A grieving academic and a hawk

    In H is for Hawk, Claire Foy plays a grieving woman who adopts a goshawk as a way of reconnecting with nature, and, just as important, avoid a return to the normalcy of life before her father's sudden death.

    Director Philippa Lowthorpe bases her movie on a well-recieved memoir by Helen Macdonald. Lowthorpe's story requires Foy's Helen, an academic studying and teaching at Cambridge, to spend much of the movie carrying the hawk while wearing a cumbersome protective glove. 

   When the hawk, though tethered to Helen's arm, flaps her wings, a sense of nature's uncontrollability becomes palpably present. Hawks are natural-born hunters, and much of the movie involves Helen's attempts to allow the bird, which she names Mabel, to hunt before returning to its perch on her arm.

   I've read that bird specialists were used and that numerous hawks were employed for the filming, but that doesn't make the feat any less impressive. Maybe it's just my skittishness, but I felt a sense of imminent danger, as if the hawk might strike at any moment. 

    Added emotional weight derives from Helen's slide into a severe depression that cuts her off from her academic life and turns her into a bit of a recluse. She shares her apartment with Mabel. Her Cambridge colleagues don't always approve. Some are indifferent. Some do their best to indulge her passion.

   Helen understands that goshawks aren't affectionate creatures. Still, she develops a connection, perhaps one-sided, with the bird. 

    Wisely, Foy makes little attempt to ingratiate herself with viewers. The movie's warmth is generated in large part by Brendan Gleeson, who appears in flashbacks as Helen's idiosyncratic news photographer father. His love for his daughter includes chiding humor and acceptance. Clearly, the two operate on the same wavelength.

   A strong supporting cast includes Lindsay Duncan as Helen's mother, Josh Dylan as her brother, and Denise Gough as Helen's devoted friend.  

    And, of course, there's Mabel. 

   Lowthorpe captures the liberating beauty of Mable in flight, but never loses sight of the fact that the relationship between Mable and Helen contains an element of unease. That edginess allows the movie to sidestep any sentiment that might have undermined the sense of irreparable loss, which the movie ably captures and sustains.

 

Maybe you can go home again

    We don’t talk about it much but, at some point, most of us fall prey to the loneliest of sorrows — not the kind of loneliness that comes from not being around people but the kind that stems from feeling the past evaporate and with it, everything and everyone we once knew. 

   Now a grown screenwriter, Adam (Andrew Scott) was 11 when his father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy) died in a car crash, the unseen event that allows the quietly haunting All of Us Strangers to find its emotional bearings.

   Adam, a screenwriter who’s struggling with a screenplay about his upbringing, travels from London to his family’s suburban home, a normal enough activity for a writer. 

   But when he arrives, he discovers that his mother and father still seem to be living in the home where he grew up. They haven't aged, but look exactly as they did on the day they perished.

   Strange as it seems, Adam has a chance to connect with his departed parents, to update them on the part of his life they never knew, to give them a chance to see him as a gay man. He wants them to love and accept him as he is.

   Director Andrew Haig plays Adam’s relationship with his parents against a relationship he begins with Harry (Paul Mescal), an equally lonely but more convivial neighbor.

   Deep feelings of isolation pervade nearly every scene, particularly in the early going. The two men live in a London high rise where they seem to be the only tenants, a clue that we’ve entered a moment of unsettling indeterminacy. 

   The relationship begins when Mescal’s Harry knocks on Adam’s door. He’s holding a bottle of liquor and wants to come in for a drink. Adam demurs. But the two eventually begin an affair.

   At first, Mom isn’t happy to hear the news about her son's sexual identity; her view of gay life never left the 1980s, a time when the AIDS crisis raged.

   Dad, a heavy smoker, has a different attitude, he's not harshly judgmental, although at one point, he admits that he could have been one of the guys who bullied Adam at school. 

   Loosely based on a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers sounds some of the same mournful notes you might expect find in a movie by the late Terrence Davies -- The Long Day Closes, for example.

