With the old filmmaker’s adage of ‘don’t work with children or animals’, you’d have to imagine that the ‘animals’ part of that has an unspoken second clause of ‘especially birds’. Sure, dogs and cats and horses might misbehave, but they can’t literally fly away, and if you thought mammals were problematic in terms of pooping on the set, just wait until you see a raptor do it. This is the challenge director Philippa Lowthorpe leaps into with gusto in her adaptation of Helen MacDonald’s memoir H Is For Hawk, a generally pretty ordinary Brit drama elevated by the constant presence of a mighty goshawk.
This goshawk is Mabel, acquired by Helen (played here by Claire Foy) as a coping mechanism for her overwhelming grief after the death of her beloved dad Alan (Brendan Gleeson), and she is the undisputed highlight of what is otherwise a pretty ordinary biopic. Utterly majestic, with mesmerising plumage that looks like it’s patterned with images of birds in flight, there’s an odd, primal charge whenever we see Mabel in a domestic environment, a genuine beast of a creature with a wildness largely undimmed by the fact she’s in a living room in Cambridge.
For the scenes of free flying and hunting, Lowthorpe turns to nature documentary stylings, and it’s a beautiful and immersive vision of the wintry English countryside, all low morning sun and frozen dew across the fields. When we’re in the realm of the purely human, though, things are decidedly less awe-inspiring. While Foy is very good as Helen, showing her grief less as a sobbing depression and more as a sort of mania, Lowthorpe and co-writer Emma Donoghue can’t find that same spiky depth in the script, which often feels like it’s just going through the motions. There are a few grace notes, like an unexpectedly funny scene of picking out Alan’s coffin and Helen’s moving climactic eulogy at his funeral, but too much is too familiar, and a scene in which one of Helen’s lectures is interrupted by an insistent vegan heckler rings astoundingly false.
Crucially, though, you do understand just why Alan’s loss is so devastating to Helen. As noted, the actual, universal grief parts of the writing are quite generic, but the flashbacks to Alan’s life are far more effective at showing why he was such a hero to his daughter. He loves life so much, and is so interested in so many parts of it, that you instantly get why any child would grow up in worship of him, and Gleeson is breezily great at showing that off.
Trimmed down by a full 15 minutes since its initial premiere about six weeks ago, H Is For Hawk benefits from this shorter runtime, able to move quickly and efficiently and ensuring that the real focus can be on the goshawk for as high a percentage of the time as possible. Come for Claire Foy and the outstanding reputation of the original book, stay for one of the most remarkable on-screen animals you could hope to share a cinema with.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 