hamnet (w&d chloe zhao, w. maggie o’farrell)

Two connected thoughts on Zhao’s take on the novel.

Firstly - In The Rider and at times in Nomadland, Zhao employed what might be described as cinema verité to great effect. Naturalistic lighting, a roving, deliberately unsteady camera. Muted performances punctuated by dramatic moments. In Hamnet, she stays true to this, in spite of what must have been an inflated budget (although the CGI London riverbank scenes feel slightly low-cost). The trouble is, and perhaps this is exacerbated by coming from an English POV, cinema verité in a faux elizabethan England is always going to be a stretch. Rather than the viewer being sucked in by the style, it draws attention to everything that possesses the artifice of cinema. In a sense the nature scenes are the most effective: here the backdrop feels no more than regularly artificial. In contrast Elizabethan Stratford/ London feels like a construction, as indeed it is. The plague that is a motif and key plot diver is communicated via cinematic shorthand.  Secondly, given the presence of star names doing a lot of heavyweight acting, rather than getting lost in their story, as is the case of The Rider, one is constantly aware of the heavy-lifting the stars are doing. The naturalism is undercut and what remains is pure performance. Which also explains why Buckley was a shoe-in for the Oscar.

the rider (w&d chloé zhao)

I watched Zhao’s second film during lockdown on a small screen. At which point she might have been the most feted up-and-coming director on the planet, fresh from Oscar success and the Marvel call-up. Which, watching The Rider again, seems such a confusing career step, for someone whose art appears to be baked into the nuanced, anti-climactic possibilities of cinema. The Rider is a film where almost everything has already happened. Brady, the protagonist, has fallen off his horse and damaged his skull. Lane, his friend, has fallen off his horse and become irreversibly damaged. This is a film about coming to terms with trauma, not seeking it. As such it is obviously a wonderful corrective to the idea of the western as a proving ground for a man’s machismo. These men have proved and lost and now they have to face up to living in a world where all their aspirational values are worthless, or even suicidal. Zhao’s slow burning take on Brady’s crisis is filmed with such assurance that it makes up for the lack of action. There is an ingrained tension in the idea that he will seek to get back on the horse, but even this tension is underplayed to an extent, the filmmaker emphasising the aesthetic as much as the the dramatic elements. This is the golden hour sunset of the western and all the baggy messed-up dreams it carries with it.