Jessie Buckley and the Luck of the Irish

Well, it’s all over now but the shouting. The 98^th annual Academy Awards ceremony is in the books, and most viewers (me included) are rather happy about the outcome. Timothée Chalamet was gracious in defeat as Michael B. Jordan was hailed for his lead performance(s) in Sinners. (Trivia time: the only other actor who won the Oscar for playing twins was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.) Some of the actresses on display looked suitably gorgeous while others (I’m looking at YOU, Renate Reinsve) just seemed, well, a bit weird. Host Conan O’Brien was a hoot wearing Amy Madigan’s red fright wig from Weapons, being chased up the aisle of the Dolby Theatre by a pack of very excited kids. The glamorous and uninhibited Teyana Taylor seemed to have surgically attached herself to the leg of Paul Thomas Anderson as he strode to the stage to receive one of three long-overdue statuettes. There was real heartfelt emotion in the In Memorian segment, particularly in Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner.

 But I want to focus on one of the evening’s least suspenseful awards: that for Best Actress. Everyone seemed to agree from the get-go that Jessie Buckley was a lock for  playing Shakespeare’s grieving wife in Hamnet. I too loved her performance, but it made me more curious than ever about how her career evolved. I first spotted Buckley in a small 2018 film called Wild Rose. It focuses on a young Scottish single mother who loves American country music and dreams of traveling to Nashville. Buckley impressed me in that role, and I figured she was a talented young Scot with a bright career ahead of her. Wrong! Buckley is Irish, and apparently the first Irish actress ever to win a major acting Oscar. So her win was well-timed, just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

 As to the question of how Buckley’s career got started, I’ve discovered something quite charming. Back in 2008, at the ripe old age of 18, she was a contestant on a BBC competition show called I’d Do Anything. The show’s title came from a perky song in the musical, Oliver! (based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist) which was a massive hit in London and New York before being transformed into an Oscar-winning film. The gimmick of the TV show was that various aspiring young singing actresses were competing to win the star role of Nancy in an upcoming West End revival of Oliver!, with votes from the public making all the difference. You can find the show’s finale on YouTube, with Buckley and another singer-actress, costumed identically, each singing Nancy’s big torch number, “As Long as He Needs Me.” 

Guess what! Buckley came in second, though guest panelist Andrew Lloyd Webber passionately campaigned on her behalf. For me, looking back on the competition after several decades, Buckley was a star in the making. I am not expert enough at singing to comment on the technical prowess of the two contestants, but there’s no question that Buckley was better at pouring into this song a deep well of emotions. Clearly, she understood the lyrics. 

 The Jessie Buckley of 2008 was not exactly the woman we saw on stage at the Dolby. At 18 she was very slim with a mop of curly hair and a fair amount of makeup, not the more austere look she seems to favor these days, as a wife, a new mother, and a recognized dramatic actress. She was adorable back then, but I wouldn’t have guessed what she’d go on to do. Now, though, the sky’s the limit. Brava! 

 

 

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?

Talking About “Women Talking”

Let’s face it: a film called Women Talking sounds like a gabfest. It’s easy to imagine a screen full of bitchy wives, making catty comments over cocktails. It suggests an update of The Women, the 1939 George Cukor opus in which the ladies who lunch struggle to grab power as well as one another’s husbands.

 The title Women Talking turns out to be hugely accurate for the new film directed by Canadian auteur Sarah Polley  But this is hardly a frivolous exercise about soignée ladies vying for social power. Polley’s script adapts a 2018 novel which itself is based on what happened within an isolated Canadian Mennonite community that had settled in Bolivia. In Polley’s film, the location of the settlement is left obscure. But what’s crystal-clear is that these women, raised to live modest, conservative, devoutly religious lives, suddenly have no choice but to make a decision that may overthrow everything they believe.

 Watching the film, it’s easy at first to think that these women lived long ago. Their drab frocks and head coverings, along with their clean-scrubbed faces, suggest an era much earlier than our own. And the fact that they can neither read nor write strongly argues that this story unfolds, perhaps, back in the nineteenth century, when rural communities stuck to subsistence farming, and women, in particular, weren’t always granted opportunities for education. But a few passing references within the dialogue—to antibiotics, for instance—remind us that this tale unfolds in much more recent times. Amazingly, the actual story took place circa 2011.

