★★★★ (4 out of 4)
Did you know that Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” as a sorrow-soaked eulogy for his 11-year-old son Hamnet, who died of the plague at age 11?
Probably not, since no one knows how Hamnet died or what motivated the Bard to create “Hamlet.” Back in 1590s, the internet wasn’t around to let people talk smack. Director Chloe Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel “Hamnet” is historical fiction, a genre that allows an artist (or a hack) to speculate on what happened based on available evidence. When done well, as in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” or Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” the result can illuminate. When done superbly, as it is in “Hamnet,” the result is transcendent.
Zhao, the “Nomadland” Oscar winner who wrote the script with O’Farrell, starts by telling us that Shakespeare had a wife, establishing a female perspective that puts Shakespeare in a supporting role. It’s a choice almost as inspiring as casting Jessie Buckley as said wife, Agnes (Anne) Hathaway. And Buckley— guttural, defiant, untamable in the performance of the year— plays Agnes with what the Bard once termed “a mad blood stirring.”
It's a given that Zhao needed an actor who could try to bring order to Buckley’s chaos. She found him in Paul Mescal, a Shakespeare in love with this so-called “forest witch,” first seen tangled in the roots of a tree with a hawk her only companion. The brilliant Mescal plays him outside the box, his physical attraction registering as strongly as his restless life of the mind. Their acting fire is incandescent, powered by a carnality that singes the screen.
We do know that at the age of 18, this son of a glover married Agnes, who was 26 and three months pregnant. Will’s mother Mary (Emily Watson scoring a major triumph in a minor role) and Agnes’s brother Bartholomew (a nurturing Joe Alwyn) don’t see the good in a union between Agnes and this “a pasty-faced scholar.” They’ll come around.
In what the Bard once termed “a mad blood stirring,” Jessie Buckley is guttural, defiant, and untamable in the performance of the year.
A daughter, Susanna, arrived six months later, followed in two years by the birth of twins, Judith and Hamnet. In 1596, Hamnet (an ardent, adorable Jacobi Jupe), just 11 years old, died, presumably of the plague, catapulting the family into torment. The inconsolable Agnes remains on the farm with her kids, while Will rides often into London to refuel his career as a playwright.
Shot with a poet’s eye by “Ida” camera wizard Łukasz Żal, and scored with an ear for thunder and nuance by Max Richter, “Hamnet” pulls in all the resources of cinema to handfast the audience to its characters.
When the plague strikes, passing by Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) to invade the twins, first Judith (Olivia Lynes) and then Jupe’s self-sacrificing Hamnet, the path to tragedy is clear. The scenes of Hamnet wandering alone in the forest, suspended between life and death, have an aching poignancy.
Not for a second does Buckley play Agnes as a gushing fangirl to her husband, the literary rock star. It’s only in the film’s cunning, cathartic final section, when Agnes travels to London’s Globe theater for the opening night of “Hamlet,” that she sees and understands what Will has been doing while leaving his family behind.
Seated in the cheap seats among the groundlings, Agnes is put off at first, not understanding the language of the play. And then the realization that Will has turned their shared grief into a play where the father dies before the son, a twist that allows Hamnet to survive through a piece of theater destined to live forever. “Remember me,” says the father’s ghost, embodied by Will himself. And it’s Noah Jupe, the older real-life brother of Jacobi Jupe, who movingly plays Hamlet as the ever-questing, melancholy Dane of legend.
The human connections continue to astonish. And these torrents of feelings are vividly captured on the face of Agnes. Buckley plays these scenes with no dialogue, but with a body-and-soul immersion that belongs in the cinema time capsule. You can’t take your eyes off her.
I’ve heard the dings against “Hamnet,” that’s it’s grief porn with no grounding in truth. To me, “Hamnet” is one of the best and most emotionally engulfing movies of the year and a tribute to art’s potential to hurt and to heal. Be prepared. “Hamnet” will wreck you.