Close up of her.
Close up of him.
Close up of her, looking at close up of him.
Larry Gelbart authored the book for City of Angels, the Broadway hit about Hollywood and the making of movies.
Noting the use of interactive multiple closeups as essential to good moviemaking, Gelbart’s Hollywood Producer kvells, “There won’t be a dry seat in the house.”
Even in a movie about Shakespeare.
Even in a movie about Shakespeare’s greatest play.
Even in a movie with some of the greatest lines of dialogue ever written… c’mon… you gonna quarrel with “To be or not to be?”
Gelbart’s admonition to Stine, the New York novelist and newbie screenwriter:
“Forget all the words to which you gave birth… remember how many a picture is worth; the odds are a thousand to one so get used to it, Stine. The book may be yours, baby, trust me, the movie is mine.”
So it is in Hamnet, a film ostensibly about the death of Shakespeare’s only son and the grieving father’s creation of the play Hamlet. Paul Mescal plays the bard and Jessie Buckley becomes his wife and the mother of his children.
Besides the film being nominated for Best Motion Picture, leading lady, Buckley, and director Chloe Zhao are nominated as well. Ms. Zhao has it down to basics…
Close up of her.
Close up of him.
Close up of her looking at close up of him…
This, at the premiere presentation of the playwright’s greatest masterwork. Add to that Mrs. Shakespeare’s introduction to just what it is her husband does for a living.
There is the illumination on the face of Ms. Buckley, as moment by moment she becomes captivated by what may well be the first play she has ever seen. Now imagine… the play is Hamlet … the greatest play ever written in the English language … and your husband wrote it!
The words the actors speak are like music and, along with the throng that surrounds you in that theatre, you too are captivated… as luck might have it, right there in front of the director’s camera.
But luck has nothing to do with it. The character transitions from an embittered woman, one who has suffered the greatest loss imaginable, to someone who is awestruck by being witness to the gift that God has given her husband.
Close up of her.
Close up of him.
Close up of her, looking at close up of him.
There is also a nomination for the cast… a relatively new category where the contribution to the film of the entire acting company is taken into consideration for an Oscar of its own. Hamnet must win this… it isn’t just the acting of the film’s ensemble… they are all… each and every one, very solid performers.
But there is more going on here than acting. It is the director’s brilliance of selecting faces that look like every 16th century painting you can ever remember perusing in books or museums. The ruddiness of the English complexion…the plumpness… the shape of the head… the eyes… each actor selected is a perfect picture of the director’s vision of who they will be playing. They are not only talented… they are perfection personified of the physical forms for the roles they have been assigned.
I am more than impressed. This is awesome. To make this movie and perhaps not even need Shakespeare’s words to pull it off. Oh, alright, pepper lines in during the early going to remind folks just who this dude is becoming. Go ahead, have his three fabulous children joyfully portray their father’s witches on an imagined Scottish heath.
This director deserves more than an Oscar. Do the Swedes give a Nobel Prize in Cinema? If not, why not? What a vision. What a talent.
I have yet to see Rose Byrne in If Had Legs I’d Kick You or Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value. I have seen my perennial favorite, Emma Stone being the primary reason to watch Bugonia, and Kate Hudson delivering more than I thought possible in Song Sung Blue.
Don’t care. I am putting it in writing. Jessie Buckley wins. She wins not just because she is so amazingly brilliant and so physically perfect for the role, but because… even though Emma Stone has Yorgos Lanthimos as her devoted director, and Ms. Hudson has probably waited her entire life for this part and this story filled with more ways to manipulate an audience than I can count, Ms. Buckley bought into something… an Asian director, Shakespeare, Hamlet, a love story marked by personal tragedy, and yet, somehow, knowing her director would not for a moment be overwhelmed by any of that while bringing the camera in on a character in wonderment and with total trust in the basics of her craft:
Close up of her.
Close up of him.
Close up of her looking at close up of him.
Wow!
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DISAPPOINTMENTS: REAL AND SURREAL
In my review of Hamnet and Jessie Buckley’s award-winning performance in that motion picture, I put forward the caveat that “I had yet to see Rose Byrne’s performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Oh, if only that were still true. I would be at least two hours younger and a happier man than I am today.
I will not waste your time (or very much more of mine). The best thing about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the title which, incidentally, makes even less sense than why anyone would want to make this movie…let alone watch it.