 It's a story that’s sordid in the extreme. Though the adult males in this community are never seen, we learn that some among them are guilty of behavior that can only be called heinous. It has become their practice to drug the community’s girls and women with cattle anesthetic, then rape them in their beds. Inevitably, some of the women have become pregnant; most have suffered deep psychological distress. But though several of the culprits have been caught and jailed by local authorities, the community is in process of bailing them out, and requiring the defiled women—on religious grounds—to forgive.

 Under these dire circumstances, a small clutch of  women meet secretly in a hayloft to make a fateful decision: should they knuckle under to the rules set by their all-male elders? Should they stay put and fight the patriarchy? Or, gathering their small children, should they pack up and leave the only world that most of them have ever known?

 Polley, who was once a young actress known for challenging parts in films like The Sweet Hereafter, was talked into directing by Frances McDormand, who functioned as producer here while also playing a small but key role.  At age 43, and with three young children at home, Polley believed her directing career was on hold when McDormand approached her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Given her own domestic situation as well as the sensitivity of the subject matter with which she was dealing, Polley strove hard to make her set as accommodating as possible. Her cast was treated gently, as were the many child actors the story required. Key behind-the-scenes positions were filmed almost entirely by women, and the cast (including big names like Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, and Claire Foy) soon bonded into the tight-knit family group they were intended to be. Kudos to Ben Wishaw as the sole sympathetic male included within the cast.

 This somber film was not one I could love wholeheartedly, but my respect for it runs deeps.

 

 

 

 

“Wild Rose”: Three Chords and the Truth

Yahooo! Rose-Lynn’s been let out of prison (where she was sent because of a small problem involving a package of heroin). There’s fringe on her leather jacket, a rebel yell on her lips, and an ankle-monitor underneath her cowboy boot,. After a quick stop at the country-music bar where she used to serve drinks and front the local band, she heads for home, but her re-appearance after a year away doesn’t exactly spark joy. Sounds like the makings of a country song.. But this isn’t Nashville. Nope, it’s Glasgow, Scotland.

In the appealing new slice-of-life drama called Wild Rose, Jessie Buckley plays a young woman so vibrant that you can’t help rooting for her even when she’s making a hash of her life, She’s quick to fight, quick to blame others for her own mistakes. (In her mind, her incarceration is entirely the fault of the judge who sentenced her.) Most egregious, she’s all too ready to break the promises she’s made to her two young children (tellingly named Lyle and Wynonna) when these get in the way of her dreams of music stardom in America.  

There are some creaky elements to Rose-Lynn’s story, most of them involving a would-be benefactor played by the charming but unlikely Sophie Okonedo.. Post-prison, Rose-Lynn comes to work for this wealthy lady of leisure as a housekeeper, putting her musical ambitions on hold in a bid to lead a responsible adult life.. But soon, once Okonedo’s Susannah discovers the singing talents of her feisty new “daily woman,” she offers to play fairy godmother for Rose-Lynn’s dream trip to Nashville. Of course the trip eventually happens—but not in the way we would expect, and with a far different outcome. It’s a treat, though, to see the awe on Jessie Buckley’s face as she stands on the stage of the “Mother Church” itself, Nashville’s timeless Ryman Auditorium. One of the film’s many pleasures is a chance to catch a glimpse of Nashville, the world’s Music City, while also introducing us to the more low-key attractions of workaday Glasgow.

Rose-Lynn may blossom in the company of the kindly Susannah, but the real key figure in her life is her down-to-earth mother, Marion, played by the always capable Julie Walters. It’s she to whom Rose-Lynn turns for emergency childcare, and for the hard-earned nuggets of wisdom that she’d really rather not hear. Marion can be tough on her only child, but she’s also her biggest supporter, one who understands that Rose-Lynn will need to grow up in an emotional sense before she can earn the opportunities that may someday be waiting for her. It’s ironic that in the last few days I’ve been learning about Anzia Yezierska, a novelist so determined to devote herself to her craft that she literally wrote her young daughter out of her life for many years, letting the child be raised by an ex-husband and erasing her from her own autobiography. That’s what some artists -- both male and female -- do in order to pursue their careers unhindered by family responsibility. But Marion’s not one to let that happen, and her down-to-earth goals and Rose-Lynn’s soaring ambitions make for a powerful combination.   

Understanding the thick Glasgow accents in this film sometimes makes for a challenge. But the soundtrack is splendid indeed, featuring the voices of some of Nashville’s finest female singers, and also Jessie Buckley’s own  powerful pipes. Her character has tattooed on her arm the classic description of country music as Three Chords and the Truth. Wild Rose has convinced me of the wisdom of that sentiment.