Movies
David Lean, Mike Leigh, Terry Gilliam, Stephen Frears , Terrance Davies, Ken Loach, Danny Boyle
Household Saints and the Resurrection of Nancy Savoca
The recent Kino Lorber Blu-Ray marks the latest in a series of restorations of Nancy Savoca’s work. It’s a good reminder that all movies are miracles, some more than others.
by Sara Batkie
There’s a certain adage about film that’s probably been around since Edison captured Fred Ott’s sneeze, but regardless always feels true: “They don’t make them like they used to.” That constant churn of nostalgia is part of the appeal of the cinematic experience, but it’s also likely more than a little irritating to the filmmakers whose toil to get their work financed is invisible by design. And it must be infinitely frustrating for the many writer-directors like Nancy Savoca whose work was either unavailable or difficult to find for years. One of the first things out of her mouth in the documentary that accompanies Kino Lorber’s new Blu-Ray of Household Saints (1993) is that it’s not that her third feature couldn’t get made today; it couldn’t really get made then, either. Any film that reaches the screen is in some sense a miracle, and that word applies to Saints in more ways than just one.
Savoca was still in film school when she read Francine Prose’s source novel, which she loved so much she wrote the author a letter expressing her hopes to adapt it. Prose filed it away as a nice piece of fan mail but didn’t consider the possibility until she saw Savoca’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning debut, True Love. Like the novel, that film is set in a disarmingly specific New York milieu, in this case a group of Italian-Americans in the Bronx. While there’s the scaffolding of a plot – a newlywed couple tries to work out how compatible they actually are – True Love is much more communal in focus than that description suggests. Its hangout vibes surely appealed to Prose, whose novel shares a similar ramshackle curiosity about its setting. “I just started out with the card game,” she says in an archival interview included on the Blu-Ray. “Even I didn’t know where it would go from there.”
The card game is pinochle, a distinctly masculine pursuit. Like everything else in the tight-knit immigrant-dominated neighborhood of 1949 Little Italy, leisure activities are divided by gender. The players include Joseph Santangelo (a rakishly charming Vincent D’Onofrio), the local butcher, and Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), whose cinematic last name is not a coincidence. The plot, as much as there is one, is kicked off here when Lino drunkenly bets the hand of his daughter, Catherine (Tracy Ullman, much more subdued than usual), and loses to Joseph. “You think this is the old country? This is America,” Catherine shouts when she hears the news, but Lino is a man of his word. So, too, is Joseph, and he finds himself drawn to Catherine’s innocence despite the fact that she’s a hopeless cook – a potentially lethal quality for a woman in this community.
What follows is a sprawling narrative that gradually emerges as a generational story of three unusual women. Catherine and Joseph wed, and their connection proves deeper than the sordid origin story that follows them around. They live with Joseph’s mother, Carmela (the delightfully witchy Judith Malina), who holds tight to her Italian superstitions. In Savoca’s rendering, the past lives comfortably with the present, and a ghost is just another member of the household, regularly appearing to dispense advice. Carmela becomes convinced that Catherine’s first pregnancy is “marked.” When the baby dies in childbirth, the completion of the curse seems to drain Carmela as well. Her own death sparks a renewal for the couple that culminates in the arrival of a baby girl, Teresa.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal excel in stately Shakespeare drama with overwhelming finale
The two stars are knockouts in Chloé Zhao’s poignant adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel with a stirring tearjerker ending
By Richard Lawson
Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O’Farrell’s so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.
Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this. The humbler dimensions of her films The Rider and Nomadland are missed here; Hamnet too often gives off the effortful hum of prestige awards-bait.
But Zhao’s hallmark compassion and curiosity remain, qualities necessary to Hamnet, which could easily tilt into the realm of manipulative tearjerkers. Hamnet was, records tell us, Shakespeare’s son, who died at a young age and is thought to have inspired, at the very least, the title of Hamlet, the story of a young prince who meets a tragic end. What O’Farrell and now Zhao imagine is that the writing of Hamlet was an exercise in grieving, a way for Shakespeare to honor his son and bid him adieu.
It’s a persuasive idea, even if it takes some literary contortions to really buy into it. While Zhao sometimes strains to sell the notion – a scene in which a weeping Shakespeare stands on the banks of the Thames and speaks a snippet of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy is perhaps a bit over-egged – she has mostly convinced us by the end. Or, at least, Hamnet has justified the bold speculation, using a leapt-to conclusion to illuminate a fundamental aspect of living. Ultimately, what does it really matter if it actually happened this way?
Hamnet invents many other facets of Shakespeare’s history. It dreams up the courtship of young William (Paul Mescal), then a Latin tutor, and slightly older Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), an oddball loner about whom the villagers whisper in fearful tones. William is drawn to exactly that strangeness, the individuality that will come to inform so much of the family’s domestic routine. Zhao spends a fair amount of time on these early days, maybe too much. Some of it could be better spent on the years in which Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) occupied the house alongside his twin, Judith (Olivia Lynes), and their older sister, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). One longs to truly know Hamnet before he is so wrenchingly lost to the world, to feel the agony of his absence that much more acutely.
Birthday Girl
