Invasive Species - Chloé Zhao's 'Hamnet'

This week, I’ve been worrying that I’ve been harsh on Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. My bugbear was that I felt the film was manipulative. Grief - particularly for a loved child - makes for very powerful cinema, but I felt the film overdid it. Yet the more I think about it, the more I sense that I was in a bad mood from the start. The trailers almost made me walk out of the auditorium. One for the forthcoming documentary about Melania Trump made me feel nauseous. And this was before I’d tucked into my treats from Hotel Chocolat. But then came the trailer for Wuthering Heights, describing the forthcoming adaptation in big bold writing as ‘inspired by the greatest love story of all time’, cajoling us go see it on its release ‘This Valentine’s Day’. Fucking hell! Emily Bronte’s novel is not a romance. It’s a tale – albeit a glorious one – of extreme abuse, toxic masculinity, trauma visited on successive generations, gaslighting, animal cruelty, and possibly incest.

'My falcon now is sharp and passing empty'

I was still shaking my head when the main feature started. And then, as the pedant in me stepped further out of the shadows, I was shaking my head again at the very first scene. There was Jessie Buckley’s Agnes Hathaway cajoling a massive Harris Hawk onto her falconry glove. The ornithologist in me immediately forgot all about Heathcliff and the First Lady and began to get irritated as to just how Agnes had come by that bird. A New World species – and even now, despite being used in British falconry – a Harris Hawk patrols the top of the British Museum to prevent pesky corvids from breaking the glass roof with stones – they are not indigenous to the United Kingdom. There certainly wouldn’t have been Harris Hawks gyring around the Warwickshire countryside.  

A Harris Hawk for a Knave (Alan Vernon) 

A bit of post-film research revealed that Maggie O’Farrell – I haven’t read the novel - had plumped for a Kestrel. That’s more like it, I thought, and found myself smiling at the memory of Ken Loach’s adaptation of A Kestrel for a Knave.

Did those trailers and the irritating use of a Harris Hawk colour the rest of the film for me? I think so. Great performances, an atmospheric and convincing depiction of late Tudor England (I loved how filthy everything was: the sides of houses, the unpaved streets, and the fingers and fingernails of William and Agnes), and some of Shakespeare’s most glorious lines delivered in an unsettling but illuminating context. In particular, there was a timely reminder of the father of Hamlet’s glorious exit lines: “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near / And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.” 

Anyway, my pedantry will get another run out soon. An adaptation of H is Hawk is on the way. Just don’t tell me they’ve swapped Mabel the majestic female Goshawk for a Turkey Vulture.