by Julian Wood
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Noah Jupe, Emily Watson, David Wilmot
Intro:
… a finely calibrated work that will move and please audiences.
Shakespeare (remember him?) never wrote an autobiography or a memoir. He got pretty famous though, and in his lifetime too, and not just for the subsequent four hundred years of worldwide interest. So, it is perhaps understandable that people have speculated about what he was like, what his life in Stratford was like and, as in this recent film by Chinese/American director Chloe Zhao, what his marriage might have been like. Zhao’s film is based on the somewhat overpraised but still likeable, novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote this adaptation to the screen.
The focus is on Will’s young adulthood. He is the son of a glover (glove maker), who clearly had enough money to send his son to a grammar school, but was, at least in this imagining, a tyrannical father who beats his son. When Will (flavour of the year Paul Mescal) is not having domestic rows, he is wondering the forests. There, he meets the attractive young Anne Hathaway (the wonderful Jessie Buckley who, incidentally, gets top billing here). The two hit it off – as in, going more or less straight to vigorous sex in a barn. Anne gets pregnant out of wedlock and a hasty marriage is required by the customs of the day. Meanwhile, somehow Will has time to think himself into being a genius. On the link to what he became, there is a mystery there as great as the mystery of love itself. It is very hard to explain him; how did he know all the stuff that turns up in his plays? On top of that, we have to ask how did he acquire his astonishing and timeless understanding of human nature?
Zhao and O’Farrell wisely sidestep all this and try to get back to the humans inside history. It is also a portrait of a marriage in a way. The problems appear early when Will indicates that he has to go to London to make his name. Anne seems remarkably cool with all this, even articulating the idea that she understands that the rural life is never going to be enough for him. She knows her man. He feels a bit bad about it all, but he goes to seek his fortune in London anyway, coming back intermittently. In the process, he not only leaves Anne lonely, but misses out on significant and tragic events in his family life.
Zhao made the haunting indie drama Nomadland, so one could discern a thread here in terms of showing the existential loneliness of women, married or not. Romance is wonderful but there is a lot of life to live thereafter too.
She is a skilful filmmaker, bringing a lot of craft to this film. Apart from anything else, it looks wonderful with its rich palette of summer and autumn colours. She has found one of two splendid houses for the interiors, and recreates the late Tudor period with economical but authentically bustling streets scenes. The forest, of course, is a timeless backdrop.
The other element here is the cast, and their chemistry and the performances that she gets out of them. Buckley often steals films that she is in, and she is superb again here. She can do so much with little. Mescal has decided to play the Bard more as larrikin than artist, but this limited scope probably suits the film’s focus.
O’Farrell’s source material did the fashionable, but also sensible, thing in focussing on the people (women mostly) who must have supported the great man. What were their lives like, chafing against the limitations of the day? For the film too, as a portrait of the age and as a tale of intimate sorrow, it is a finely calibrated work that will move and please audiences.
