H Is For Hawk (12A, 114 mins)
Verdict: Gets its talons into you
There are various ways, in the movies as in life, of tackling grief. The old man in Pixar‘s film Up (2009) did it by taking a trip. Less helpfully as it turned out, so did the couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now (1973).
In Field Of Dreams (1989), Kevin Costner turned to baseball. In the recently-released Hamnet, Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare buries himself in writing his great tragedy, Hamlet.
In H Is For Hawk, a true story, Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy) tries something else. Struggling to process the sudden, unexpected death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson), she devotes herself to training a goshawk, which becomes her most precious companion. She calls it Mabel.
This visceral connection with nature, red in tooth and especially claw, relieves her pain. But it doesn’t offer any glib answers.
In adapting Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir, Philippa Lowthorpe (the director and co-writer, with Emma Donoghue) does not shy away from depicting Helen as a complex character: easy enough to empathise with, but not necessarily to like. She ruffles feathers, you might say.
In different hands – Disney’s, for example – the story might have been softened and given a clearer trajectory from intense pain to total catharsis.
But Lowthorpe has created a smarter picture than that, more demanding of its audience, probably less commercial than it could have been, but all the better for it.
It is set in 2007. Helen is a chain-smoking academic at Cambridge University who, since girlhood, has shared a fascination for birds of prey with her father, Alisdair. The two share a sense of humour, too, chirpily trading Groucho Marx one-liners.
Claire Foy plays Helen Macdonald in H Is For Hawk. Helen is a chain-smoking academic at Cambridge University who, since girlhood, has shared a fascination for birds of prey with her father, Alisdair
Her dad is the only person who truly understands her, making H Is For Hawk a welcome addition to the short list of powerful films about the father-daughter bond. Of recent offerings I commend Aftersun (2022) to you, but there really aren’t that many.
Alisdair (nicknamed Ali Mac) is a renowned newspaper photographer who has seen and snapped it all, but still can’t stop working… to the detriment, it is implied, of his health.
Helen adores him and is blindsided with grief after taking a call from her mother (Lindsay Duncan) to say that he has collapsed and died. From this point, we must rely on flashbacks to understand the connection between Helen and her dad.
Her relationship with her mother is much more brittle. There is a brother, too, who barely utters a word. In fact for a while I thought he might be mute.
But it’s Duncan’s character who serves to remind Helen of what she has lost. ‘Dad wouldn’t want us to mope, would he,’ says her mum, briskly.
Actually, moping is not the half of it. At one point it looks as if Helen might find comfort in romance, but the man she takes home is spooked by all the emotional self-help books lying around.
She also has a decent and concerned best mate, a fellow academic (Denise Gough), but human interaction is not what she craves. She decides to share her life with a goshawk, travelling up to her father’s native Scotland to buy one.
Back in the Cambridgeshire countryside, a friend (Sam Spruell), a bird-of-prey expert, gives her lessons. By all accounts, Foy did plenty of intense training in real life, so the scenes in which she handles Mabel, with burgeoning authority, are compellingly authentic (and exquisitely shot).
As she bonds with the bird, her teaching suffers – and so does her personal hygiene – making H Is For Hawk an increasingly challenging watch. The story does not unfold as I expected, but then grief rarely does. Which might be the whole point. Whatever, it’s a very worthwhile film, with a superb performance from Foy at its heart.
The History Of Sound (15, 128mins)
Verdict: A bit dinge-like
Another two brilliant actors from the British Isles, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, both currently among the hottest in the industry, enhance The History Of Sound.
And yet Oliver Hermanus’s film, set in the early 20th century, is still, somehow, less than the sum of its parts.
Mescal plays Lionel, a poor farmer’s son from Kentucky blessed with a preternatural ear for music.
O’Connor is David, a musicologist from a more privileged background who meets Lionel in 1917 at a New England conservatory. The two fall in love, and later travel around Maine recording obscure folk songs on wax cylinders.
In The History Of Sound Paul Mescal plays Lionel, a poor farmer’s son from Kentucky blessed with a preternatural ear for music and Josh O’Connor is David, a musicologist from a more privileged background
The film, adapted by Ben Shattuck from two of his own short stories, takes us all the way to 1980 when Lionel, now played by Chris Cooper, reflects on their long-ago musical quest and ultimately doomed romance.
It’s all very nicely and tastefully done, and modestly touching, but a little dirge-like.
Compared with the quiet masterpiece that was Hermanus’s last film, Living (2022), I found it a mild disappointment.
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