All The World’s a Stage: “Hamnet”

 A fair number of high-powered film critics don’t seem to care for Hamnet. The film was wholly shut out by such august bodies as the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, both of which chose to honor more outrageous flicks, like One Battle After Another. For them, I gather, Hamnet is an old-fashioned tearjerker, without much connection to our own troubled times.

 Actors, though, clearly hold this film in high esteem. Wednesday’s nominations for the Actor Award, the newly-renamed honor from the Screen Actors Guild, include individual recognition for Jessie Buckley (up for female actor in a Leading Role) and Paul Mescal (actor in a Supporting Role). Even more impressive: the film was nominated (along with, among others, One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme), for the coveted ensemble award honoring the featured cast.

 And what do I think? As a dedicated filmgoer with a decided literary bent, I found this rendering of the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife thoroughly mesmerizing. Adapted by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao and novelist Maggie O’Farrell from Farrell’s best-selling novel, this is a story about familial love and loss. In the absence of much hard evidence, many literary types have speculated about the marriage of the brilliant English playwright and the rustic young woman he abandoned for so many months while pursuing his career in London. It’s easy to guess, as many have done, that the pair had little in common aside from the three children who stayed home in Stratford with their mother. (No wonder , they reason, that Will looked for greener pastures elsewhere! No wonder that upon his death he left his wife merely the second-best bed!)

 I think the romantics among us are delighted to find in O’Farrell’s rendering a genuine marital union, though one challenged by Will’s long absences. And, of course, further threatened by the plague-death of the couple’s only son, Hamnet, at an early age. The story,  then, becomes one in which a  couple need to find—somehow—their way out of grief. For the earthy Agnes (more usually known as Anne), there’s despair, fury at her long-absent spouse, and a deep connection with nature. For Will there are words to be written, and a play to be produced. I’ve seen other films re-creating the performance of an Elizabethan drama on the stage of the Globe Theater (see Shakespeare in Love, for example). But never before have I seen this set-up used so movingly, with Agnes—standing among the groundlings at the very edge of the stage—mesmerized by the words her husband has written, finding in them personal meaning to help soothe her agony.

 I’ve always liked Jessie Buckley’s performances in modest indies, but the role of Agnes calls forth from her whole new depths. Her radiance is impossible to ignore, and I suspect big prizes may be coming her way. Paul Mescal’s role as William Shakespeare is smaller, but also requires—and gets—real intensity. I also want to praise the child actors who are essential to this plot, particularly Jacobi Jupe as 12-year-old Hamnet, whose death tears the Shakespeare family asunder. Fittingly, young Jacobi’s 20-year-old brother, Noah, is featured in the climactic Globe Theater scenes, on stage in the role of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist. (The film makes clear at the outset that Hamnet and Hamlet were, in sixteenth-century England, essentially the same name.)

 Huzzah for Hamnet’s production values, including glorious cinematography that captures Agnes’s closeness to the natural world. Perhaps because women created her, she’s a heroine unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote.

 A final note: it wasn’t until I belatedly talked to viewers who hadn’t read the novel that I realized not every moviegoer knows at the outset that Paul Mescal’s character, Will, is a creative portrait of the bard-to-be, William Shakepeare. The feeling among several who spoke to me is that this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers: they wanted the audience to respond to the country lad who falls for Agnes without initially recognizing the literary genius he will become. I wonder: does this strategy help or hurt the film’s success?

Minari: The Family That Grows Together . . .

We’re all too aware that this is a tough time to be an Asian American. Last week’s shooting at three Atlanta massage parlors took the lives of eight people, six of them Asian-American women. Elsewhere in the U.S., there’s been a spate of street attacks on elderly folks who have the bad luck to have Asian-looking faces. Alas, their ancestry makes them ripe for being blamed for introducing the COVID-19 virus, which seems to have begun in Wuhan, China.

 Here’s the irony: at the same time that many Asian-Americans are cowering in fear, the American film community has bestowed a bumper crop of awards nominations on Asian-American projects. Beijing-born Chloé Zhao, who’s quickly becoming one of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, has been personally nominated for four Oscars as producer, director, writer, and editor of Nomadland. Riz Ahmed, whose Pakistani birth makes him officially Southeast Asian, is up for Best Actor for his role in the engrossing Sound of Metal. And, of course, one of the eight Best Picture nominees is a true immigrant story, based on the life of an Korean family not far removed from the filmmaker’s own. 

