To mourn or not to mourn
Chloe Zhao's latest-- adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's well-regarded 2020 novel-- is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask: does it earn our tears, or are we overindulging?
Haven't read O'Farrell's book so can't approach the material that way-- can only go on what's visible on the big screen.
The film starts impressively enough-- Zhao's camera looking up into the sky or down a hole, both sky and soil crowded by giant beech, their roots furry with moss. We see a hawk swoop down onto the glove of one Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckly), catching along its glide path the eye of a young man (Paul Mescal).
Attraction, connection, commitment: Agnes is courted, marries the man, is disowned by her family, is forced to move in with newfound husband. Gives birth to daughter, Susana (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). At about this point more or less one notices an oddity: we hear the man referred to as 'tutor,' 'husband,' 'son,' 'father' but not by name, the reason being simple: this isn't the man's story.
Zhao's film-- and O'Farrell's novel presumably-- is a member of that subgenre of metafiction where a well-known tale is retold not through the eyes of the protagonist but of a supporting character's, in this case Agnes. Tom Stoppard did this as early as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, (about the eponymous pair and their misadventures with a certain Danish prince) back in 1966; Gerardo de Leon pulled it off (with the help of Teodorico Santos) fifteen years earlier with Sisa (the story of Noli Me Tangere through the eyes of its most memorable minor character). Sidenote: Stoppard thirty-two years later told of the staging of Romeo and Juliet, where the real-life playwright immortalizes his true love in a play; Mario O'Hara that same year remade Sisa with its equally real-life writer-hero immortalizing his true love in a novel. Might strictly be me but Stoppard seems to write brilliant fanfic in eerie parallel step with Filipino filmmakers, was at one point anticipated by a decade and a half.
Being silly of course. Stoppard retells the story of a well-known play through the eyes of one of its minor characters; O'Farrell retells the story of a well-known life through the eyes of the man's wife. Stoppard is working with an established play, arguably the most famous in all of English literature, O'Farrell filling in the gaps in a biography with guesswork and imagination.
Another noted difference: Stoppard's play (saw the 1990 adaptation directed by the author) is often funny, full of absurdist Beckettian humor (as befits two characters with little else to do); Hamnet offers few laughs, if any, and the dearth can be overwhelming. This is heavy drama, gets heavier as it unfolds.
Paul Mescal has been dinged for being too pretty and I see the critics' point: if O'Farrell's purpose is to tell the story of Agnes and not of Agnes' husband, or at least only enough of Agnes' husband to establish that he's emotionally distant or becomes emotionally distant when tragedy strikes, doesn't help to have an actor with melting Spaniel eyes, with a gaze so soulful he keeps you worshipping even when he's a self-centered jerk. The smarter money would have been to cast someone less distractingly pretty-- this generation's equivalent of Gary Oldman or Tim Roth (I don't know that many young uns), able to repel us then, eventually, win our affections the hard way. A Humphrey Bogart, if you like, of contemporary indie cinema.
Critics also ding Jessie Buckley for being one-note and to that I say: phooey. The actor knows a good thing when she sees it and goes all the way, from spell incantations to hard births to desperate resuscitation attempts to primal screams loud enough to raise the dead. And it isn't all acting with a capital 'A:' Towards film's end, when she finally attends a performance of her husband's long-awaited handiwork, her expressions and mutterings-- consistent with her tendency to mutter during moments of stress or when she needs to focus-- help us to a better understanding (as she in turn better understands) of what her husband hath wrought onstage.
Mind you, I said 'understand,' I didn't say 'reconcile.' That's certainly suggested in the way Agnes and her husband look at each other at performance's end, and in the way Zhao arranges images for the film's finale, the hoariest kind of biopic cliche-- but I like to think there's enough ambiguity that we're left with the possibility the ending led to a momentary connection not holistic healing, that the marriage ahead will still have rough bumps and deep potholes, maybe a historically unrecorded separation or at least estrangement along the way.
As for the accusation that a playwright transmuting life experiences into a masterpiece is yet another cliche-- O c'mon. C'mon. The late Filipino filmmaker Mario O'Hara admitted to taking ideas from what happened around him; he walked everywhere, every day, sometimes from Avenida to Luneta, a forty minute trek. He at least partially based his script for Insiang on what happened to his backyard neighbors back in Pasay (partly on a radio drama written by Mely Tagasa). If drawing from experience to create art is merely another old trope, I submit there's a reason why it became an old trope in the first place.
O'Farrell notes that she based much of her novel's emotions on her own when her child was sick-- in this case of meningitis, a terrifying disease-- and on her experiences as a child suffering from encephalitis. If she presumably invests so much feeling in her novel can Zhao-- whose films are notable for their often low dramatic temperature-- do no less? Should Zhao do what she usually does and hold back, understate, make the scenes of sickness and suffering tasteful, even artful? More phooey; any parent-- me included-- knows exactly what Agnes and through her O'Farrell are going through, and any husband or father will be just as dumbfounded when they realize that whatever terror or sadness or despair they've experienced is nothing, a mere foothill, to the volcanic upheavals a wife and mother undergo.
Don't know I don't know; already admitted to having failed to read O'Farrell's book (currently committed to a really long read, likely take years to finish), and will admit to being a sorry nonexpert on Elizabethan drama (seen film adaptations-- does that count?). If more knowledgeable heads can hang the label 'grief porn' on this film then so be it-- but it's well-made porn, I submit, nevertheless, and I'll admit to having giving in to its spell a few times.
First published in Businessworld 2.6.26
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