A fair number of high-powered film critics don’t seem to care
for Hamnet. The film was wholly shut out by such august bodies as the
New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, both of
which chose to honor more outrageous flicks, like One Battle After Another. For
them, I gather, Hamnet is an old-fashioned tearjerker, without much
connection to our own troubled times.
Actors, though, clearly hold this film in high esteem. Wednesday’s
nominations for the Actor Award, the newly-renamed honor from the Screen Actors
Guild, include individual recognition for Jessie Buckley (up for female
actor in a Leading Role) and Paul Mescal (actor in a Supporting Role). Even
more impressive: the film was nominated (along with, among others, One
Battle After Another and Marty Supreme), for the coveted ensemble
award honoring the featured cast.
And what do I think? As a dedicated filmgoer with a decided
literary bent, I found this rendering of the relationship between William
Shakespeare and his wife thoroughly mesmerizing. Adapted by Oscar-winning
director Chloé Zhao and novelist Maggie O’Farrell
from Farrell’s best-selling novel, this is a story about familial love and loss.
In the absence of much hard evidence, many literary types have speculated about
the marriage of the brilliant English playwright and the rustic young woman he
abandoned for so many months while pursuing his career in London. It’s easy to
guess, as many have done, that the pair had little in common aside from the
three children who stayed home in Stratford with their mother. (No wonder ,
they reason, that Will looked for greener pastures elsewhere! No wonder that
upon his death he left his wife merely the second-best bed!)
I think the romantics among us are delighted to find in
O’Farrell’s rendering a genuine marital union, though one challenged by Will’s
long absences. And, of course, further threatened by the plague-death of the
couple’s only son, Hamnet, at an early age. The story, then, becomes one in which a couple need to find—somehow—their way out of
grief. For the earthy Agnes (more usually known as Anne), there’s despair, fury
at her long-absent spouse, and a deep connection with nature. For Will there
are words to be written, and a play to be produced. I’ve seen other films
re-creating the performance of an Elizabethan drama on the stage of the Globe
Theater (see Shakespeare in Love, for example). But never before have I
seen this set-up used so movingly, with Agnes—standing among the groundlings at
the very edge of the stage—mesmerized by the words her husband has written,
finding in them personal meaning to help soothe her agony.
I’ve always liked Jessie Buckley’s performances in modest
indies, but the role of Agnes calls forth from her whole new depths. Her
radiance is impossible to ignore, and I suspect big prizes may be coming her
way. Paul Mescal’s role as William Shakespeare is smaller, but also
requires—and gets—real intensity. I also want to praise the child actors who
are essential to this plot, particularly Jacobi Jupe as 12-year-old Hamnet,
whose death tears the Shakespeare family asunder. Fittingly, young Jacobi’s
20-year-old brother, Noah, is featured in the climactic Globe Theater scenes,
on stage in the role of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist.
(The film makes clear at the outset that Hamnet and Hamlet were, in
sixteenth-century England, essentially the same name.)
Huzzah for Hamnet’s production values, including glorious
cinematography that captures Agnes’s closeness to the natural world. Perhaps
because women created her, she’s a heroine unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote.
A final note: it wasn’t until I belatedly talked to
viewers who hadn’t read the novel that I realized not every moviegoer knows at
the outset that Paul Mescal’s character, Will, is a creative portrait of the bard-to-be,
William Shakepeare. The feeling among several who spoke to me is that
this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers: they wanted the audience to
respond to the country lad who falls for Agnes without initially recognizing
the literary genius he will become. I wonder: does this strategy help or hurt the film’s
success?
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