Buffalo Movies: Oscar hopefuls starting to arrive in local theaters

By M. Faust
(Image above: Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in “Sentimental Value”)

As awards season befalls us, the year’s top hopes are finally starting to arrive in Buffalo area theaters. Two now playing (and well worth your time) offer stories of families, death and the role of art in coping with loss, along with extraordinary performances by their leading actresses. 

The Scandinavian drama Sentimental Value, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, opens with two sequences that held me rapt: they didn’t necessarily lay out the film that was to come, but they engrossed me to the point where I was willing to sit back and see where they led. In the first, an anonymous narrator recounts an essay that a young girl named Nora once wrote about the house her family lived in, and how she thought it might have reacted to their presence and activities. In the second, the adult Nora (Renate Reinsve), now an acclaimed actress, is paralyzed by stage fright as she prepares to face an opening night audience. 

What follows from there, at a pace that is in no hurry to reveal all of the story’s secrets, is an exploration of Nora’s relationships with her family members, living and dead. This is sparked by the return of her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, the Max von Sydow of his generation), a noted film director who has not been able to get a project funded for over a decade. He hopes to reconnect with Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) with a script he wrote for her based on the life of his own mother. She angrily refuses to read the script, but is later unhappy to hear that the part has gone to a top Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). 

I don’t want to recount too much of the story, particularly how death enters into it. Partly that’s because I believe that you shouldn’t know too much about a movie before you see it. It’s also because, in reading other reviews of Sentimental Value, I’m struck by how many different interpretations there are of a story that seems fairly straightforward. Some of this is likely due to the habit of director Joachim Trier (who wrote the script with his usual collaborator Eskil Vogt) to parcel out plot points as if calibrated on a graph. It’s probably also because Trier and Vogt like to wander off on plot tangents that don’t seem necessary to the story’s main points. 

A nicer way of looking at this is to say that Sentimental Value allows its multifaceted characters to reveal themselves gradually. Reinsve (who was named Best Actress at Cannes for her previous film with Trier, The Worst Person in the World) is quietly mesmerizing, but the whole cast is strong. It’s playing at the  North Park Theater. 

The death that eats at a family’s heart in Hamnet is no surprise, even though it comes more than halfway through the film. It takes even longer than that to utter the name of the story’s leading character, William Shakespeare, even though his identity is hardly a secret.

Hamnet is the first film from director Chloé Zhao since her 2020 Nomadland won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. (I choose to ignore her 2021 venture into the Marvel universe, Eternals.) It was adapted from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who collaborated with Zhao on the screenplay. Beginning with the known fact that Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway lost their eleven-year-old son to the plague, O’Farrell speculates that Hamlet might have been written to deal with the grief that was tearing the couple apart. 

I haven’t read the novel, which was highly regarded critically, so I can’t speak to O’Farrell’s success at mining of bits of personal pain and autobiography from what is generally considered The Greatest Play in the History of the English Language. In the film, the premise comes off as academically cheeky but thin, the kind of thing that might get a college sophomore a B+ on his paper, along with note warning about scraping the bottom of the interpretive barrel. 

But here’s the thing: that’s what I thought a day after I saw the movie. While I was watching it, though, it swept me right up. The story begins with the couple (she is renamed “Agnes” so as not to confuse audiences familiar with the current filmic Anne Hathaway) meeting and courting, recounting their early struggles and joys. It’s a familiar dramatic arc of rising action, conflict and resolution, but brilliantly handled. Paul Mescal is excellent as William, especially in the climactic scenes set at the play’s premiere, but the movie belongs to the Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for 2021’s The Lost Daughter. Playing now at the Dipson Amherst and other local theaters.