The two hardest things to do in a movie are to genuinely scare the viewer and to genuinely move the viewer. When you accomplish either, it’s not usually the result of strenuous effort. In fact, underplayed moments and counterintuitive choices, especially those that surprise the viewer, are responsible for the lion’s share of wet hankies out there in the cinemas, not the big, go-for-broke, make-you-cry-at-all-costs gestures.
Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet spends the entire last hour of its running time trying to wring tears from its audience using gestures pitched at this scope. The narrative occurrence that would prompt these tears – the loss of a child – is not, of course, unworthy of such duct opening or tear shedding. But it’s unworthy of such shameless methods, and it makes good actors go to great lengths in assisting the cause. Fortunately for them, they are getting Oscar buzz for these efforts, rather than being raked over the coals.
The child is the title character, the only son of William Shakespeare, whose twin sister Judith was thought to be the frail one. She appeared to be stillborn before coughing out a few belated breaths and becoming a healthy child, if more prone to becoming sick than her brother. And it’s Judith who actually gets a bad case of “the pestilence,” a.k.a. the bubonic plague, before miraculously surviving. Hamnet does not survive, his own efforts to save his sister putting him in the fatal harm’s way. (History does not know for sure if this is how Hamnet died.) And according to this movie, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell‘s 2020 novel (O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao), his death prompted the writing of Shakespeare’s most famous play, with its similar title, Hamlet.
Shakespeare is played by Paul Mescal, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, no character utters his name until about the 90-minute mark. Perhaps we are meant to understand that this could just be any father’s child, and the fact that the father is the world’s greatest playwright does not lend additional significance to it. The movie is unaccountably, then, fixated on the role this death had in Shakespeare’s creative process, reaching rather dubious conclusions about similarities between the Prince of Denmark and the 11-year-old son of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley).
Agnes is the character with the most screen time, an herbalist and falconer whom the locals say is the daughter of a forest witch. She apparently has a second sight common to the women in her family, which is why she so fears the loss of Judith. Her marriage to William is cause for gnashing of teeth in both families, with Emily Watson playing Shakespeare’s mother and Joe Alwyn playing Agnes’ brother. But everyone’s fully on board by the time the young lovers become parents, first of an older daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and then of Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).
In 2018 Kenneth Branagh made another prominent film in which most of the scenes take place in Stratford, where the rest of Shakespeare’s family lived while their patriarch was in London acting and writing plays. That was All Is True, a cheeky title if ever there was one, since much is unverifiable about Shakespeare’s movements during this time (including, to some fringe scholars, the very question of his authorship of the plays). One thing that certainly has the ring of truth about All Is True is that it was debatable how truly broken up Shakespeare was over Hamnet’s death. In one line of dialogue that snappishly takes him to task for neglecting his family, his wife reminds him that he was writing The Merry Wives of Windsor while his son was dying.
The way these two filmmakers present similar material, it’s a lot easier to believe that film’s speculations than this one’s. Here, indeed Shakespeare does return to London rather too quickly after Hamnet’s death, which brings this perspective of him as an absent father in line with the scholarly consensus. Then Hamnet overplays its hand in the other direction, suggesting such deep mourning on the part of the playwright that the famous “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet is staged as Shakespeare’s contemplation of his own suicide – an impulse with only flimsy precedent in the narrative.
Even if we could decide that Zhao were justified in directing all her resources toward documenting this parental grief, which requires Buckley to tap into all the depths of her considerable craft, there would still be something nagging that undercut it: the loss of a child to disease was a common occurrence in late 16th century England. In perhaps the film’s only correctly modulated performance, Watson, now effectively serving as a nursemaid to Agnes, calmly acknowledges the loss of three of her own children to the same pestilence, one of whom was seven years old, two of whom were twin infants. In fact, at this time, a third of all children died before age 10. People bore these hardships without an hour of screen time devoted to their soul-scraping agony.
It’s a shame Zhao succumbs to such indulgences, because what she’s put on screen here, from the perspective of production details, is pulsing with earthy life. Every design detail immerses us in the world she’s created. The opening scenes even have a sense of gothic romance akin to something like Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. At this stage, we are properly entranced.
Zhao’s camera gets up in close to the actors, which could have itself been the intimacy that permitted the underplaying of their grief. Buckley’s performance, which has already earned her a Golden Globe, demonstrates an uncanny ability to put herself in the headspace of a heartsick mother. It would be so much more effective if she weren’t saddled with this single note of misery for such a long time.
Hamnet finally exhausts any previous patience through its extended final scene during the first staging of Hamlet. Had Zhao made different choices earlier in the narrative, this scene could have been that surprise element that freed the emotions welling up inside us. Instead it just goes on for twice as long as it should and relies on symbolic moments that don’t make sense as actual occurrences during the debut performance of this play. We don’t want an emotional release at this point, we just want a release from the cinema.
Hamnet is currently playing in Australian cinemas.