Steiner’s thought experiment underlines the tendency we have to see certain artists or historical figures as somehow existing beyond the quotidian, so that the revelation of everyday routines or hobbies takes on a mythic cast: Sylvia Plath keeping bees, or Jack Kerouac playing fantasy sports. In 2020, the Irish author Maggie O’Farrell offered her own variation on this problem, one borne of her own writerly experience. “When you’re sitting at your computer, immersed in the world you’ve created, and have to write: ‘William Shakespeare had his breakfast…’ it’s impossible not to think: I’m an eejit,” she told The Guardian. “Even calling him William seems colossally presumptuous.”
Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”
O’Farrell subtitled her book A Novel of the Plague, and the story is tinged with death at every turn; the premise, which she devised during her time at Cambridge, is that certain key characters and themes in Hamlet were directly inspired by a fugue of grief.
That Shakespeare fathered a child called Hamnet who died before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet is a reliably concrete detail that’s been passed back and forth over the years by scholars and biographers. It’s ultimately little more than a footnote, but O’Farrell deploys it industriously, as a means of collapsing the historical and rhetorical distance between us and an impossibly famous subject, and as a skeleton key unlocking his genius. (The book has sold over two million copies, a total likely to be juiced by fresh copies featuring Mescal’s hangdog-handsome mug.)
“Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat,” says Will’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), in a portentous monologue ported over wholesale from the book. What Zhao’s film seeks to dramatize, in as much sound and fury as humanly possible, is what it might feel like for a parent to internalize that lesson, and how those emotions might then be wrangled and channeled in the service of some larger and enduring act of artistic catharsis.
Hamnet is the director’s first period piece, and while the glancing, magic-hour lyricism of the cinematography (by the excellent Łukasz Żal, who shot The Zone of Interest) connects it to its predecessors, Mescal’s and Buckley’s performances exist in a new register. Instead of trying to penetrate the hardened exteriors of amateur actors—or coaxing an old pro to act natural—Zhao means to steer two thoroughbred thespians through the cinematic equivalent of the Preakness. Buckley’s Agnes is first seen curled up in a muddy hollow—literally tree-hugging—linking her in the film’s meticulously on-the-nose imagery with capital-N Nature; if it’s possible to overact lonely repose, Buckley’s body language fits the bill. It’s not her fault: Hamnet is so determined to establish Agnes as an elemental presence—with quasi-uncanny psychic abilities, a gorgeous pet falcon, and a nasty fairy-tale stepmother to match—that it pushes a technically brilliant actress perilously into the realm of Gaia-ish caricature.
It’s hard not to be affected by moments like these, or by how Zhao visualizes the dying Hamnet in limbo: wandering a bare stage, wondering aloud where he’s gone, before exiting through a darkened portal. The sheer ferocity of Hamnet’s assault is an achievement of sorts, and yet the boundary between humane empathy and award-baiting shamelessness—a tightrope walked by many great artists, and also plenty of dubious ones—keeps blurring. Part of the problem is that Will and Agnes’s odd-couple, star-crossed courtship and subsequent bucolic family life are presented with such rib-nudging ominousness—the kids arrayed playfully as the witches from Macbeth; the death of the aforementioned family falcon—that things feel heightened (and phony) before the arrival of a paradigm-shifting trauma. Meanwhile, on a formal level, Zhao never stops pummeling us. The use of Max Richter’s luminous composition “On the Nature of Daylight” gives the game away; the piece is such a musical cheat code that pretty much any auteur with a Spotify account has used it, so that when we’re supposed to be gripped by the climactic-performance-within-the-film of Hamlet, we’re remembering money shots from Arrival and The Last of Us instead.
Whether or not you buy the underlying cause-and-effect psychology, it’s a lovely idea, and so is the staging whereby the company’s boyish, too-too-fragile Hamlet (Noah Jupe) reaches out—beyond the stage directions, and, by extension, from the realm of fiction into the reality it shadows—to commune with one particularly stricken audience member. It’s grand, it’s ambitious, and it works, maybe in spite of itself; though this be corniness, “yet there is method in ’t.”
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