I think that I should start by clarifying a few key facts. Firstly, and most importantly, I was thrilled when, in the early hours of yesterday morning, Jessie Buckley won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her superlative work in Hamnet.
I have been a great fan of Buckley on stage and screen for many years, starting with her memorable debut as the daughter in Trevor Nunn’s production of A Little Night Music at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2008 (I have the framed poster for this show hung in my house). Her Golden Globe award was richly deserved, given that her performance as Shakespeare’s intuitive wife Agnes Hathaway in Chloé Zhao’s film is emotionally resonant and ethereally good.
Talking of Zhao, I cheered deep into the night when she became only the second woman in the decades-long history of the Oscars to be crowned Best Director for the splendid Nomadland (2020).
Thus Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s family life, the death of his eponymous young son and the staging of his – as well as the world’s – most famous play should have been a dream come true for a cinephile theatre critic like me. So keen were my friend Deb (a long-time admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel) and I to see the film that we went on the very first afternoon of its release last week. Reader, I hated it, and so did Deb, finding it unforgivably overwrought and portentous.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in ‘Hamnet’ (Photo: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features /AP)The story O’Farrell tells is potent, but Zhao weirdly doesn’t seem to trust that the events and the actors (Shakespeare is played by the fine Paul Mescal) will pack sufficient punch by themselves. Instead, she resorts to endless lengthy silent close-ups, as if attempting to force every last drop of emotion out of us whether we want it or not.
I’m afraid that the more this happened, the stonier-hearted I became, and by the time the shining-faced young whippersnapper met his doom, I was almost entirely unmoved. If Zhao had tried less hard, I am certain that my tears would have flowed freely, but all her cinematic bullying proved counterproductive.
Much has been made of the film’s last scene, in which Agnes is an enrapt groundling at the Globe watching a performance of Hamlet. Scenes of theatre on film always make me nervous, as the enterprise can too often look unbearably pretentious – and so it proves here.
Jessie Buckley as Agnes in Hamnet (Photo: Focus Features LLC)The Globe was a famously rumbustious place and yet in this film a reverential silence cloaks the audience from the very first line (and let’s not forget that Hamlet’s unedited running time is more than four hours). They are, Zhao is at great pains to tell us, utterly bewitched by the magnificence of Shakespeare’s words; I confidently predict that theatre sceptics who watch this will have all their worst assumptions confirmed for ever more.
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Agnes alone, of course, understands the real life rooting and connections behind the play, so I’d have been more than happy for Buckley to be visibly transfixed and to hold out her hand to the young actor playing Hamlet during his Act Five death scene. But the whole audience doing this? Come on. After four hours, a good percentage of them would have been less rapturous and more desperate for a pee. Idolising – embalming, even – theatre like this does no-one any good.
I am acutely aware of the fact that I am a rare naysayer, that Hamnet paddles blissfully in a golden pond of five-star reviews, including from this paper. It’s the Baftas next month, followed by the Oscars in mid-March, and I shall be crossing my fingers for Buckley at both ceremonies.
Hamnet itself will also be a favourite for the Best Film gong. All I’ll say on that subject is that my hands will not be outstretched in reverential awe.
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