She’s a woman who feels most at home in the natural world, curling up on forest floors in rural England and displaying a gift for falconry. He’s a young Latin tutor, barely out of his teens, desperately trying to pay off his father’s debts. They encounter each other outside of a garden near the school where he works, the young man running out in the middle of a lesson to meet her. The spark between them is instant, and incendiary. They will marry, have children, experience the worst tragedy a parent can imagine. Their grief will inspire a work of art that remains a touchstone to this day. Her name is Anne, though she goes by Agnes. His name is William, and he will soon be considered the greatest playwright of the English language.
Meet the Shakespeares. Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet imagined the relationship between the Bard and his spouse as an intimate tale of lust, compromise, joy, resentment, support, and sorrow. A marriage, in other words. It also focuses on one of the defining events of their lives, the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet, and how that unfathomable loss leads William to write the tale of a melancholy Dane in an existential crisis. The play takes their boy’s name as its title — Hamnet and Hamlet being virtually synonymous — and secures Shakespeare‘s legacy. O’Farrell imagined a speculative fiction that nonetheless grounded the story of a famous historical couple in the reality of both love’s labor and a sense of loss. Even the man who wrote eloquent romantic soliloquies that have endured centuries still royally pissed off his wife on the regular.
It’s near impossible to imagine a screen adaptation capturing the grief and catharsis rendered so vividly on the page, even if O’Farrell was signed on as a co-writer. And yet: Filmmaker Chloé Zhao‘s rigorous, moving, and altogether transcendent take on channeling pain into work and finding the will to go on is every bit the book’s equal. Factor in Jessie Buckley‘s career-defining performance as Agnes, and you could make the argument that it surpasses its source material. Having played the fall festival circuit of Venice, Telluride, and now Toronto, Zhao’s film will be one of the most devastating things you see in the back half of this year, if not the most devastating thing to hit theaters over the last 12 months. But it’s a chronicle of reckoning with death that nonetheless bursts with life, renewal, rebirth. Young Hamnet’s shuffling off this mortal coil once laid the groundwork for a masterpiece. It’s now done so twice.
As a writer and director, Oscar winner Zhao has always had a keen sense of space, terrain, and how people move through environments, whether it’s the reservation lands of South Dakota (Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider) or the backroads and pit stops of America at large (Nomadland). Agnes is introduced as a creature of the land, virtually blending into the foliage surrounding her; later, she’ll give birth to their oldest daughter at the base of tree, far from claustrophobic rooms and a crush of people. You wouldn’t call her untamed, but she’s a genuine Earth mother. On the other hand, Will — played with a jagged sensitivity by Paul Mescal, making the most of his sad-eyed charisma and physical presence — is a guy who feels more at home at a desk, with only a candle to light his way through the treacherous creative process. This Shakespeare is moody, short-tempered, occasionally self-centered, prone to drinking too much and wallowing in self-loathing. The common term for such perpetually troubled souls is “a writer.”
Will is raging against his family, notably his ungrateful father (David Wilmot) and unforgiving mother (the always clutch Emily Watson). Agnes, too, yearns to break free from her living situation, despite her attachment to her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn). When she becomes pregnant, both defy the wishes of their doubting families and wed. A daughter is born. Eventually, despite Shakespeare’s long sojourns to London to establish his career — the play’s the thing! — the couple manage to conceive again. This time, Agnes gives birth to twins. The first is a boy named Hamnet. The second is a girl named Judith. She appears to be stillborn. Agnes virtually wills her back to life. The power of a mother’s love is enough to stave back death, it seems. That will prove to be an illusion.
The children grow, with the eldest Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) helping to look after her rambunctious siblings. Both Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes) are imaginative, playful, mischievous. They are also inseparable, prone to dressing up in each other’s clothes and ending each other’s sentences. The family is close, even with Dad’s extended absences. Still, his promises of moving them to the “biggest house in Stratford” suggests Eden is right around the corner. Then a plague hits the household. Judith is the recipient of the pestilence, Agnes stays by her side, Dad is M.I.A. It is Hamnet, however, who takes arms against a sea of troubles. Lying beside his sister, he tells her that they will fool death into taking the wrong child. “I will be brave,” Hamnet repeatedly whispers. His plan works all too well.
What happens next is part of Shakespeare’s biography, though co-writers O’Donnell and Zhao add in their own details about how it transpired. The result is nonetheless shattering, for the characters and the audience. There will be a lot of chatter about Jupe, who lends a depth to his sacrificial youngster that you don’t normally associate with child actors. The same can be said of Mescal, who’s already parlayed playing men of muscular physique and melancholy dispositions into above-the-title movie stardom. Portraying the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the play’s debut, his face and body covered in chalky white paint, his Shakespeare steps through the looking glass and becomes his own tragic player, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage. Every other actor lends a sense of being crushed by the weight of events as well. Yet this movie belongs to one person, and one person alone.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Though people will be crowing over Hamnet for months, the chatter likely building in pitch as a certain Southern California event in March looms large in the distance, they will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance for years. It’s the sort of screen work that blends nuance and full-on expressionism, quiet moments and blood-curdling shrieks. The howl of anguish she lets loose upon acknowledging what’s happened is gutting. The affection Agnes holds for her children and the anger aimed at her husband, not to mention a world cruel enough to rob her of a child, are both tuned with precision to crack your noble heart. Upon hearing that her non-communicative husband has written a play that takes her son’s name in vain, she enters the Globe Theater in stunned disbelief. Then she watches the drama unfold, courtesy of a Hamlet that resembles an older version of her Hamnet, and Buckley somehow makes you see a light shining out of her. The Irish actor has crafted dozens of broken, batty, bold, and even bizarre characters over the past 10 years, yet what she’s doing here feels unprecedented. It rewires your expectations of how to play someone rediscovering their soul.
You take all of this in, trying to pick yourself up off the floor after witnessing such grief and grace. And then Zhao gives you a moment of communal outpouring, as the play’s audience responds to a violent climax with sympathy and love. The sheer uplift of that sequence is overwhelming. Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss. Death is inevitable, the movie tells us, but art can help us make sense of the illogical notion that we’re here one second, then gone the next. It is a way of communicating universal truths and shared bonds, of bridging the gap between us and them. The rest is silence.
From Rolling Stone US