   Haig treats Adam’s encounters with his parents as if they were real and leaves it for us to decide what they mean for Adam. Perhaps All of Us Strangers is mostly about Adam’s imaginative life — and the purposes it serves for him. 

   The relationship between Adam and Harry also involves elements that stretch realism. Clearly, though, Adam can’t move on until he buries his grief.

   All of Us Strangers draws us into Adam’s interior life, which means distinctions between the real and the illusory fade in and out, like chalk slowly being wiped from a blackboard and then suddenly reappearing again.

   What’s unquestionably real, though, is Adam’s pain, grief, and need for solace. In the end, Haig, whom I judge to be a director of generous spirit, doesn't deny him his comfort.

Throwing off the weight of oppression

 

   If you were looking for an evening's diversion, it might not occur to you to spend it hanging out with a group of Mennonite women living in an isolated community in a Latin American country.

   Grim, serious, and weighted by patriarchal oppression, Women Talking makes Amish country seem luxe by comparison.

   Forbidding and talky, director Sarah Polley's movie, adapted from a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, tells a reality-based story about women seeking libration from a calcified society that hides its sins behind a religious mask.

    And, yes, you read that “reality-based” sentence right. The story inspired by a 2011 event in Bolivia in which seven men from a Mennonite colony were convicted of rape. 

    The story focuses on the response of the colony's women. Outraged by men who drug them with cow tranquilizers, rape them, and then blame ghosts or demons, the women arrive at a point of decision.

   As a whole, the community's women are divided about what to do. So eight women form a kind of high council of the oppressed, retreating to a hayloft to discuss options that will impact the rest. 

    The women are able to talk frankly because the men have gone to town to bail out the attackers after the authorities intervened. We don't need to see the men because this isn't a movie with two sides: It's a movie about what happens when women no longer can tolerate a soul-crushing system.

   Three choices emerge: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The men have given the women two days to decide to forgive them, so the clock is ticking. The faux rectitude of the men’s position —  only forgiveness will be tolerated — needs no further comment.

      Because the men have forbidden the women to learn to read or write, a black-sheep male (Ben Whishaw) has been selected as recording secretary. Whishaw's August occupies an uneasy position vis a vis the community. His mother was expelled for speaking her mind. He left and attended college but returned to become a teacher for the young men in the community. He’s an outlier.

      Frances McDormand, one of the movie's producers, appears briefly as a woman committed to upholding the prevailing order. 

       Mostly, the movie plays as an ensemble piece built around powerful actresses: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Claire Foy, and Michelle McLeod.

      As the women debate, we learn a bit about them. Mara's Ona, a woman with a dimpled beatific smile, has become pregnant after one of the rapes. August is in love with Ona, but the stern environment isn't exactly conductive to romance.

      Foy's character bursts with fury over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, a rage so powerful it frightens her.

      Few would argue with the movie's message. These women want equality, freedom to express themselves, and faith that isn't used like a cudgel, inducing resignation and despair.

      The last point is important; these are women of faith, influenced by the need to forgive and by religiously inspired pacifism. They don't want to abandon all they hold sacred. They're also reluctant to leave older sons, who may already have drunk the colony Kool-Aid.

      Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier cloak the movie's images in weighty browns. The visual environment matches the  strictures under which these women live, making it clear that throwing off its terrors won't be easy.

     Polley's cast embraces the variety of possible responses to the movie's central predicament, although it takes a while to keep track of who's who. And the characters sometimes feel as if they've been reduced to the positions they take.

    But then, in a way, they have been -- by the abuse they've faced. 

   Women Talking might have been more powerful had it been presented on a stage, where it could have benefited from the kind of theatrical electricity that creates its own urgency.

     In the end, though, Women Talking gets under the skin and its shocking story compels. Polley makes us want to escape this stifling, barren world in which obedience has conquered love.

     Put another way, we want these woman to find the new lives they've only begun to imagine.  

