I was too young to enjoy the “golden age of travel.”
But if Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy really wants to return to the days when air travel was a ring-a-ding-ding good time, don’t the airlines have to do their part too? Maybe the cramped cabins, inedible meals and endless delays are making us all a little cranky. And maybe the incivility and disrespect that Duffy’s boss displays on a daily basis has a way of coarsening the way people behave in public.
If a return to a “golden age of travel” means bringing back cocktail and piano bars on airplanes, however, I’ll dust off my fedora and be first in line to pack up and fly away.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, wondering how you survived this past weekend. Maybe you stayed local and went to see “Hamnet”? Let’s talk.
‘Hamnet’ has its critics, but audiences are behind it
Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”
(Focus Features)
Steven Spielberg introduced “Hamnet” at the movie’s Academy Museum premiere a couple of weeks ago, saying that director Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about William Shakespeare’s family life were “made for each other.”
Motioning to the huge screen at the academy’s 952-seat David Geffen Theater, Spielberg called it “the kinds of screens that we are fighting the tides to keep filled with, not just blockbuster, epic, escapist movie rides, but sensitive and intimate portraits of marriage and family and the life-altering epiphanies that spring from heartache and heartbreak like the film you’re about to see.”
“There needs to be room for films like Chloé’s on screens like these,” Spielberg, one of “Hamnet’s” producers, concluded.
Zhao then came onstage, brought out her cast and led the meditation ritual she has been doing since the movie’s Telluride premiere.
“The reason why I like to start a film this way is because making ‘Hamnet’ taught me the simplest but most important thing in life, which is being present with each other right here, right now,” Zhao said before leading the breathing exercise.
The moment of Zen came in handy. About a half-hour after the movie started, the theater’s sound system glitched, muting the dialogue and turning a scene between Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, into a pantomime.
Eventually, the house lights came up and the film was delayed for about 15 minutes while the audio issues were addressed. “Hamnet” sound designer Johnnie Burn, an Oscar winner for “The Zone of Interest,” and film editor Affonso Gonçalves left their seats to lend a hand. Whatever they did worked, and the movie resumed.
As “Hamnet” is a mood piece, a movie that envelops you in its world and its characters’ heightened emotions, I worried that the interruption would irrevocably break its spell. But during the homestretch, I looked to my right and noticed the two women next to me crying. They weren’t alone.
“Hamnet” is such a good movie that even technical difficulties can’t defeat it.
Afterward, at a party attended by around 200 film academy members, the talk centered on how quickly people shifted gears and became immersed in the story after the delay. Zhao’s tale of love and loss and the cathartic power of art has been a festival hit, winning several audience awards the past few weeks. And it was clear from this screening that Oscar voters are ready to line up behind it as well and crown it one of the season’s powerhouse contenders.
Not that there aren’t a few dry-eyed contrarians out there. In her wildly entertaining pan, Times film critic Amy Nicholson decried the dampness of it all. My favorite line concerns Will and Agnes’ courtship: “Their flirtation — especially Mescal’s dumb, happy, horny grin — makes Shakespeare feel freshly relatable. Perhaps his Ye Olde Tinder profile read: ‘Aspiring playwright seeks older woman, pagan preferred.’”
My old friend Justin Chang wasn’t entirely enamored either, writing in the New Yorker: “Buckley and Mescal, both Irish and both bountifully gifted, have done quieter, subtler work elsewhere, though I can’t say that their histrionics miss the mark. What is ‘Hamnet,’ or ‘Hamlet,’ without a little ham?”
Do they protest too much? Let me know what yethinks when you’ve seen it.