Two kinds of grief in 'Hamnet'

  Hamnet, director Chloe Zhao's adaptation of a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, takes us into the Elizabethan world where Shakespeare began both his career and domestic life. Perhaps to clarify matters about the title, we're immediately informed that in Shakespeare's day, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. 

  By necessity, Zhao's grief-laden movie (more to come on that) must be regarded as speculative. As the author of 38 plays, four long narrative poems, 154 Sonnets, and some shorter poems, it's no wonder that the English language's most famous author didn't have time to keep a diary.

  Zhao (Nomadland) builds her story around the marriage between Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). The pivotal event arrives when the couple's 11-year-old son, Hamnet, is struck down by the plague, shifting the story toward Agnes's inconsolable grief and simmering resentment. 

   Busy establishing his theater, William wasn't around when Hamnet passed.

   On screen, the independent-minded Agnes embraces nature and considers herself inseparable from it. A pet hawk rests on her gloved forearm when summoned to feed. She spends so much time with trees, she might as well be moss-covered. 

   Communing with nature aside and writing with a quill pen aside, William and Agnes had time to have three children, a daughter (Bodhi Rae Breathhach) and twins (Olivia Lynes and Jacob Jupe). 

   Mescal's performance has both cheery and doom-struck aspects, but Zhao focuses more on Agnes, who carries most of the burden of child-rearing. Preoccupied with running The Globe in London, William left Agnes in Stratford. She insisted he go off and fulfill his destiny as a writer, but later came to resent his absence.

   I guess it's a new take, Shakespeare as the workaholic dad and absentee father. 

    Zhao makes the most of the wooded mysteries around Stratford, Agnes's leafy domain. Make what you will of Zhao's fondness for turning dark holes into a motif. Ah, the deep void, the gaping yaw in which undiscovered countries can be found, as Agnes puts it, echoing the line Shakespeare gave to Hamlet. 

    Hamlet, you'll remember,  referred to death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."

   Throughout, we're primed to expect problems. When we first meet William, he's working as a Latin tutor to pay off the debt his irresponsible, glove-making father had accumulated. The looming marriage between William and Agnes isn't greeted favorably by either family. Agnes's brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) seems more sympathetic.

    So what is this movie trying to accomplish? 

    When Hamnet's death scene arrives, Zhao gives full vent to the agony of loss. Garments may be rend both on screen and off as Zhao contrasts two kinds of mourning: Agnes's, direct and visceral, and William's, expressed through writing, the arena in which he presumably could deal with it.

    Jupe's performance as a playful kid who's devoted to his twin sister augments the grief.

   In Zhao's finale, William takes on the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father in the first production of the play. Agnes becomes a vocally avid member of the audience, initially derisive but ultimately understanding that Will grasped the agonies poor Hamnet endured. Dying from the plague was a gruesome ordeal, reflected in the ghost's speech about being poisoned by his brother, Claudius, and recited by William during the movie's recreation of the performance of Hamlet on the Globe stage. 

    It's better written than anything in the movie.

    "The leprous distilment, whose effect

         Holds such an enmity with blood of man

         That swift as quicksilver it courses through

         The natural gates and alleys of the body,

         And with a sudden vigor it doth (posset)

         And curd, like eager droppings into milk

         The thin and wholesome blood."

     Did the death of Shakespeare's son really inspire Hamlet? Having seen a number of productions of Hamlet, I'm dubious. And it's impossible to watch Hamnet without constantly reminding ourselves of what Shakespeare was destined to become no matter how much Zhao grounds him in 16th century realities.

     That's a problem for any movie that brings Shakespeare into view; it must withstand suspicions that it is trying to gain prestige through association with greatness. Hamnet can't entirely dodge such doubts, but Zhao -- particularly in the movie's final scenes -- finds a startling immediacy in Buckley's unadorned grief, revealed finally without the embarrassment of artifice by an actress unafraid to walk out on a limb grown from unbearable pain.

    

    

    

 

‘Gladiator II’: More but not better

 

    I’d been looking forward to Gladiator II, hoping director Ridley Scott would deliver an epic-scaled movie that provided a healthy dose of sword-and- sandal escapism while paying homage to an idealized version of bygone Roman virtues: honor and strength. 

  What I experienced was a mixture of involvement and disappointment, a movie that prioritizes spectacle as it labors to refresh the structure of the original movie, which made its debut 20 years ago.

   Gone, aside from a few references in flashback, is Russell Crowe as Maximus, an obvious necessity prompted by the fact that Maximus died in the first installment. He's replaced by Paul Mescal as Lucius, who we first meet on the eve of the Roman siege of Numidia, a North African Berber kingdom.

