Short takes: An excellent movie and a mediocre book

In the last week I’ve finished watching an excellent movie and reading a mediocre book, both of which were recommended by readers or friends. I rely a lot on such recommendations because, after all, life is short and critics can help guide us through the arts.

The good news is that the movie, “Hamnet,” turned out to be great. I had read the eponymous book by Maggie O’Farrell in 2022 (see my short take here), and was enthralled, saying this:

I loved the book and recommend it highly, just a notch in quality behind All the Light We Cannot See, but I still give it an A. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie, for it would lend itself well to drama. I see now that in fact a feature-length movie is in the works, and I hope they get good actors and a great screenwriter.

They did. Now the movie is out, and it’s nearly as good as the book. Since the book is superb, the movie is close to superb. That is, it’s excellent but perhaps not an all-time classic, though it will always be worth watching. Author O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with director  Chloé Zhao, guaranteeing that the movie wouldn’t stray too far from the book. As you may remember, the book centers on Agnes, another name for Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, a woman who is somewhat of a seer (the book has a bit of magical realism). And the story covers the period from the meeting of Shakespeare and Agnes until Shakespeare writes and performs “Hamlet,” a play that O’Farrell sees as based on the death from plague of their only son Hamnet (another name for Hamlet; apparently names were variable in England).  I won’t give away the plot of the book or movie, which are the same, save to say that the movie differs in having a bit less magic and a little more of Shakespeare’s presence. (He hardly shows up in the book.)

The movie suffers a bit from overemotionality; in fact, there’s basically no time in the movie when someone is not suffering or in a state of high anxiety.  But that is a quibble. The performances, with Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, are terrific. Buckley’s is, in fact, Oscar-worthy, and I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t win a Best Actress Oscar this year.  The last ten minutes of the movie focuses on her face as she watches the first performance of “Hamlet” in London’s Globe theater, and the gamut of emotions she expresses just from a close shot of her face is a story in itself.  Go see this movie (bring some Kleenex for the end), but also read the book.  Here’s the trailer:

On to the book. Well, it was tedious and boring, though as I recall Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Indian author Arundhati Roy, was highly praised. Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize and I loved it; her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was not as good.  I read Mother Mary simply because I liked her first book and try to read all highly-touted fiction from India, as I’ve been there many times, I love to read about the country, and Indian novelists are often very good.

Sadly, Mother Mary was disappointing. There’s no doubt that Roy had a tumultuous and diverse live, and the autobiography centers around her  relationship with her mother (Mary, of course), a teacher in the Indian state of Kerala. The two have a tumultuous connection that, no matter how many times Roy flees from Kerala, is always on her mind.  It persists during Roy’s tenure in architectural school, her marriage to a rich man (they had no children), and her later discovery of writing as well as her entry into Indian politics, including a time spent with Marxist guerrillas and campaigning for peaceful treatment of Kashmiris.

The book failed to engage me for two reasons. First, Mother Mary was a horrible person, capable of being lovable to her schoolchildren at one second and a horrible, nasty witch at the next.  She was never nice to her daughter, and the book failed to explain (to me, at least) why the daughter loved such a hateful mother. There’s plenty of introspection, but nothing convincing. Since the central message of the novel seems to be this abiding mother/daughter relationship, I was left cold.

Further, there’s a lot of moralizing and proselytizing, which is simply tedious. Although Roy avows herself as self-effacting, she comes off as a hidebound and rather pompous moralist, something that takes the sheen off a fascinating life.  Granted, there are good bits, but overall the writing is bland.  I would not recommend this book.

Two thumbs down for this one:

Of course I write these small reviews to encourage readers to tell us what books and/or movies they’ve encountered lately, and whether or not they liked them. I get a lot of good recommendations from these posts; in fact, it was from a reader that I found out about Hamnet.