It isn’t art. It isn’t good. It does nothing to improve the minds of any who might take it in. There is simply no reasonable explanation for this thing to exist.
Let me take some of that back. People seem to like it. I am told the HBO audience has given it something like a rating of 91 “Rotten Tomatoes.” Could be, or perhaps in this instance, it means 91percent of the viewers threw ripe fruit at their screens. That thought occurred to me more than once while watching.
Someone labeled this thing a “dark comedy.” Trust me, there is nothing funny about it. Wikipedia, which one must presume has some input from the artist herself, seems to focus on Rose Byrne being a comedic star. Let me take exception; Ms. Byrne is about as unfunny as anyone I can imagine and although, for me, her career got off to a decent start nearly twenty years ago as the foil for Glenn Close in the exceptionally good TV series Damages; my memory is there were no attempts at humor there either.
At the opposite end of the spectrum. I didn’t expect to like Song Sung Blue for a plethora of personal and (turns out) not particularly good reasons. I don’t know why I am not a bigger Neil Diamond fan. Back in the early seventies we lived next door to one another in the Malibu Colony and never had an unpleasant run in. My memory is that he was rarely home and his house guests were easy to have as neighbors.
Diamond’s PR guy was Joe Sutton, a very good pal of mine and one of the original poker group I hosted in what were then my pre-Malibu days in Century City. It was then the 1960s, the very early days of Diamond’s career. Maybe it was because I never “got it,” about Joe’s client and did not honor my friend’s recommendations about Diamond at the dawn of his career at the Troubadour in Hollywood.
In my defense, the urban persona Diamond projected was totally wrong for what was then my quest for a country singer to play the lead in my fermenting Indy film, Who Fears The Devil. Even so, even I eventually came to learn that it is hardly possible to be more wrong about an artist than I was about this guy who turned out to be “the titan of the Brill Building.”
Hugh Jackman is another performer who is far from the top of any favorites list of mine, and Goldie’s kid, Kate Hudson, is someone whose career highlights had pretty much alluded me… although, come to think of it, I remember being happily surprised to see her in Nine… one of my very favorite filmed musicals and a homage to the Fellini semi-autobiographical, 8½.
My recollection is Ms. Hudson was terrific in that 2009 film and there is even more to kvell about in Song Sung Blue.
The movie is based on a documentary of a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act called “Lightning and Thunder,”and although it took its own sweet time to get to the really good stuff, the movie … and Ms. Hudson in particular… ultimately come through to pay off the film’s audience, big time. It turns out Mr. Jackman eventually does some nice work as well.
Onward: readers of this space may recall that vampire movies have never been my thing. Oh, damn… I let it slip. My bad. I am sure I was not the only one surprised at the… for me out of context blood sucking in the film Sinners. I am sure most went to this flick because of the superstar qualities of Michael B. Jordan, his urban image, the powerful heroic parts he has essayed, including the iconic Black Panther superhero flicks… coupled (you should excuse the expression) with the opportunity to see him play not one, but two parts in this movie.
With all due deference to the storied career of Denzel Washington, Michael B. Jordan, who I remember first seeing years ago in The Wire on HBO, just may be the biggest African American movie star in Hollywood today.
And, big as that all is, it is sorta beside the point, for mid-way through Sinners… without notice, sans set-up, music cue, or any hint or preparation whatsoever, there… in the Jim Crow South… is all this vampire horror stuff where… in this idiom anyway… seems to me the Ku Klux Klan oughta be front and center.
Forget that I am not a vampire guy. I am, however, a script fella… and the literary part of this offering is sadly lacking in flow, in style, and in anything but exposition; of which, rest assured, there is an abundance.
The movie looks good, but it sounds terrible. I refer not to the music or those creaky noises that go with the horror genre, but rather what passes for dialogue in scenes that should … in a movie… flow together. In this horror story they simply do not.
And am I being fussy, or may I legitimately ask what is a vampire doing dancing an Irish jig and harboring a Gaelic accent? Did I miss something in Bram Stoker? Could be. If you do choose to throw caution to the winds and see this movie, make sure to watch to the very end of the more than two and a quarter hours of viewing time… past the credits. It almost makes the rest of the movie worthwhile… almost.
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To purchase “Cagney & Lacey and Me” go to Amazon or Apple Books
“Before and After Cagney & Lacey”, a second memoir… coming this Spring from McFarland Publishers