    David Scarpa’s screenplay introduces Lucius as an adult who was taken in by North African "barbarians” (as the Romans refer to its non-Roman subjects) as a child. The Numidians are ripe for conquest by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a loyal Roman who’s devoted to imperial expansion and to the republican ways of the past.

    Early on, we get the whole Scott enchilada: big ships, catapulted fire balls, gory hand-to-hand combat, scaled walls, and flaming arrows. 

    It should surprise no one that the empire is evil. The cunning wickedness of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus -- so important in the first movie -- has been replaced by Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a conniving entrepreneur who owns and wagers on gladiators and angles to surpass those who belong to the senatorial elite.

    Returnees include Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, Maximum’s one-time lover.

   As if to differentiate this belated and somewhat boated sequel, two actors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) play callow brothers who rule the empire, providing dual helpings of cruelty. 

   Plenty of action, much of it set in the Roman Coliseum, follows as the movie ratifies its status as a collection of CGI thrills. Digitally created super-monsters battle gladiators. These include vicious creatures that look like a combination of rabid dogs and monkeys and a rhinoceros the size of a small building.

    At one point, the arena is flooded for a simulated naval battle conducted while man-eating sharks ply the shallow waters. 

   Though obvious, the word "overkill" leaps to mind.

   I won’t bother you with details about a plot that includes reasonably predictable elements that echo developments in first movie. In case it isn't already clear, I'll summarize: After Lucius' wife is killed in the battle for Numida, he's captured and taken to Rome, where Macrinus purchases him and makes him a gladiator.

    The principal performances are all up to snuff. Mescal rages and looks muscular, a man contemptuous of his origins but not entirely freed of them, even as he seeks his vengeance for his wife’s death at Roman hands. 

   Playing a man of conscience, Mescal’s presence is missed when he's not on screen. The movie needed  more of his weight.

   In what becomes the movie's stand-out performance, Washington brings Shakespearean stature to a man of wit and cunning.

   Nielsen acquits herself well as Marcus’ wife, a lady with a "secret" that’s eventually revealed but which is obvious from the start.

   Although many of the movie's characters are based on real historical figures, the minority of viewers who are versed in Roman history in the 200s, may blanch at inaccuracies. 

   Those aside, Gladiator II finds Scott putting himself through the required paces. His battle scenes serve as crowdpleasers, much in the way battling gladiators served the Roman yearning for bloody escapism.

  I found the movie — which unfolds over two and a half hours -- a somewhat mechanical attempt to highlight a checklist of themes: Roman intrigue, Roman debauchery, the Roman taste for spectacle, Roman stoicism in the face of doom, and a buffed version of Roman virtue.

   Put it all together and you have a movie that finds  captivating moments amid a scattered, unexceptional plot. Gladiator II can't replicate the sorrows of the first movie or reach its noble heights.

   As a long-time spectator in the entertainment area, I'll turn my thumb sideways and move on.

 

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.

A grim look at marriage in the future

 

   Foe takes place in 2065. As is almost always the case these days, the future looks even worse than the present, so much so that corporations want to establish colonies in space. 

   Steeped in Gothic austerity, Foe — based on a novel by Lain Reid, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Garth Davis — displays  palpable ambition as it deals with marriage, artificial intelligence, gender roles, and crushed dreams.

   Working with two fine actors (Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal), Davis mixes elements from various periods, using anachronistic music and introducing futuristic sci-fi concepts that unfold when a stranger (Aaron Pierre) visits the farm where Hen (Ronan) and Junior (Mescal) live in isolation.

    Smooth-talking and assured, Pierre's Terrance represents vaguely defined corporate and governmental interests.  He informs the couple that they’ve been short-listed for an important experiment. If they pass vigorous tests, they’ll qualify to spend a couple of  years on a space station called The Installation, part of a strategy to ensure human survival once the world starts running on empty.

    As the story evolves, we learn that only Junior has been selected. Hen (short for Henrietta) will remain behind. Junior has no choice in the matter; he’s been conscripted, a human guinea pig.

     Lest she be lonely, Hen will be supplied with a substitute human, a replicant that precisely mirrors everything about Junior: his appearance, his memories, and his ability to simulate the ardor that once pervaded their now-flagging relationship.

     Hen and Junior aren't exactly overachievers. Junior works at an industrial chicken farm and Hen earns a bit of money as a waitress, but there’s little reference to the world beyond the couple’s 200-year-old Midwestern farmhouse. They’re like prisoners sharing the same cell.

      Tension mounts when Terrance moves in with the couple as part of Junior's prep and to help develop Junior’s replacement.

     That’s a lot of exposition for a movie that’s less interested in sci-fi or even plot than in creating space for the relationship between Hen, Junior, and Terrance to settle, bounce off the walls, and grope toward resolution.

