Claire Foy and the bird are worth the evening, and Brendan Gleeson gets to us in about four scenes. Around them Philippa Lowthorpe has made a careful, tasteful film about grief that runs half an hour long and is too polite to hurt.
Helen Macdonald’s memoir has been filmed by Philippa Lowthorpe from a script by Emma Donoghue, and it keeps the two things everyone remembers from the book: a woman undone by her father’s sudden death, and the goshawk she buys instead of grieving. Claire Foy plays Helen. A bird plays Mabel. Between them they hold up a film that runs 120 minutes and would have been better at ninety, and that treats mourning with a good manners the book never had. It is decent. Foy is a good deal more than that.
The setup is quick. Helen, a Cambridge academic, loses her father (Brendan Gleeson) with no warning and no chance to say anything. She goes to a breeder (Sean Kearns) and comes home with a young goshawk, moves it into her flat, and stops answering the door. The idea, the book’s and the film’s, is that teaching a wild animal to trust one person is a way of not having to trust anyone else. Donoghue pares the memoir down to that single line and follows it.
Foy handles the bird herself and it shows. Her arm is steady, her voice drops to a murmur, and when the hawk bates off the glove she lets it hang and waits without a flicker of the actor wanting to look competent. She plays Helen as short-tempered and not asking for sympathy; the grief does not come out as tears but as a hardness around the mouth and a habit of leaving rooms. The scenes with Mabel are the best in the film because nobody in them is explaining anything, and there are a lot of scenes in this film where somebody is explaining something.
Charlotte Bruus Christensen shoots the outdoors in the flat grey light of an English autumn, hedgerows the colour of wet cardboard and the bird’s eye the one bright thing in the frame. Indoors she lets the flat go darker week by week as the curtains stay shut. Sarah Finlay fills that flat with the kit of hawking, perch and scales and glove, while the washing-up piles round it, and Amy Roberts keeps Foy in the same jumper for what feels like a month. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score is mostly low strings and it has the sense to keep out of the bird’s way.
Here is what got us. The film cuts back to Helen as a child (Eden Hamilton) out with her father, and Gleeson plays him as a patient, unhurried man who takes a small girl’s questions seriously. One of these scenes, the two of them standing still in a field waiting for something to show itself, moved us more than we expected, and it is because Gleeson does almost nothing and Lowthorpe lets him. Then the flashbacks come round again. And again. Nico Leunen cuts back to them so regularly that they stop being memory and become punctuation, and the fourth time we felt our own response being managed.
The other trouble is the living. Christina (Denise Gough), the falconers Stuart and Mandy (Sam Spruell and Emma Cunniffe), James (Josh Dylan) and Amar (Arty Froushan) are written as reasons for Helen to leave the flat and say a line about how she is coping. Lindsay Duncan has two or three scenes as her mother and is wasted in all of them. A scene with the Master (William Chubb) shows us Helen being rude to the wrong people and then moves on. Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark we were restless, and we do not think we were meant to be; the film had made its point and was making it again, more gently.
The memoir is angry, funny and odd, and it lets grief make its author unpleasant company. The film keeps the oddness and files off the anger. Lowthorpe, whose Misbehaviour had the same clean, considerate surface, directs with taste, and taste is the one thing this story did not need. It needed a woman with a dead bird in her freezer and no interest in being liked.
See it for Foy, for the hawk, and for Gleeson’s four scenes. Anyone who has read the book should go in knowing this is a quieter, kinder thing than the one on their shelf. It is a 12A and it runs two hours, and the second one drags.
