Jessie Buckley (Agnes) and Paul Mescal (William Shakespeare) in Hamnet. Photo: Agata Grzybowska
(12A, 126 mins, in UK and Irish cinemas now)
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said: “There’s no new thing under the sun”? … No, upon further research, it wasn’t. He borrowed that Sonnet 59 idea, like a lot of his best bars, from an earlier text (Ecclesiastes 1:9, in this case). His genius lay not in originating ideas but in how he reworked his source material into psychologically acute dramas, which access truths both timeless and universal.
Yet the conceit of Hamnet, the new, hotly Oscar-tipped film from Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, is that Shakespeare’s most celebrated work did originate in his personal life. This film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s poignant 2020 novel, tells the story of the playwright (Paul Mescal)’s courtship and marriage of Anne “Agnes” Hathaway (Jessie Buckley); their life in Stratford-upon-Avon, including the 1596 death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet; the family’s subsequent, all-encompassing grief; and how this was poured into the first performance of Hamlet, around 1601. (As noted in the film by an introductory title card, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were fairly common in the Warwickshire of that time, and considered virtually interchangeable.)
So while Hamnet has many grander antecedents, its interest in how the artist’s biography informs the art makes it unavoidably reminiscent of Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 film starring Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare and Gwyneth Paltrow as the willowy love interest who supposedly inspired Romeo & Juliet. That film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, over such enduring classics as The Big Lebowski, The Truman Show and Saving Private Ryan. Its reputation then rapidly declined, and these days Shakespeare in Love is rarely mentioned, except as a lower-order exhibit in the case against studio boss Harvey Weinstein, whose bullying tactics are generally credited with manoeuvring the film into prizewinning position.
There is genuine quality tucked away under Hamnet’s doublet, but regardless of whether it is actually an awards-worthy film, it’s certainly wearing the clothes of one
Shakespeare in Love is also a good example of the sort of film which is not actually very good, but which, come awards season, can be seen prancing around in the costume of prestige cinema, and thereby manages to fool enough undiscerning voters to get by.
Zhao’s film is better. There is some stuff of genuine quality tucked away under Hamnet’s doublet – more on this shortly – but regardless of whether it is actually an awards-worthy film, it’s certainly and showily wearing the clothes of one. (In Shakespeare’s day they had sumptuary laws to prevent just this kind of confusion.)
Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet) and Paul Mescal (William Shakespeare) in Hamnet. Photo: Focus Features
It has the historical setting, the lachrymose subject-matter, the late-in-the-year US release date (keeping it fresh in the mind of Academy voters), and a resonant, swelling score from Max Richter. Some critics have objected to this on the grounds that On the Nature of Daylight, the piece used in the film’s climactic scene, is familiar from several previous films, notably 2016 Oscar-winner Arrival. But given the Bard’s own noted penchant for recycling, no Shakespeare scholar would take issue.
Then there’s that powerhouse performance from Best Actress shoo-in Jessie Buckley. As Agnes – pronounced “AHN-yis” – Buckley is both the film’s greatest asset and its biggest problem. She is a Manic Witch-y Dream Girl who beguiles her husband, then, like a benevolent Lady Macbeth, manipulates him into fulfilling his career ambitions in London. She’s also a maternal force of nature, with the power to tame wild animals, prophesy the future and rekindle the spark of life in a stillborn baby. This results in several transcendently moving moments, but also in the overshadowing of Shakespeare himself.
Is this a casting issue? A matter of Mescal’s comparatively slight screen persona, that mulleted millennial everyman, being simply blasted off the screen by another Buckley tour de force, like he was by Denzel Washington in Gladiator II? (Mescal is a talent, but his star quality is elliptical and elusive. Not every director seems capable of capturing what Charlotte Wells did so gorgeously in Aftersun.)
Jessie Buckley (Agnes) in Hamnet. Photo: Agata Grzybowska
It’s clearly intentional, however, that from opening shot to curtain’s close, Buckley’s Agnes is at the film’s centre, the conduit through which the primary emotion of grief flows, like a rushing forest river. Maybe that worked within the nuanced pages of a novel. On screen, it feels reductive to attribute Shakespeare’s inspiration to a single biographical source like this.
It’s also not Mescal’s fault that, in one fatally corny instance, the screenplay requires him to deliver the “To be or not to be” speech – apparently spontaneously? – while poised on the edge of the riverbank, contemplating taking his own life. Here and in other places, Hamnet is caught in its own purgatory of indecision, between sublime Shakespearean tragedy and contrived Hollywood weepie.