        An essential conflict emerges. Junior sees no reason to abandon the grim horizons of the farm that has been in his family for generations; longing for something more, Hen remembers she once could see a future for herself.

        A dusty piano that’s kept in the farm-house basement represents a side of Hen that her marriage forced her to bury. And Junior’s name suggests a man/child who never has found a pathway to maturity. 

        Ronan’s performance can be both sensuous and resentful; in the showier role, Mescal dips into Junior's madness, despair and simmering rage.

        Foe sets up a dynamic in which we wonder whether Terrance’s stated goals mask another agenda. A score by Park Jiha and Oliver Coates suggests deeper mysteries than the movie embraces, serving as a kind of on-going tease.

        I’ve waited to pass critical judgement on Davis’s work because that’s how I experienced the movie, an unsettling waiting game that asks for a delayed response.

        Foe tries to go deep but only half succeeds. It’s like a replicant of an art movie, almost convincing, but never quite hitting the thematic high notes that could have lifted it from the grey zone in which the movie, like Junior, seems stuck.

   

        

Lovers on the run: Let’s dance

 

  French choreographer Benjamin Millepied makes his directorial debut by enrolling in the lovers-on-the-run school of filmmaking. We’ve raced through these corridors before, but not quite like this.

  Loosely following the arc of Bizet's opera, Millepied's Carmen casts Melissa Barrera (In the Heights) as a fiercely independent woman who escapes cartel killers in Mexico and takes flight to Los Angeles.

  During a skirmish at the border, Barrera's Carmen meets Aidan (Paul Mescal of Aftersun), a former Marine who did two tours in Afghanistan. To protect Carmen, Aidan kills a border patrol officer. 

   The two take flight.

   A plot summary doesn't do justice to Millepied's effort. Relying heavily on cinematographer Jorge Widmer (A Tree of Life and V for Vendetta) and composer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight), Millepied turns his movie into a dreamy succession of set pieces, many featuring dance and song.

   Other musical contributions come from singer/songwriters Julieta Venegas, songwriter Taura Stinson, and rapper The D.O.C.

   The movie's opening sets a no-nonsense mood. Flamenco dancer Marina Tamayo dances on a wooden platform in the middle of a lonely arid landscape. The rhythms she creates with her feet are sharply defiant. Whatever these men want, Tamayo's character has no intention of giving it to them.

    Tamayo, who's playing Carmen's mother, dies at the hands of these cartel thugs, but her presence is meant to haunt the rest of the film.

   Millepied requires his actors to create a strong presence as much as to develop their characters. Mescal makes a convincing battle-scarred warrior with a tender side and Barrera shines during the dance sequences. 

   Pedro Amodovar regular Rossy de Palma brings her striking appearance to the film as the owner of a club where Aidan and Carmen find respite. De Palma's witchy blend of concern, menace, and eroticism almost turn her into a special effect.

   Border issues and the traumatic impact of war add topicality but Millepied seems to be aiming for more than a gloss on current events, possibly a story about characters who become dramatic archetypes.

   As a result, emotions often play second fiddle to Millepied's  formalized approach, a prospect that will bother those expecting torrid passion. 

   Carmen may not deliver on every level, but bold execution creates appreciation for a movie of artistic ambition and palpable daring.

A father and daughter wrapped in memory

      Dad is divorced. It's not clear how often he sees his daughter but we suspect that his visits are infrequent. Perhaps to make up for it, Dad has taken 11-year-old Sophie on vacation to a resort in Turkey. 

      In his early 30s, Dad finds himself in an ambiguous position: He's both friend and parent to Sophie and it's clear that he hasn't entirely worked struck the right balance.

      It's also clear that Dad is troubled. There are signs. While his daughter sleeps, Dad, who has a cast on his right arm, stands on the balcony of their hotel room swaying as he tries to light a cigarette. He's like someone trying to work out kinks, and we suspect the kinks are more than physical. 

      In her first movie, Scottish director Charlotte Wells pulls off a neat trick. She keeps things specific: A father and daughter play pool, doze in the sun or take boat rides. 

    At the same time, Wells wraps the movie's emotional life in a cloak of tantalizing vagueness. 

    Bifurcated and unsettling, Wells' approach allows for a challenging range of interpretive possibilities.

      Mostly, the daughter's point of view dominates. We'll eventually learn that Sophie is recalling this summer interlude as an adult with a baby and a wife. She's looking at old camcorder footage Dad took on that long ago trip, which Wells, thankfully, uses sparingly.

     Sophie tries to understand who her father might have been when she was at an age when she couldn't really take the measure of his life.

      Stroboscopic flashes of Sophie dancing with her father in a club disrupt the flow of calm imagery. Moments of frenzy that shatter the movie's placid surface.

      By now it should be clear that Wells' plotless, hazy approach places a heavy burden on the actors. 