 Minari is a small, modest film, which in most non-COVID years may have been better suited to the Indie Spirit awards than the Oscars. (This year it’s up for six of each.) Like Nomadland, it’s a labor of love on the part of a rising filmmaker who both wrote and directed. But Lee Isaac Chung, a Korean immigrants’ son who was raised on a small farm in rural Arkansas, shaped an original story out of something close to his own family experience. The foursome in the film—father Jacob, mother Monica, daughter Anne, and the adorable little David—hunker down in a mobile home on a small, untamed plot of land because Jacob (eager to leave behind his dispiriting California life as a chicken sexer) can’t wait to work the soil. His wife is less than pleased by their lonely, somewhat grubby new existence, especially since young David has heart issues that could end his life at any moment. The arrival of Monica’s fresh-off-the-boat mother, the feisty and unpredictable Soonja (in an Oscar-worthy performance by Korean star Youn Yuh-Jung), complicates matters further. Clearly, something explosive is about to happen.

 Happily, given the times in which we live, the family is not done in by racism. The locals (at church and elsewhere) are quick to show off their ignorance of Korea, but they never stoop to cruelty. And a holy-roller type whose impromptu religious rituals make him an object of derision in this locale becomes something of a true friend.

 Those who disdain reading subtitles will not be fans of Minari. In a nod to authenticity, a vast amount of the family interaction is conducted in Korean, with an American phrase thrown in from time to time as immigrants are wont to do. When family members communicate with the outside world, they manage in English, but the Korean language predominates. That’s partly why the Golden Globes folks, never known for being socially progressive, put Minari in their Best Foreign Language Film category, which it handily won. Given that the U.S. is a country of many languages and cultures, it would have been nice to see this film included as one of the evening’s top “bests,” but never mind.

 By the way, the all-important “minari” turns out to be water celery or Java waterdropwart. I have no idea what that is, but in future I’ll look at the Korean vegetables at my local farmer’s market with new respect.

 

 

Nomadland: On the Road Again

At a time of lockdown, the allure of Nomadland seems particularly potent. While many of us are stuck at home, consigned to staying within our own familiar ruts, the characters in this quietly magical film keep on trucking. Partly it’s a matter of economic distress, but mostly it’s a choice: these are people who frankly love the romance of the open road. And the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Joshua James Richards (one of six nominations garnered by Nomadland this past week) captures the landscape of the American west so gorgeously that afterwards I wanted to pack up and set out for Arizona or the South Dakota badlands. Maybe it takes a foreigner like the Beijing-born director Chloé Zhao to teach us to look with new appreciation at our own land.

 But the film is more than a travelogue. Director Zhao has a clear passion for cinéma verité. Here, as in her acclaimed earlier film, The Rider, she incorporates in central roles the people—non-actors—who are really living the tale she wants to tell. This means that such just-plain-folks as Linda May, the charismatic Bob Wells, and the feisty, dauntless Swankie appear as (presumably) the van-dwelling travelers they really are. And the film’s lead actors, including the much-honored Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, pitch their performances to match the everyday rhythms of the non-pros, convincing us that they too are part of this special world.

 For a while, in watching this film, you’ll find yourself expecting some big drama to burst onto the screen. We’re so conditioned to appreciate movies full of blood and guts that we’re waiting for impending disaster: a rapist on the loose, a disastrous accident, a crippling loss. As we eventually discover, the undulations here are so much more subtle than the big crescendos of most Hollywood movies. McDormand’s Fern, whom we first meet as she’s signing in for a shift at an Amazon warehouse, has long since adapted to life on the road. The big events of her time on earth--her leaving the family home, her long marriage, the loss of her husband and of the mining community that once sustained them both—have all occurred long in the past, and she’s made her peace with the lifestyle of a wanderer, traveling the back roads in a rickety old van that doubles as her home. It’s a life that she (mostly) finds emotionally sustaining, full of peripatetic friendships, a variety of odd jobs, and wide open spaces tantalizing in their beauty. So attached is she to this vagabond way of life that she can’t be tempted by a comfy bed in the home of an hospitable friend. No, she’s got to keep shoving on.

 Which is not to say that she’s always happy. Aside from the daily challenges of life on the road, Fern is quietly facing her past and her future. A dying road buddy is a reminder that she won’t always have the capacity to survive on her own.  And, though it takes us a while to fully recognize it, the loss of her husband and of the house they shared for so many years is not something that her chipper attitude toward the world can fully mask. It’s a subtle performance, but one of McDormand’s best, indicative of her ability to disappear into salt-of-the-earth roles that make this extraordinary actress seem wholly average.

 I’ve just discovered McDormand will soon appear as Lady Macbeth, opposite Denzel Washington, in a film directed by her husband, Joel Coen. Macbeth’s blood-thirsty lady is hardly the salt-of-the-earth type, and I can’t wait to see the results.