Christopher Schroeder

Category: movie

  • Half-Way Is Enough?

    I agree with others who assert that Hamnet is a moving movie but wonder whether it works as a story.

    This movie, which offers an account of Shakespeare’s family play, focuses on his wife Agnes (Anne). As such, it becomes in this adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by Chloé Zhao and O’Farrell a story about the passion between a reputed forest witch who is alienated from her foster family and a Latin tutor who is repaying his father’s debt.

    Agnes (Jessie Buckley) later refuses to join Will (Paul Mescal) in London where she convinced him with her brother’s help to go because she fears for the health of their twin daughter Judith. However, their other twin Hamnet is the one who dies before Will can return, and her grief is compounded when Will returns to London where he develops a different play, which Agnes eventually recognizes as an account of their shared yet different sorrow, and a testament to Will’s love for her.

    Such a movie — artists whose work matters more, children who die — usually bores me, but this one has several moving scenes that brought me back to my own relationships, which the best stories often do. Moreover, its direction (Zhao) combines with compelling cinematography (Łukasz Żal) and powerful lead performances to establish an almost mystical mood, and an intoxicating joy, that makes their loss, and its threat to their marriage, all the more moving.

    I am most interested in this depiction of the connection that can exist between married couples, and thought it is a compelling corrective to the account of Will’s and Anne’s (Agnes’s) marriage that I had been given in grad school. Little about their lives if memory serves is reliably know, so this fictionalized account is as good in my opinion as any other. Moreover, it refocuses the attention afforded this canonical author, which I’ve never understood, on the relationships that could have sustained and inspired him, and as such serves as a reminder of their significance.

    Regardless, I think this movie flirts with melodrama — Agnes inspires both the author of this play and the audience at its premiere — but never makes good on such suggestions until its end. Agnes initially suspects that her son’s memory is being exploited by his father, and her husband, but later realizes that it’s a tribune to his life and their grief.

    Agnes is so entranced at its conclusion in part because she discovers that her ability to see visions has been restored. She actually can see her son leave this world and moved into the next one, and she reaches for the hand of the actor who plays Hamlet, and in so doing motivates the entire audience to reach out to him.

    That is a powerful scene but also the place where this story unravels at least for me. Will’s motivation while ambiguous is presumably his own existential questions, and that in this account informs Hamlet’s family soliloquy yet never reaches a plausible resolution.

    The betrayed in Will’s new play are the son (Hamlet) and his father (King Hamlet), and the betrayer is his mother and the wife (Gertrude). In contrast, Will cannot completely be the betrayer after he was encouraged by Agnes earlier in the movie to establish a London life, and yet Agnes hasn’t quite betrayed Will by insisting upon what she as a mother thinks is best for their sickly twin daughter Judith.

    That bothers me more than the misrepresentation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which seems more complicated than the simple contemplation of an existential question that is widely regarded to be. In contrast, I think it’s more a consideration of contingency and chance, and the difficulty in such conditions of defining duty, but such complexity is lost in the oversimplified suggestions of this movie.

    Perhaps in the end such scrutiny is unwarranted, and unnecessary. Without it, this movie is the story of a lost woman who finds acceptance and love in someone who would become one of the most famous people in the history of humanity. Who wouldn’t want such romance, especially at this time of the year?

  • The Kick We Might Need

    The recently released movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is written and directed by Mary Bronstein, might not seem obviously relevant, but it’s worth the effort and the experience.

    A therapist named Linda (Rose Byrne) and her unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn) who has an eating disorder return to their apartment to find a flood in their bathroom and soon thereafter a hole in a bedroom ceiling. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is sailing for two months, so Linda is responsible for coordinating these repairs and resettling her daughter in a nearby hotel without disrupting her treatment while maintaining her own private practice.

    Linda finds support in the hotel manager James (A$AP Rocky) and her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), who is also her supervisor. However, her shortcomings are exposed when Charles unexpectedly returns, so she runs to the beach and rushes into the ocean only to be repelled each time by crashing waves. She is found stretched out on the sand by her daughter, whom she promises that she will do better.