     

A look at an artist obsessed with cats

 

  In the well-leafed pages of art history, you’d be hard-pressed to find references to an artist whose sole preoccupation was with cats. Louis Wain was such an artist, a man who drew anthropomorphic pictures of cats for newspapers. He became popular for adding humor and color to the day’s drab news.

  In The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Benedict Cumberbatch immerses in eccentricity as an oddball artist who became increasingly deranged as his life progressed. Wain’s art also became more interesting and adventurous as he aged and retreated into his own world. 

  If you like psychedelic cats, Wain's your man. He might have been first on the block. Look it up.

  Some believed Wain to be schizophrenic. Maybe he was simply demented. Or maybe he fell somewhere on the spectrum of personalities destined to inhabit worlds most of us are content  to visit only in biographical movies.

  Director Will Sharpe makes use of a deeply committed performance from Cumberbatch to bring the artist to life in ways that can be amusing, although the movie never quite makes a case for its existence.  

   Put another way, Electrical Life teeters on the edge of success without ever quite falling over. 

   The story’s key event involves Wain’s marriage to Emily (Claire Foy), a match that scandalized Wain’s five sisters, women who regarded Emily as beneath the family’s station.

   Class distinctions aside, the union enables Wain to separate from his sisters, establishing an independent residence with a woman who tapped into his heretofore neglected capacity for happiness.

   Emily had been working for the family as a tutor to the daughters of the Wain sisters, a group presided over by Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), the oldest and most severe of the sisters.

   Wain's obsession with cats begins when he and Emily save a stray. Life seems good, but as we know, Victorian stories seldom escape misery.

   Emily’s early death from cancer left Wain alone and bereft. Her departure also abandons the movie to Wain's eccentricities and hallucinations, some of which Sharpe brings to life with mixed results.

   The story also highlights Wain’s financial ineptitude; he didn’t seem to care whether publishers took advantage of him. He never bothered to copyright his work. He's the artist of cliche; i.e., one who couldn't be bothered with contracts or terms of compensation.

    Lest we get lost in all of this, a  narration is provided by Olivia Colman, who has been charged with contextualizing the Victorian England in which Wain labored. She also helps clarify the movie’s title: Wain became obsessed with the new science of electricity.

   Several images at the end of the film have hallucinatory beauty that may not exactly fit the rest of the movie but make a pleasurable appearance nonetheless.

   Overall, Electrical Life wavers as it seeks a tone that matches Wain’s eccentricities. The story wears out as it moves through Wain’s massively disheveled life.

    Who knows? I might have liked it better if I weren't a dog person.

The story of the moon landing

Director Damien Chazelle avoids cliches in First Man, a carefully calibrated look at an epic event.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Damien Chazelle’s First Man arrives in the form of a reminder: Great feats often begin with baby steps that stutter, shudder and sometimes go terribly wrong.

To establish the point early, Chazelle opens the story of NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon with Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) taking a bone-rattling ride on a 140,000-foot test of an aircraft that’s meant to approach the edge of the atmosphere. Armstrong, who later will become the first man to set foot on the moon, encounters a malfunction but pushes through.

The sequence serves as a powerful overture for a movie about the early days of space flight. By today's standards, men were riding in vehicles that look fragile, almost jury-rigged. They were putting their lives on the line to break barriers and extend humanity’s reach — and not everyone thought space exploration was a great idea. A costly US space program was pitted against pressing domestic needs and a rising chorus of protest against the Vietnam War.

Chazelle evokes the tumultuous political atmosphere of the ‘60s, but doesn’t dwell on it nor does he sound triumphant chords about space achievement. He doesn't glorify the NASA astronauts who risked and sometimes lost their lives in pursuit of the moon landing President John F. Kennedy had chosen as a national goal.

Moreover, the movie doesn’t have a standard-issue hero.

