Given that his legacy pervades millions of lives the world over, how much do we truly know about William Shakespeare? It’s a fascinating enigma in which countless academic texts have arrived at innumerable allegorical readings of the man’s plays, and yet the homespun details, including his domestic life, remain shrouded in mystery.
Period drama Hamnet boldly steps into the fray, directed by Chloé Zhao and written by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell who helps adapt her own bestselling novel. As with the book, the film purports to be an intimate, albeit speculative, examination of the heartache lying behind the play widely considered to be Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet.
The movie’s greatest strength is a raw, writhing and earthily anguished performance from Jessie Buckley, who steals the show from its nominal focus. She plays Agnes, a woman deeply connected to the woods and the trees and who is introduced taming a hawk. As Agnes explains to the handsome William (Paul Mescal), a local tutor and the man later to become her husband, she is ‘of the forest’.
Director Zhao, very much on the bounceback from her Marvel flop Eternals, works closely with cinematographer Łukasz Żal to frame Agnes as a figure both earthbound and ethereal. Buckley’s strong turn radiates independence and idiosyncrasy in line with Terrence Malick-style shots of whispering leaves and undulating grasses – acting, cinematography and immaculate period detail work overtime to convince us that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in philosophy.
The focus widens over the years as the eventual marriage between Agnes and William yields several children, the most important of whom is the puckish and precocious Hamnet, superbly by newcomer Jacobi Jupe. William’s increasing fame sees him caught between London’s literary scene and the domestic unit in Stratford. Hamnet, for his part, anticipates becoming part of his father’s theatre company, something the preternaturally gifted Agnes also predicts. Life, naturally, has other plans.
However, the film runs into an escalating problem in that it wants to be both suggestive and definitive at the same time. For one thing it never invokes the surname ‘Shakespeare’ once, aiming to stand as an enigmatic slice of life period drama, but it also feels the need to open with explanatory text outlining how ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were once considered the same name.
What, therefore, is this film: as fine-grained a piece of historical research as we’re likely to get, or a wispy delve into the universality of grief that may or may not be invoking the world’s greatest playwright™? Hamnet wrestles with this conundrum but never answers it satisfactorily. In its admittedly devastating final act when the movie develops a more on-the-nose thesis, one longs for the implicit, subtler mysteries of the natural world and the human heart with which the story began. There’s also a peculiar and distracting soundtrack choice made at this juncture that rather undermines and overshadows composer Max Richter‘s fine work elsewhere.
That’s not to downplay the film’s strengths: Buckley is astonishing, all the more so as the film goes on, unlocking tectonic plates of anguish and emotion that are genuinely hard to watch. The Best Actress Oscar is surely hers for the taking.
Mescal has in some ways a harder task of keeping us engaged, stranded between portraying a concrete interpretation of a literary pioneer and a generically unsympathetic workaholic spouse. It’s a shame that the film largely wastes the talents of Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn in bland background roles as, respectively, William’s mother Mary and Bartholomew Hathaway.
An audience can be informed and led explicitly down the garden path, or left to find their own way through a narrative – mixing and matching both approaches isn’t a strategy that works here. Zhao’s previous movies The Rider and Nomadland remain more consistent and satisfying experiences, although it would take a hard heart not to be moved by Hamnet‘s final moments, which remind us of mankind’s remarkable capacity to translate unbearable pain into bold, enduring artistic expression.
★★★ 1/2
In cinemas from January 9th / Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Jacobi Jupe, Joe Alwyn, Noah Jupe / Dir: Chloé Zhao / Universal Studios / 12A
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