(3.5 stars)
Reams of scholarship and fictional takes have imagined how Shakespeare’s earthly life influenced his plays. “Hamnet” isn’t one of them. The boldly devastating film from Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) is far more primal than a speculative portrait of the artist.
The movie may actually be more interested in earth and its life cycles than in the legacy of one man. It’s certainly more intently focused on the woman left behind to rear their children as the playwright’s career shone on the London stage. As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, the film is a literal revelation. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut.
“Hamnet” is titled for Shakespeare’s great tragedy (the film’s epigraph notes that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable) — and for his son, whose death at age 11 unleashed a flood of grief through the work that followed. But don’t lean in listening for clues as to how — at least, not until the time comes. It would be a distraction to parse this ethereal and atmospheric film, which is based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao, for literary allusions.
Pay attention, instead, to dirt and water. To how the roots of trees spread out like ancient cities, mirroring the soaring splay of branches overhead. The child of a so-called forest witch, Agnes is attuned to the vicissitudes of nature, which she understands to encompass her own. Played with ferocious vitality by Jessie Buckley, she’s a woman of the elements — grounded in what can be seen and felt by the body.
It’s a case of opposites attract, then, when her little brothers’ Latin tutor spies Agnes out the window and goes to her like a dog to a treat. (Agnes was the legal name of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway.) The swift courtship between Agnes and Paul Mescal’s Will is playful, goofy and hot. There’s poetry, too — he tells her the story of Orpheus and Eurydice after admitting he’s not a great talker — but also an immediate sense that the two just fit. (For a moment, the strange giddiness of their first meeting made me think they were lovers role-playing.)
If we didn’t know this was a story about a great artist, it could be a quiet, countryside drama in which not much happens until the couple is visited by loss. As the two start a family, the occasional squeak of Will’s inky quill is the only indication of his career offscreen. There is a slow peacefulness to the film, as Zhao, working with cinematographer Lukasz Zal (“The Zone of Interest”), frames her shots with a painter’s eye for landscapes and rustic still lifes. That tranquility is momentarily shattered, of course, by the shrieking births of the couple’s children, which Buckley plays with vein-bulging intensity.
Time passes on the breeze, and soon their three kids, an elder daughter and fraternal twins, are adorably acting out the witches scene from “Macbeth” in the backyard. (If you’re searching for dramaturgic cues, now’s your time to sit up.) Hamnet, played with haunting innocence by Jacobi Jupe, is preternaturally sensitive to cruelties both big and small. The stage is set for heartbreak.
The story takes a harrowing turn, as the lives of parents do when they lose a child, and the rawness of Agnes’s grief reverberates through to the end. In what may be the crux of their conflict (as well as my favorite scene of the year), Will goes to embrace Agnes as he departs for London soon after their son’s death. She wrestles him to the floor. He’s going where? To do what? How could he not stay with her? And why does his grief, in Mescal’s lid-on-a-boiling-pot performance, appear so contained?
The obvious assumption is that he channeled those feelings into his work. If there are moments that feel overwrought as the film is engulfed in sorrow, they are no more so than Shakespeare’s own attempts to put tragedy into language.
Agnes’s grief is an animal howl, with notes of abject horror, searing pain and, ultimately, resentment toward a husband who’s off to play make-believe. Buckley is unforgettable, at times both difficult to face head-on and yet impossible to turn away from.
History has noted Shakespeare’s wife — where it’s noted her at all — off in the margins, a bit of biography tangential to the substance of his works. Here she’s at the center, and her vibrancy is crystal-clear, in love as in agony.
PG-13. At area theaters. Thematic content, strong sexuality and partial nudity. 125 minutes.
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