by Julian Wood
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Lindsay Duncan
Intro:
Foy gives a brave, honest performance …
H is for Helen actually.
This is an anticipated film, given how much praise Helen MacDonald’s 2014 source book attracted, especially in the UK. It is a semi-fictionalised account of Macdonald’s life (here played by Claire Foy) as a Cambridge academic who decides to train a goshawk. The inciting incident, as it were, is the death of Helen’s father (affably played by the always-watchable Brendan Gleeson), an accomplished photojournalist with an appetite for living life to the full, who inspired his daughter to love nature and adventure.
The father-daughter relationship that dominates the first act is well played and lays down a strong emotional base for the film. We know early on that once the dad goes, Helen will descend into serious grieving. Her mother (Lindsay Duncan) misses her husband too, but she is much more ‘English’ about it all and tries to soldier on. After all, as she and Helen agree, he wouldn’t have wanted them to mope. Still, Helen is going down slow. She decides that she needs a new challenge, so she acquires a goshawk which she calls Mabel. There is quite a lot of chat about how goshawks are sort of untrainable ‘psycho killers’, so we know that it’s not going to be plain sailing.
Helmer Philippa Lowthorpe is a feted small screen director (she made Three Girls and the recent and very impactful Prisoner 951), but she doesn’t really bring the material to life. To be fair, depression and grief are not always easy things to realise on screen and they don’t make for audience engagement. One of the main problems with the film (which is less true of the book) is that there isn’t enough hawk in it. We get shots of Mabel (or some stunt hawk perhaps) in flight and realise that it can take down a rabbit or even a pheasant, but that is about it. Okay, so they don’t want to make it a nature film either, but really, there should have been more prominence given to the bird itself other than by using dialogue references to its fierce nature. The title sequence showing the sheer beauty of its feathers is promising, but the film doesn’t really follow up with enough of that close engagement/fascination.
Foy gives a brave, honest performance, and she tries hard to shake off the shadow of the Queen (she was so brilliant in The Crown), but her character arc is pretty much compressed into a few final scenes. The film could have been vital, urgent and even a bit Lawrentian, but it comes across more like a British version of Penguin Bloom.
