The 83rd Golden Globes took place on January 12, and I have mixed feelings about the results.
Nikki Glaser hosted the ceremony for the second time this year, and once again did an excellent job, delivering plenty of biting, risque humour without being too mean.
My favourite gags were Glaser comparing Sean Penn to a ‘sexy leather handbag’, poking fun at Leonardo Di Caprio’s trend of very young girlfriends, and a naughty pun I can’t repeat here about Michael B. Jordan in Sinners.
Stellan Skarsgärd won Best Supporting Actor as Gustav in Sentimental Value, and his charming acceptance speech espoused the magic of cinemas, where the lights go down and you
‘share the pulse’ of the rest of the audience.
Teyana Taylor won Best Supporting Actress for One Battle After Another, but I wish Amy Madigan from Weapons or Elle Fanning from Sentimental Value won instead.
Taylor is alluring and terrifying as the unhinged revolutionary Perfidia, and is the counterpart of fellow psychopath Colonel Lockjaw (Penn), but Madigan and Fanning have a greater presence in their films and portray more interesting characters.
As the witch aunt Gladys, Madigan’s doddery, even goofy moments give way to horrifying sadism, but she retains a weary, vulnerable aura. Fanning is a very talented actress, so as Rachel Kemp in Sentimental Value, she does a great job roleplaying as a kinda bad actress, with an engaging arc of deeper emotional understanding.
One Battle After Another won the most Globes (four): Supporting Actress for Taylor, Best Screenplay and Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson, and Best Picture, Comedy/Musical.
One Battle After Another is a very good film that I don’t like: it’s highly-suspenseful and full of dry humour, but a very harsh film in which even the ideologically good guys are egotistical jerks.
Bugonia took home nothing, and while it’s also a dark film that I have problems with, it’s much funnier (which is important for a Comedy category) and the cutthroat CEO and conspiracy theorist abductor main characters are somehow less hateable.
While it hadn’t come out yet in Australia when the Golden Globes aired, I wish Hamnet, in hindsight, had come out ahead of One Battle After Another, although two Globes — Best Actress for Jessie Buckley and Best Picture, Drama — are nothing to sneeze at.
Based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet dramatises the life of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), his wife Agnes (Buckley), and how the tragic death of their son Hamnet
informed Shakespeare’s iconic play Hamlet.
Presented mostly from Agnes’s perspective, Hamnet is an achingly moving portrait of love, loss and healing through art. Buckley is a captivating lead of sorrowful resolve and earthen wisdom as Agnes (her Oscar is almost guaranteed), Mescal is dashing but down-to-earth as William, and Noah Jupe delivers a heartwrenching standout performance as Hamnet.
Chloé Zhao’s slow, measured direction captures Agnes and William’s touching relationship and the growing schism between them due to family tragedy and William’s long absences for work.
The film has gorgeous period costumes and sets, the Globe theatre is a bridge between the Shakespeares’ rural, rustic home and the bustling grime of London, and it’s refreshing to see a modern film with steady camerawork (as opposed to the shaky-cam so common even in other historical dramas such as Train Dreams).
The soaring, intimate final act will leave you misty-eyed, and brilliantly recontextualises the play Hamlet as a grand tribute, atonement and symbolic farewell.
Hamnet, a sumptuously-made, heartbreakingly beautiful film that deserved more Golden Globes but will hopefully rake in the Oscars, is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
Seth Lukas Hynes