    The lead performance is particularly powerful, and according to Bronstein and Byrne purposely particular, which makes it a puzzle.

    For some, it represents the challenges confronting mothers who are told to lean in and have it all. Such an impression is obvious for example in the scene in which Linda challenges the physician (Bronstein) who is treating her daughter and other mothers’ children in a group session.

    This movie for others might be an account of the ways that men fail women. Such failures can be found for example in Linda’s husband Charles, who continually minimizes the challenges she is confronting, or her supervisor, who does help with a professional crisis but later terminates her therapy with him.

    It could be for still others a story about the ways that women cannot see and support each other. That in addition to the group session scene is also evident in the exchange between Linda and a client named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who after abandoning her newborn in Linda’s office later tells her that their recognition isn’t mutual.

    This exchange however suggests a larger link among these possibilities, which is the way that anyone can be unseen even by the people who could, and should, see us. Linda not only cannot see this client or for that matter others, but she also cannot recognize the humanity in the hotel manager James, whom she abandons in her damaged apartment after he fell through the ceiling hole and broke his leg.

    This movie in other words is more a cautionary tale about the ways that we can miss others’ suffering, and in so doing might make it worse. Even the parking lot attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) in his insistence upon the rules is yet one more person who cannot offer compassion to another suffering human.

    Suffering, which might be central to the human experience, is powerfully presented in this movie, which is why it cannot be a comedy even though some think it is. It’s less amusing and more unsettling, and certainly offers no connection or communion at its end.

    That isn’t funny or fun, and can never be, which could very well be why we all might need a kick in the pants.

  • Nothing Smashing

    Many credible critics liked The Smashing Machine, which I liked more than I expected yet couldn’t recommend.

    This sports biography focuses on several years (1997-2000) in the life of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr as he confronts professional and personal challenges. These moments were also featured in a 2002 documentary, which seems to have been widely admired.

    I’m a fan of neither sports biographies nor Dwayne Johnson, who nonetheless attempts to go places in his Kerr performance that I’ve not seem him acknowledge in other roles. Johnson claims that this movie, which also changed his life, isn’t a “fight” film but a “life” movie perhaps in part because its subject is still alive, and even makes a cameo appearance in a grocery store at its end.

    Neither Johnson nor his co-start Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, succeeds for similar and different reasons. For Blunt, the issue is less her ability — she makes the most of her role, and attempts to add dimensions but runs out of room in this script. Regardless, the effect limits the appeal of this movie.

    The bigger problem is the lack of a clear purpose. For example, I was curious why Kerr, whom I’d watched struggle with losing, could laugh after having done so in the shower while his friend, and manager / trainer Mark Coleman went on to win the “life-changing amount” of money. Both had mused about the possibility of fighting each other one day, which until this loss seemed inevitable in this tournament.

    The explanation suggested by this movie has something to do with Kerr’s newfound sobriety, including its effects upon his romantic relationship. His addiction had previously forced him to withdraw from a tournament, for which he had apologized, so his sobriety could be both why he can fight again and why he cannot maintain the ferocious professional reputation. Perhaps that also accounts for why he was showering while Coleman was fighting.

    Or maybe the purpose is more recognition for Kerr, who was a MMA pioneer but remained relatively unknown even after the 2002 documentary. The scrolling epilogue informs audiences that Kerr and Staples marry soon thereafter and later have a son — becoming parents is a conflict between them earlier in the movie — and that they were together for fifteen years, which seems life-changing enough.

    I’d guess if pressed that the writer and director Benny Safdie wanted to highlight a forgotten figure whom others could admire. Such a possibility, and parts of the plot, are easier to understand after reading about the previous documentary on which this version is based. Regardless, I think Safide gets bogged down in doing so as a box-office success, and cannot find the proper perspective to do both.

    Perhaps both are ultimately impossible, or at least seem so in this version of a biography of someone who might be admirable nonetheless. By its end, I had no greater interest in this sport, and didn’t learn anything about being human, even as I had been more entertained for a couple of hours than I expected, which at that point seemed enough.