Sees All

Fictional stories about the life of William Shakespeare have been created for many decades, if not centuries. None other than George Bernard Shaw wrote a short play called "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets." I remember seeing William Gibson's play, A CRY OF PLAYERS, in the late 1960s with Anne Bancroft and Frank Langella as "Will" and "Anne." I read Anthony Burgess's novel, NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, about Shakespeare's alleged affair with the "dark lady of the sonnets" (who was an African in his version) a couple of years later. At the end of the 20th Century came Robert Nye's novel, THE LATE MR. SHAKESPEARE, about a homosexual actor in Shakespeare's troupe who played women's roles. In 1998 came Tom Stoppard's clever screenplay for the Oscar-winning film, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. I'm sure that there have been many others. The latest entry into the field is HAMNET, a best-selling novel (I have not read it) about the death of Shakespeare's young son, which has now been made into a movie. It is the weakest of the bunch.

I was expecting a great deal from this movie. It had a lot of positive hype: good reviews, film festival awards, fan buzz on the Internet. When I saw it yesterday, I was VERY disappointed. I found it to be a lot of cliches strung together in a rather lackluster way. I was surprised when I saw the credits that both Stephen Spielberg and Sam Mendes were the producers. If only one of them had actually directed it! The actual director, Chloe Zhao, has chosen to give every scene equal weight. There are no moments of heightened tension. It is all played at the same relentless pace. It is all flattened out into a uniform terrain. There is a lot attention paid to details. We get all the expected discomforts and gross visuals of childbearing and the deaths of close family members. It's all "this happens and then this happens" with no real cause-and-effect. The actors give it their best. I was unfamiliar with Jessie Buckley, who plays "Anne" nee "Agnes." She seems to have gone to the same acting school as Jessica Chastain, where they teach them to demonstrate what they're feeling. It grieves me to say that I felt sorry for that fine actor Paul Mescal. Any through-line for the character, he had to create for himself. It is especially grievous when it shows him playing the Ghost in HAMLET, which shows the Ghost's scenes with no context, just strung together. I'm sure that audiences unfamiliar with HAMLET were mystified or (more likely) bored. It doesn't help that the actor portraying Hamlet is just dreadful. I was very glad when this movie was over.

I was probably the ideal audience for this movie. I felt that it validated all the things I already thought about contact with extraterrestrial (or perhaps "intraterrestrial") beings. For me the film convincingly laid out a case for the beliefs that 1) we are not alone in the universe, that 2) beings from a far more advanced civilization than ours are keeping tabs on us, that all the rumors that such incidents as "alien abductions," and the crash of an alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico are true, and that 3) the US government is on a mission to stigmatize anyone who claims to have witnessed such beings as "crazy crackpots." The film presents credible people who either have held important positions in the US government, or currently hold such positions (such as Senators Marco Rubio and Kristen Gillibrand). I found this a compelling documentary, even though it is just a series of interviews. Yes, the soundtrack did add an emotional subtext, but I see no reason to doubt the evidence it presents.

This movie got great reviews that made me really want to see it. Fortunately, I live in New York, so foreign language films are easily accessible to me. I thought this movie was well done: Direction, acting, all the technical elements were fine. The script is intelligent and interestingly structured. The plot comes in sideways. A man is driving his wife and daughter at night on a lonely rural road and accidentally runs over a dog. Afterwards he goes to a garage, and at the garage, he's sure he recognizes someone who has wronged his family. He wants vengeance. He comes back and kidnaps the man intending to kill him and bury him in the desert, but after he has him half buried, he suddenly has doubts that this man is indeed the person he thinks he is. He has a prosthetic leg, but perhaps that's just a coincidence. Thus begins an elaborate scheme to validate that this is indeed his enemy. It is a grotesque comedy of errors, with lots of violence. But I'm afraid that after seeing last year's SEED OF THE SACRED FIG and this film, I am simply not sympathetic to the cultural values of this region. Maybe they have lived for so many years under repression and cruelty that the people come off cold-blooded and mean. I found it hard to have compassion or sympathy for any of the characters. And that is my honest opinion, although I'll probably be called all kinds of names for it.