WE ARE all, in our different ways, storytellers. Helen McDonald in her extraordinary memoir H is for Hawk (Film, 23 January) tells the story of her grieving after the death of her father. It is a torrent of words which mixes memories of a lost parent with an account of how she withdrew into herself through the training of a goshawk. Into this she weaves the parallel story of her relationship with another dead man, T. H. White, who in the 1950s wrote a book describing his own attempt to train a hawk in a different rite of passage.
The newly released film of H is for Hawk shows just how effectively cinema can pluck a story from a whirlpool of words and present it with a fierce eloquence through the great silences in which Clare Foy and the hawk sit staring at one another.
There are different ways of telling the same story, but some are better than others. Maggie O’Farrell has written another award-winning exploration of the grief of bereavement in Hamnet, her imagining of the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son just a few years before he wrote Hamlet.
Yet, ironically, considering its subject was our greatest playwright, the story translated poorly to the stage (Arts,1 December 2023). The Royal Shakespeare Company production lacked the dramatic urgency and intensity of the story. It was clunky and pedestrian lacking any correlative for the rich interior life of the book.
The film Hamnet, however, through the rawness of Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Shakespeare’s wife, deepens the emotional core of the story. Its linear cinematic structure, by contrast with the novel’s time-shifting structure, creates a powerful emotional narrative arc through the wife’s growing understanding of the difference between her husband’s and her own ways of coping with grief. The inspired moment, in which the audience around her echo the poignant act with which Buckley closes the film, turns a bereaved mother’s gesture into a moment of communion.
Not all movies offer an improvement. Emerald Fennell, the director of “Wuthering Heights”, has placed the title of her adaptation in inverted commas with good reason. Emily Brontë’s novel is a labyrinthine saga of love, power, passion, class, corruption, cruelty, abuse, race, revenge, and reconciliation, which journeys across several generations. But Ms Fennell has merely pulled a single thread from this huge tapestry, attempting to justify her reductive approach by saying that she wanted to make a film that recreated what she felt when she read the novel when she was 14.
Her teenage approximation of “the greatest love story of all time” results in a grotesque gothic bodice-slashing caricature. Heathcliff, Brontë’s embittered and obsessive madman with a lust for revenge, is transformed into nothing more than a frustrated hopeless romantic. Her complex heroine, Catherine, becomes a superficial sex-starved catwalk model in an outlandish anachronistic fashion shoot. And sickeningly vicious domestic abuse becomes just a bit of kinky BDSM slap and tickle.
The film, the outraged novelist Heather Parry laments, takes a thoughtful pioneering radical feminist work of art and makes it a shallow and seductive defence of a class system which reverses the meaning of the entire story. The only good thing is that the film might send a new generation back to read the book.