As played by Gosling, Armstrong comes across as an emotionally reticent man who seems only able to survive by pulling a curtain across the pain that stemmed from the death of a daughter from cancer. He sheds tears when he’s alone, but doesn’t talk about the loss with his wife (Claire Foy), his sons or his friends.

A stand-out scene finds Armstrong removing himself from a gathering after the funeral of a fellow astronaut. Alone in his backyard, he scans the skies through a hand-held telescope, pushing away a concerned colleague by telling him that he's not standing alone in the night because he's looking for a conversation.

With Armstrong training, traveling and immersing himself in his work, it falls to Foy’s Janet to hold down the homefront. She does, but Foy never turns Janet into the loyal wife of cliche. She supports her husband, but she’s also angry in the way of many wives of the '60s, women who were left to tend to chores while their husbands found adventure in the workplace.

Of course, there was one key difference between Armstrong and the legions of overworked office slugs: Armstrong risked not coming home from his workplace.

And that’s the Armstrong we meet here, a no-drama guy who regards what he does as “going to work," a job.

You may want to think of First Man as a "space procedural." Chazelle takes us through the various stages of development of a moon landing that began with the Gemini program and culminated with Apollo.

To make clear the dangers at hand, Chazelle includes the cockpit fire that took the lives of White, Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham) and Roger Chafee (Cory Michael Smith), three astronauts who died in a fire during a “plugs out” test of the spacecraft.

Naturally, the moon landing becomes the movie's climax. Chazelle handles the moment Armstrong stepped onto the moon with exquisite balance. He doesn't italicize its awe or underplay it.

When the Eagle touches down on the moon, Chazelle allows the silvery expanse of the lunar surface to speak for itself, so much so that the movie goes silent. I confess to disappointment when — after some minutes of sobering silence — Justin Hurwitz’s score began to chime in.

Ryan's controlled performance makes us wonder whether the actor opened a tap and drained out three-quarters of his emotional life. That could be exactly what Chazelle had in mind. We come to understand that Armstrong performs with cool equanimity when he's able to keep a lid on anything that might break his concentration.

It may be fair to say that the movie — based on a book by James R. Hansen — finds its meaning in the choices that Chazelle doesn’t make. He takes a neutral path that mirrors Armstrong's personality. That’s not to say that the movie is without emotion or tension, but it’s not buoyed by an identifiable point of view, a limiting factor. That, an overly long running time and a slight whiff of sentimentality keep the movie from greatness.

Still, First Man struck me as a far more ambitious and worthier work than either Whiplash or La La Land, two of Chazelle's previous movies.

Chazelle has been criticized for not showing the moment when Armstrong planted an American flag on lunar soil. Please. I took the omission as a significant part of Chazelle’s approach. He wants us to see the Apollo mission fresh, to avoid the kind of signature images that have degenerated into cliche.

As if to emphasize work-a-day life in the space program, Chazelle also refuses to celebrate the hotshot pilot ethos that made The Right Stuff so engaging. Only Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin approaches his job with bravado and public expressions of ego. It’s not something that Chazelle dwells on.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the movie's tension and single-minded determination become a bit of a grind, so much so that the lunar landing generates more relief than excitement. I don't mean that as a criticism. When the Eagle lands, the movie relaxes.

I’m one of those people who believe the US benefits from a strong and adventurous space program. First Man reminds us that no such program can be risk-free and leaves us to ponder whether the rewards are worth the risks.

Decide for yourself, but wouldn't it be grand to see the world again focused in awe and appreciation at an accomplishment that really had the power to expand the way we see ourselves? I'm not holding my breath, but sometimes a little dreaming helps.

A victim or is she really insane?

Claire Foy plays a woman institutionalized against her will in Unsane. Steven Soderbergh directs.

Filmed with iPhones by director Steven Soderbergh and built around a powerhouse performance by Claire Foy, Unsane offers moments that shock, unsettle and work on your nerves. And in playing a woman who's put through a physical and emotional wringer, Foy wipes out all memories of the dignity and composure she projected as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.

