how she can, too. Her young dad is similarly in flux, with plans for the future, a desire to maintain a healthy relationship with his daughter, and sublimated emotional currents, symbolized by the cast on his arm, that are held back for her sake.

I’ve been trained by decades experiencing stories of melodrama and misery to fear an explicit tragic turn with this setup. Indeed, there is a certain suspense hanging over some of the proceedings—an ear for the potentially ironic. A line about birthdays, or scuba diving, or the passage of time, or a stray reference to sexuality or substance abuse, can press with the weight of expectation. But the movie’s too sensitive and circumspect and real to push toward such explicit drama. Instead, it finds a genuine love between father and daughter, and a casually-worn insight into the spaces between the world of an adult and a world of a child. To the eyes of a grown-up audience, a certain fragility and danger can sit in scenes where the father allows his child to wander the resort, or adolescent figures crowd near as specters of looming diminution of innocence, or a momentary lapse in judgement leaves the pre-teen to fend for herself for a brief span of time. But the girl’s remaining childhood innocence is both a protection and vulnerability—neither quite needed, but the scrim of retrospection hangs heavily. Threaded throughout are scenes shot from a camcorder. The first, in fact, is also the last—a heavily pixelated goodbye that’s then rewound. Here’s a movie dreamily, melancholically, past-tense. It’s nostalgic in the purest sense of the term in its original Greek: the pain of returning.

This rewind—punctuated with the pop and whir of old tech punctuating intuitive remembrance—leads into a memory poem of a film that delicately folds back in on itself by the end. Its diaristic, impressionistic structure isn’t a mystery to solve, but clarity that slowly comes into focus in soft lighting and gentle observation. Scenes in their room, at meals, games, pools and sightseeing, unfold with the precision imagery and sounds of the most frangible memories. There’s such lovely, low-key attentiveness in performance and staging and sound here—a glance, a gesture, a murmur of affectionate advice, a slow slipping mistake, an earnest apology, a song, a smile, a dance, a helping motion. It’s a child’s hair softly teased with a kind hand. It’s a shared satisfaction in a game, or a view. It’s a sudden frosting-over of interactions and a slow, inevitable thaw.

In the performances of Paul Mescal (Normal People) and Frankie Corio (a winningly natural debut), we see how much unspoken import passes between parent and child—the longing for connection, the imbalance of power, the loving, the imperfections, and the loving despite and because of those imperfections. It’s about the slow shift in dynamics, and the circular nature of their mutual sympathies. What makes the movie especially special, moving, haunting, is its attention to detail—a keen eye for physicality, a sharp understanding of the weight a word—or its absence—can have in the memory. The movie’s approach is built around the loneliness they feel together, a slowly widening self-consciousness, and looming sense of aging and loss. There’s a feeling that this is a Final Moment, though it never tips its hand for why, exactly, it feels these two might never meet again. We return at the end to the beginning—a goodbye, except, as the camcorder closes, this one feels like forever, and like a memory to which she, and we, will need to return.

Bookish: NORMAL PEOPLE

The trick of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, the buzzy, intimate coming-of-age sort-of-romance published last year, is that it’s closely observed, but incredibly narrow. We are treated to scene after scene in which the interest is entirely in the gestures described, the subtle give and take of awkward adolescent power plays, the earnestness with which its characters trick themselves into and out of interpersonal relationships while chasing an elusive something that’ll take them to the rest of their lives. The point, in other words, is in the subterranean emotional development conjured by Rooney’s descriptions, and not so much the story itself which starts at a place of pro-forma young adult relationship — he’s lower class popular; she’s more well-off but an outcast; they’re drawn together and yet mutually agree to keep it a secret, sometimes — and is then dressed up in artful elision, skipping weeks or months at a time, with Rooney describing mostly intimate bedroom moments, or polite chatter at dreary high school and college parties. How normal, indeed. It was also a bit stifling for this reader, for as well drawn as these normal moments are, and how deeply the author knows her characters’ minds, that’s about as far as the book imagines. It has texture, but no space. Therefore the interest is not in what they do, but in how they feel about it. We’re in their heads.

This presents a problem for directors Lenny Abrahamson (Room) and Hettie Macdonald (of British theater and television), and a team of writers including Rooney herself, in turning the novel into a miniseries. When stripped of interiority, the plot is incredibly mundane, and when each scene is dutifully staged with naturalistic performances from fine young leads (relative unknowns Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal), the whole thing goes vacant. Without imagining how to present the minds of these characters cinematically other than the occasional cross-cut flashbacks, we’re left with scenes of those boring parties and molasses-paced exchanges. The bigger ensemble scenes play out on occasion with what suddenly sounds like boring teen soap dialogue, the college scenes are built out of English major Mad Libs, and yet the pillow talk between the leads is soft and stumbling, more raw than the poorly imagined setups to their grinding payoffs. But no matter how committed to the naked emotionality of these young people the performers are, the filmmakers aren’t interested in framing more than a two shot, or tight close-ups in shot/reverse shot conversations between flatly lensed establishing shots. The whole thing — six slow hours over the course of twelve thirty-minute episodes; long for a movie, short for television, in another one of these intermediary neither-here-nor-there slogs — is inert. The leads are stranded in the dishwater dull visual style, stretching to communicate the unspoken in ways the writing and production can’t complement.