A Grief Observed: HAMNET

A problem with every movie about Shakespeare’s life is that it constantly invites comparison to Shakespeare's works. Shrugging off a middling movie by saying “well, what’d you expect, it’s not Shakespeare” is a lot harder when the Bard is actually on screen. Add to that the known unknowns of his life, and any attempt at dramatizing it becomes a tantalizing case study in speculation at best. If I could wish any author’s autobiography into existence, it’d be his. Not only would it clear up a lot of conspiratorial wishful thinking surrounding him, it’d be, one hopes, further examples of his richness of language and ear for dramatic depth of character. But, in its absence, I suppose it’s only fair that other writers take a crack at getting in his head. He certainly used historical figures for his own dramatic flourishes and poetic license, so why not? In the case of Hamnet, we focus in on Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) through the birth of his children with Anne (Jessie Buckley) and then skip ahead to the death of one of their children in the plague. It’s the exact mirror image of Shakespeare in Love. (Call it Shakespeare in Grief.) Where that film is clever fanciful froth, this is quiet speculative sorrow. It is subtle to the point of emptiness at times, but builds to a considerable tearful conclusion. 

It keeps his career largely off screen until a climactic abridged and reduced Hamlet. Instead the focus is on the wind through the trees and murmuring in dimly lit rooms and the spoken and unspoken emotional transactions of life in a family. Sometimes they trade kisses and care; other times they cry in intense close up. It’s a movie about child death, after all. It’s not difficult to make that hit hard. Other times the period details of muddy boots and inky parchment squish or scritch scratch away on the margins like a casual reenactment serving as a replacement for memorable scenes. It’s a movie that’s all mood. Because it's a largely quiet, domestic movie, it earns its interest in grace notes and fleeting moments. But there’s also a sense that it’s gliding along the surface, trading off its actors’ fine interiority and patience instead of digging in and making meatier scenes beyond sniffling and staring and murmuring. Writer-director Chloé Zhao is usually pretty good at the surface details like that, attentive to the quality of light across a landscape or the flicker of expressions across an actor’s face. Given the right words, her aesthetic sparkles to life. Her Nomadland’s best scene is an extemporaneous recitation of a Shakespearean sonnet bringing strangers closer. It matches the transcendence of the natural world with the uplift of art. 

Here, co-writing with Maggie O’Farrell adapting her novel of the same name, the moment where the movie goes from interesting and small and cold to something grander and moving, is in that final performance, where we see his deep loss transmuted into theatrical tragedy. It’s a sequence teetering on the edge of preposterous as it begins, but suddenly we fall into the rhythms of Hamlet on stage. With Noah Jupe playing an actor playing the lead, its power draws an audience out of itself into a pure communion of catharsis between actor and crowd. It’s a deeply powerful moment that also pulls the movie out of itself and into something greater than everything before. The problem of every film about making a real work of great art is if it could possibly add meaningfully upon the experience of the art itself. (The dreary Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere struggled mightily there just a month ago.) And not many movies would survive direct compassion to Hamlet. Indeed, not even many Hamlet adaptations do. And nor does Hamnet. But Zhao’s film somehow manages to pull off a finale so moving it dilutes any complaints the rest of the movie accumulates. It’s a movie merely playacting something painfully real, but somehow gets realer when it’s about literal play acting.