Unsane also boasts a bit of head-spinning substance: The movie makes us wonder how we might go about defending our sanity if we suddenly were institutionalized, having mistakenly -- or so we believed -- been identified as a danger to ourselves and others.

Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, a banking analyst who's trying to establish herself in a new city. As the story develops, Sawyer is tested at the deepest levels. Unsane hardly qualifies as a small classic, but the movie wouldn't work at all if Foy had failed to communicate a sense of vulnerability and, just as important, a potential for violence.

After a disturbing incident with a man she picks up at a bar, Sawyer decides to see a counselor. She's fearful of being followed by a stalker. Why someone as capable as Sawyer would seek psychological help at an institution rather than in a more traditional setting -- the privacy of a psychiatrist’s office, for example -- never is made clear, one of several tests of the story's credibility.

An intake officer decides that because Sawyer has thought — albeit tenuously — about suicide, she should be admitted on a 24-hour-hold. Sawyer signs a few papers thinking that she’s signing up for counseling. Without realizing what she's done, she ascents to her own commitment.

The more Sawyer aggressively protests, the more the attendants believe she really needs help. After a few violent outbursts, Sawyer's 24-hour hold is extended to seven days. Her mother (Amy Irving) is sympathetic, but can't obtain Sawyer's release.

Unsane functions on at least two levels. The first involves a social dimension: Is this institution committing people against their will in order to collect insurance money? When such monies run out, the supposedly insane suddenly become sane again. Mental health care becomes a profit-oriented scam.

On a second level, the movie pushes Sawyer to wonder whether she really might be insane. If all the people around you seem to be insane — why else would you find yourself in their company?

Working from a screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, Soderbergh effectively keeps us wondering about Sawyer for quite some time.

The story takes a turn toward horror when a new attendant (Joshua Leonard) shows up at the hospital. Sawyer accuses the attendant of being the man who stalked her in Boston, forcing her to move to Pennsylvania to escape his reach.

No one believes Sawyer, who finds only one ally inside the institution. Nate (Jay Pharoah), a man who has been committed for opiate addiction, has managed to smuggle in a cell phone which he shares with Sawyer.

Initially, Soderbergh’s use of iPhones gives the movie’s images an off-kilter feel that creates a mood of disconnection from the ordinary. Overall, though, I’m not sure there was a great deal of gain in making the movie this way — unless it was to keep costs to a minimum.

Despite some plot leaps that are difficult to swallow and a reveal that arrives too early, there’s enough in Unsane to keep it watchable, providing you don’t mind a surrender to horror-movie ploys before Soderbergh calls it quits.

I don't imagine that Unsane will be a major box-office performer, but it serves as a clear announcement that Foy is more than a regal presence. As Sawyer, she’s vulnerable, frightening and assertive. Her performance goes a long way toward saving a movie that isn’t always able to resist its less imaginative impulses.

He refused to be bed ridden

Robin Cavendish spent 36 years of his life paralyzed from polio, a disease he contracted while working in Kenya in the 1950s. Breathe, a new movie starring Andrew Garfield and marking the directorial debut of actor Andy Serkis, turns Cavendish's story into a life-affirming celebration. It may sound odd for a movie about a paralyzed man, but Serkis (The Lord of the Rings and the Planet of the Apes movies), has made a sometimes giddy, feel-good movie -- and, as a result, Breathe never feels entirely credible. Early on, the movie focuses on Cavendish's relationship with Diana (Claire Foy), the love of his life. The two meet, marry and head to Kenya. When the stricken Cavendish is brought back to England, he initially wishes for nothing more than to die. He has no desire to spend his life attached to a breathing machine. For an active adventurous man, life had lost its meaning. Diana, who by this time is pregnant, eventually brings her husband out of his funk and the rest of the movie charts the ways in which Cavendish struggles to lead a meaningful life. With the help of an inventor (Hugh Bonneville), Cavendish labors to escape his bedroom, an ambition that led to the invention of a mobile wheelchair with a built-in breathing machine. For those who are unable to breathe on their own, life becomes a new kind of adventure, one dependent on a continuous flow of electricity and, ultimately, on others. Displaying a preternatural helping of good humor, Garfield gives a spirited performance as Cavendish, no small feat considering he's limited to working with his face and voice. Serkis delivers moments of interest, but the movie eventually becomes mawkish with a conclusion that proves touching -- if not heartbreaking. If Breathe advances a view that's anything close to the truth, Cavendish probably wouldn't have wanted it any other way, but Breathe might have benefited from a little less burnish and a lot more soul searching.

