A Disappointing Adaptation Starring Claire Foy

Sometimes books can remain books. Especially memoirs of the kind that made Helen Macdonald’s treatise on grief so special. Their 2014 H is for Hawk, which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson award for best British non-fiction book, was a stirring reflection of their innermost tribulations; Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaptation is a somnambulant, unimaginative challenge to stay awake.

Written by Emma Donoghue, who wrote both the book and the adapted film Room, H is for Hawk replaces the inherent pleasures of Macdonald’s astute reflections with the incessantly blank stare of Claire Foy, who plays Macdonald’s lightly fictionalized on-screen facsimile. No disrespect to Foy, who showed with The Crown just how capable she is of revealing entire histories through her open visage, but watching her go through the extremely repetitious (and, one supposes, accurate) steps of training a Eurasian Goshawk is exceptionally tiresome. H is for Hawk induces the same effect as taking a sedative.

H is for Hawk Is Riddled With Tired Clichés and A Distinct Lack of Imagination

When the film isn’t relying on Foy’s wistful eyes, it uses the titular hawk as a lazy metonym for Macdonald’s grief at losing her photojournalist father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson), to whom she was uncommonly close. See her, as with grief, having a difficult time taming her goshawk Mabel. See her feel isolated at a Cambridge faculty party where she works, because she has the unruly Mabel on her arm; but really, it’s the grief that is making her retreat. See her hide from her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough) because she has to monitor Mabel’s movements; or is it that her grief has her catatonic?

The truth is that the film makes it very hard to care about this tenuous bond between animal and human. Donoghue’s script has no propulsion, and Lowthorpe’s direction is frustratingly staid. When Macdonald isn’t training Mabel, she’s being thrust back in time with flashbacks of her relationship with her Dad. Gleeson and Foy have a naturally warm chemistry and witty repartee, but being that these scenes are presented with the full knowledge that he is dead, each one of their interactions is maudlin.

We get so little of her life before her father passes that we essentially only know of the Cambridge professor as one in debilitating stress.

The film works best when it remains in the present. Foy’s slow-burning loss of control over her own feelings provides Lowthorpe with the film’s only source of genuine movement; anytime it feels the need to turn back the clock, all momentum, what little was there, depletes like a poorly baked soufflé. Though, even then, its hard to feel fully ingratiated into Macdonald’s inner world. We get so little of her life before her father passes that we essentially only know of the Cambridge professor as one in debilitating stress.

Buried within the film is an observation about observing. Macdonald talks about how her father taught her to be aware of the world around her in a way that is meant to teach her that being a part of society means active participation in it. But there’s also a cautionary tale baked in about how losing yourself in observation is a path towards isolation. Real-life Macdonald had to learn that lesson, and being clued into her inner life through her own words is a persistent gift. But without those words, we are left feeling trapped under the same desk that Foy’s character hides. Without having anywhere to go, it can feel like we are the hawk with blinders on, desperate to fly away.