The scatterbrained, chain-smoking Helen (Claire Foy) is a rather unlikely Cambridge lecturer in H is For Hawk (12A). At the beginning of the film she loses her father, photo-journalist Ali (Brendan Gleeson).
She deals with her grief by acquiring a wild goshawk as a pet – though she denies it’s a hobby, or that the hawk is a pet. It takes Philippa Lowthorpe’s film nearly two hours to show us how such healing therapy works. In a lesser director’s hands, I’m sure there would have been walk-outs, but her slow-moving approach somehow hits the target. It quietly extends Helen’s love for the bird to us.
It’s called Mabel, which, she informs us, “stands” for love. Is the emotion excessive on her part? In one shot, we see her eye peering through the opaque glass of a door. It might be Mabel’s. We can see what Lowthorpe is getting at.
Helen brings Mabel to the campus with her. Her obsession is indulged both by her colleagues here and her widowed mother at home. Everyone treads gingerly around the subject. “Got your bags packed yet?” is the closest anyone comes to a hint that she might be better off moving away from Mabel.
Lowthorpe could be accused of celebrating killing in the film. An early reference to avian “murder” is delivered with a chuckle. When Mabel kills a rabbit, Helen is asked if she’s sorry for it having died. “We all have to die,” she replies, which is hardly the point. She’s bringing a world of hunting into the groves of academe. This seems unfair. It also seems unfair to take Mabel away from her natural habitat so that taming her can help Helen recover from Ali’s death.
The other thing that jarred with me in the film was how Helen managed to hold down a job when she seems to spend the lion’s (hawk’s?) share of her time training Mabel. The closest we get to seeing her giving a lecture is a scene where she tells her pupils to put away their jotters because she’s bringing them down to the pub. (Why wasn’t I sent to a university like that?)
Based on Helen Macdonald’s best-selling memoir of the same name, this is a good-hearted, well-intentioned film which contains many touching shots of Mabel in flight. At times she seems to become almost as much of a character as the humans in it.
Foy is a wonderfully versatile actress. She can go from playing Queen Elizabeth to Anne Boleyn to the offbeat lecturer she plays here with intuitive ease. Gleeson also stumps up well with a creditable Scottish accent, his scenes being mostly in flashback.
But the film belongs to Foy. She keeps us dialled into her unique bereavement therapy in a slow but sure-footed (and sure-handed) way for most of its running (or should I say flying) time, despite some laughter early on which struck a false note with me considering her trauma is its keynote.