A journalist is imprisoned in Iran

Comic Jon Stewart makes a serious directorial debut with Rosewater.

Curiosity about the new movie Rosewater stems in part from its pedigree. Rosewater, which tells the story of a journalist who was imprisoned and tortured in Iran, marks the directorial debut of comic Jon Stewart.

No stranger to political commentary, Stewart drops his satirical edge, building his movie from quiet outrage about what happens when free expression is trampled and ideology replaces sanity.

Rosewater attacks this larger theme by focusing on the story of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian/Canadian journalist whose book, Then They Came for Me, became the bestseller that provided a basis for Stewart's movie.

Bahari's journey began with an assignment for Newsweek: When we meet him, he's covering the election between hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hossein Mousavi, the candidate who promised sweeping reforms.

In need of transportation, Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal) quickly establishes a relationship with a cab driver (Dimitri Leonidas) who subsequently introduces him to a group of reform-minded young people who believe Iran is on the brink of revolutionary change. Their enthusiasm is infectious; they can't wait for a new day.

It never dawned. Ahmadinejad won. The country's opposition claimed election fraud and protests broke out.

The fact that Bahari filmed a protest in which soldiers fired on protesters helped seal his fate. He was arrested and accused of being a spy. In 2009, Bahari spent 118 days in prison.

Once in Evin Prison, Bahari underwent interrogation, beatings and psychological torture, mostly (according to the movie) at the hands of one man (Kim Bodnia), an official who's eager to please his superiors by eliciting a confession from Bahari.

Bernal presents Bahari as a young journalist who can't quite believe that he's been caught in a position in which he must accept a reality that, to him, seems entirely absurd. At various points during his ordeal, he weakens.

Stewart, who filmed Rosewater in Jordan, uses real news footage to heighten the film's sense of immediacy and to give it breadth, but for the most part, Rosewater is a closed-in drama.

We follow Bahari as he moves from his spartan cell to the interrogation room, where he's often blindfolded.

Perhaps to open things up a bit, Stewart also includes scenes in which Bahari imagines that he's talking to his late father (Haluk Bilginer), a man who served time in the same prison during the Shah's repressive regime. These fantasy conversations help Bahari build strength for his ordeal.

Shohreh Aghdashloo plays Bahari's mother, and Claire Foy portrays his London-based, pregnant wife, but the central drama hinges on the relationship between Bahari and a tormenter who isn't always sure of himself and who, on at least one occasion, finds himself at odds with his boss.

Bahari calls his interrogator Rosewater because the man has a habit of sprinkling himself with cologne.

The film finds a brief touch of wit when Bahari tells his captor about the degenerate ways of the West, putting the man in the delicate position of wanting to hear more about the sexual decadence he's pledged to combat.

As Bahari fictionalizes about various forms of massage, he's provided with a rare -- if fleeting -- opportunity to exercise a measure of control over his tormenter.

Stewart's interest in the story stems from the fact that an appearance Bahari made on The Daily Show was part of the evidence used against him. Bahari was interviewed in Tehran by comic Jason Jones for a satirical Daily Show segment in which Jones posed as a spy.

International attention helped free Bahari, whose story may constitute only a footnote in the overall sweep of global oppression, but Stewart tells Bahari's story with urgency and authenticity.

In the process, he reminds us of what can happen when literalists take command of a culture; i.e., nothing good.