Hamnet: The Play's Ultimately the Thing, But Family, Love and Loss Make It Linger
By Jim Slotek
Rating: A-
It’s tricky reading a best-selling book like Hamnet just before seeing it as a movie. It not only must stand on its own merits, it must be as good as the movie already playing in your head.
Call it a stand-off. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (co-written with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the best-selling suppositional novel about the home-life of Shakespeare) earned its People’s Choice Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. It did so by retaining the soul of the story.
Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley in Hamnet
The soul of Zao’s Hamnet is Shakespeare’s wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) – a stand-in for his real-life wife Anne Hathaway, here depicted as a lusty wild-child who is believed by the villagers of Stratford-upon-Avon to be a “forest witch.” I mean, she has a pet kestrel (a hunting bird), how witchy is that?
This particular young witch, rather than being a candidate for burning, is sought after by ailing locals for her healing powers. And her connection with the woods leads her to run away and bear her first child alone, in a bower of forest foliage within sight of the sprites.
This is the kind of liberty one can take when there is virtually no historical record to say otherwise. William Shakespeare’s life remains largely a mystery, which makes him catnip to storytellers dying to create a story for him.
But in this story, Agnes’ healing powers do not extend to the plague. And Hamnet is an emotional ride about a mother and absentee father suffering the loss of a favoured son.
What we do know about Shakespeare (played here by Paul Mescal) is that he did have a son named Hamnet (a variation on Hamlet, the same name with two different spellings) who died young. And he made his name and largely lived in London, 100 miles away from his wife and three children.
That separation is key to the heart-rending drama that unfolds in Hamnet. It plays its part in suspicions of adultery, in his hopeless efforts to stay connected to his ailing family, and eventually in his secret purging of grief through the writing of a play called… you guessed it.
Mescal is fine as Shakespeare, but it’s Buckley who owns the show. And quite rightly. In the novel, Shakespeare’s name is never actually mentioned. He is the “young man” and the “writer,” even when he is present. And people never say his name, even when talking about his sudden success. If you weren’t aware of the book’s premise going in, it might be quite a few chapters before you clued in to who the mostly-absentee father was.
By comparison, Hamnet the movie does have a tendency to hit you over the head with the Bard. While playing games with his children on a visit home, they recite lines from his plays back to him. And in the one sore-thumb moment in the movie, a grieving, suicide-pondering Shakespeare stands by the Thames and utters the exact words from, y’know, that soliloquy, apparently off the top of his head. (Hey, I can do that too, but I had to memorize it in school.)
Still, Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast. Emily Watson sensitively portrays the matriarch Mary Shakespeare, who takes in the out-of-wedlock pregnant girl, and becomes a rare comfort in an otherwise unwelcoming house. Jacobi Jupe has a certain ethereal quality as the boy who inspires the play of almost-the-same name.
And cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s 16th century film portraiture anchors the movie with a combination of sheer rural beauty and village earthiness. And Zao adds a clever turn or two, as when she animates the adventures of an infected flea from the other side of the planet to Stratford.
If you’re playing that game, Hamnet is a prime candidate for awards season. And I would be prepared to hand Jessie Buckley a trophy right now.
Hamnet. Directed and co-written by Chloé Zhao. Stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Jacobi Jupe. Opens in select theatres Wednesday, November 26, nationwide on Friday, December 5..