       As the father, Paul Mescal creates a loving parent who seems to be harboring secrets. Mescal's Calum isn't about to allow Sophie to peer into areas he may not wish to examine himself.

        It's a tricky performance. The boyish-looking Mescal conveys a lot by simply allowing himself to live in the movie's accumulation of small moments. 

        Frankie Corio gives a great performance as Sophie, one of those amazingly natural turns that makes it seem as if no acting is happening.

        Corio's Sophie is still a kid. She can get caught up in an arcade motorcycle game with a boy who's about her age. But she's also anticipating change. She's fascinated by teenagers who invite her to share a few moments. Sophie watches with curiosity as the older kids begin to express their sexuality, an awakening that she has yet to experience.

         Wells has created a portrait of two people who share moments of amazing intimacy without really knowing each another, which perhaps stands as a metaphor for many human interactions. Wells allows us to feel the warmth of afternoon suns and the dissolution of tension that happens in the moments before one falls asleep at poolside. She lulls us into relaxation while simultaneously allowing unsettling undercurrents to ripple through nearly every scene.

          Of course, it's all a bit fuzzy. We're mostly looking at events as remembered by the adult Sophie. Maybe 'remembering' isn't quite the right word. She's dreaming the past with all its love, angers, and unrecoverable loss.

          Now and again, Wells shows us images of hang-gliders floating through the blue Turkish sky. These images, almost trivial from a vacation standpoint, might represent a way to think about memory --untethered drifts through time.

          Aftersun offers the pleasure of discovering a movie made by someone who knows how to speak the language of cinema. Wells isn't telling a story; she's sharing an experience, leaving us immersed in the emotions her film unleashes.

A haunting, complex look at motherhood

 

    Count me among those who consider Olivia Colman indispensable.

    Colman has played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and has taken on a variety of other characters in a growing body of work.

    If you can think of a time when Colman’s performance missed the mark, leave a comment. I can’t.

    Colman stars in The Lost Daughter, a film in which actress Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her directorial debut.

    Adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante — best known for My Brilliant Friend — Lost Daughter establishes itself as a fearless exploration of motherhood with all its deep affections and charged resentments.

   Colman’s performance skillfully embodies the movie's themes without ever asking for sympathy. She creates a character who can be chilly and difficult, an academic capable of insight and cruelty.

   Slowly and in carefully calibrated fashion, Gyllenhaal moves through the story — although not without leaving disturbing traces of an irresolvable conflict. The Lost Daughter isn’t about resolving conflict; it’s about learning to live with it — or not.

    We soon discover that Leda has taken what appears to be a working vacation. She’s gone to a small Italian beach town, ostensibly to concentrate on her work.

    Inevitably, she meets other tourists, as well as a handyman (Ed Harris) and the local bartender (Paul Mescal). 

    An uneasy relationship develops between Leda and Nina (Dakota Johnson), a wife and mother who has traveled to Italy with a small family group from Queens, New York. Nina begins to fixate on Leda as a possible role model.

    Leda shows the ferocity of her independence when, on the beach, she denies a request by Nina to move her beach chair so that her family can spread out a bit. Leda's refusal intrigues Nina, who’s having her own issues with the demands of motherhood.

     At one point, Nina’s young daughter is lost along with her favorite doll. Leda finds the girl, calming the girl’s frantic mother. Leda also finds the doll, which becomes the centerpiece of a revealing and provocative turn.

     Leda's most important relationship may be one she can’t dodge, the connection to her youthful self. Leda’s younger days are seen in flashbacks in which an impressive Jessie Buckley portrays Leda as a young mother who’s constantly being distracted by two demanding daughters. She can't get any work done at home.

   In these flashbacks, Gyllenhaal presents a small but telling portrait of a marriage under stress. Leda’s husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) tends to his own career and disappoints his wife in bed.

   At an academic conference, Leda begins an affair with a colleague (Peter Sarsgaard) who greatly admires her ability to translate poetry.

   Work, independence, and sex provide Leda with much-needed fulfillment— but also leave her grappling with guilt about maternal insufficiencies. She reveals herself when she tells Nina that children can be a “crushing responsibility.” Underline the word “crushing.”

    You can spend productive time unpacking the symbolic importance of dolls in the movie but, in broadest terms, they suggest a side of womanhood that Leda both needs and disdains.

    Presented in a plain, unadorned style in which the flashbacks sometimes feel abruptly inserted, The Lost Daughter stands as a courageously truthful depiction of a struggle many women face but which seldom receives on-screen. 

    The movie doesn't indulge in simple or even complicated solutions; it's a challenging look at what it means for Leda to face the consequences of choices that haunt her. 

     Only an actress of Colman's caliber could make this work.