BRIAN VINER: Claire Foy is majestic in H Is For Hawk – it’s a soaring study of grief
H is for Hawk (12A, 114 minutes)
Verdict: Gets its claws into you
In movies, as in life, there are various ways to deal with grief. The old man in Pixar’s Up (2009) did this by going on a trip. The couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now (1973) also turned out to be less useful.
Kevin Costner turned to baseball in the movie Field Of Dreams (1989). In the recently released Hamnet, Paul Mescal, as William Shakespeare, becomes absorbed in writing his great tragedy Hamlet.
In the true story H Is For Hawk, Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy) tries something else. While trying to process the sudden and unexpected death of his beloved father (Brendan Gleeson), he devotes himself to training his most precious friend, the goshawk. He calls her Mabel.
This inner connection with nature, whose teeth and especially claws are red, relieves his pain. But it doesn’t offer any fluent response.
In adapting Macdonald’s best-selling 2014 memoir, Philippa Lowthorpe (director and co-writer, with Emma Donoghue) does not hesitate to portray Helen as a complex character: easy enough to empathize with, but not necessarily likable. You might say he’s ruffling feathers.
In different hands — Disney’s, for example — the story might have been softened and given a clearer path from intense pain to complete catharsis.
But Lowthorpe has created a film that is smarter than this, more demanding on the audience, less commercial than it probably could have been, but still better.
The movie takes place in 2007. Helen, a chain-smoking academic at Cambridge University, has shared a fascination with birds of prey with her father Alisdair since she was a little girl. They both share the same sense of humor and chirpily trade Groucho Marx one-liners.
Claire Foy plays Helen Macdonald in H Is For Hawk. Helen is a chain-smoking academic at Cambridge University who has shared a fascination with birds of prey with her father Alisdair since she was a little girl.
Her father is the only person who truly understands her, and H Is For Hawk is a welcome addition to the short list of powerful films about the father-daughter bond. Of the recent offerings, I recommend Aftersun (2022), but there really aren’t that many.
Alisdair (alias Ali Mac) is a famous newspaper photographer who has seen and shot it all, but still cannot stop working… it is implied that it is taking its toll on his health.
Helen adores him and is blindsided by grief after receiving a phone call from her mother (Lindsay Duncan) telling him that he has collapsed and died. From this point on, we must rely on flashbacks to understand the connection between Helen and her father.
His relationship with his mother is much more fragile. There is also a brother who does not say a word. Actually, for a while I thought he might be mute.
However, it is Duncan’s character who reminds Helen of what she has lost. His mother says sternly, ‘Dad wouldn’t want us to be upset, would he?’
In fact, being upset is not the half of the job. At one point, Helen seems to find solace in romance, but the man she takes home is frightened by the sentimental self-help books floating around.
She also has a good and caring best friend, a fellow academic (Denise Gough), but human interaction is not what she craves. He decides to share his life with a goshawk and travels to his father’s native Scotland to buy one.
In the Cambridgeshire countryside, he is tutored by a raptor expert friend (Sam Spruell). By all accounts, Foy has received intense training in real life, so the scenes in which she handles Mabel with developing authority are convincingly authentic (and superbly shot).
As he bonds with the bird, his teachings and personal hygiene suffer, making H Is For Hawk an increasingly compelling watch. The story doesn’t develop as I expected, but grief rarely does. That might be the whole point. Anyway, it’s a very worthwhile film, with Foy’s superb performance at its centre.
History of Sound (15, 128 minutes)
Verdict: A bit dinge-like
Two other great acts from the British Isles, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, both currently among the most popular names in the industry, enrich 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, the son of a poor Kentucky farmer blessed with an extraordinary ear for music.
O’Connor is David, a musicologist from a more privileged background who met Lionel at a New England conservatory in 1917. 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, the son of a poor Kentucky farmer with an extraordinary ear for music, and Josh O’Connor plays David, a musicologist from a more privileged background.
Adapted by Ben Shattuck from two of his own short stories, the film takes us to 1980, when Lionel, now played by Chris Cooper, reflects on his long-ago musical pursuits and ultimately doomed loves.
It’s all beautifully and tastefully done, and modestly touching, but a bit elegiac.
I found Hermanus a slight disappointment compared to his last film, the silent masterpiece Living (2022).
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