“Time and again,” wrote George Steiner in his 1996 essay “A Preface to the Hebrew Bible,” “I have sought to imagine, albeit indistinctly, Shakespeare remarking at home or to some intimate on whether or not work on Hamlet or Othello had, that day, gone well or poorly.”
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.”
Whatever else you can say of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—adapted by the director and O’Farrell from the latter’s award-winning novel of the same name—it is not a tale told by an eejit. Rather, it seeks to imagine, with all of the distinction that its Oscar-winning director and brand-name stars can muster, the process by which William—you can call him Will, played by Paul Mescal—conjured up the world and characters of his most famous play: an endeavor that’s shown going well before it goes poorly. Despite excelling as a husband and father in verdant Stratford, our man feels squeezed by his domestic responsibilities, unable to bear down and scribe while there’s so much sun-dappled frolicking about; he gets himself to a flat in London, while his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), holds down the fort with their three children. In the city, Will has a room of his own, and time enough at last. He pauses, he struggles, he searches inwardly for le mot juste. He gazes out over the water, wondering: To be or not to be?
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.”
Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.
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.
During his sojourn in London, Will learns that his 11-year-old daughter, Judith (played in the film by Olivia Lynes), has contracted the Black Death, and he rushes home to be at her bedside. Upon his arrival, he’s overjoyed to find Judith healthy, and then in the same breath devastated to learn that her twin brother, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), had been fatally infected and passed away in the night. The siblings had always liked to playfully trade places around the house, in order to trick their parents; in his final hours, Hamnet held his ailing sister close and told her that he’d die in her stead. To quote the Bard himself: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”
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.)
Of course, to attempt to reduce a work as complex as Hamlet to a single thesis—or to a sliver of tidy art-imitates-life exposition—is a fool’s errand. (The best writing inspired by Hamlet recognizes this: Tom Stoppard’s superlatively absurd play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance, honors Hamlet’s spaciousness by constructing an entire parallel narrative on its margins.) Still, there is something genuinely elegant in the way Hamnet navigates Hamlet’s labyrinths of self-reflexivity. O’Farrell’s setup effectively echoes Hamlet’s plan, which is to “catch the conscience” of his uncle—to determine whether his uncle is guilty of murdering his father—by making his uncle watch a play about a similar crime; in Hamnet, the task is to search Shakespeare’s own conscience by retracing the creation and performance of Hamlet itself. With a central character so preoccupied by mournful self-incrimination, the play’s existentialist textures of angst and indecision, as well as its morbid inventory of familial betrayal and flawed father figures, carry a potent charge of survivor’s guilt.
“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.
In her first two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Zhao worked primarily with nonprofessional performers (including several residents of a Sioux reservation in South Dakota), cultivating a persuasive (and trendy) sense of hybridity. She repeated—and complicated—that tactic in Nomadland (2020), which dropped no less than Her Majesty Frances McDormand among a carefully curated menagerie of everyday folks in the hope that her performance as a self-styled drifter, chasing a seasonal gig at an Amazon fulfillment center, might duly absorb the salt of the earth.
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.
What makes Buckley remarkable in her best roles is her quality of emotional translucence, the way her feelings seem to burn through her skin. Here, though, the temperature has been jacked up so that her gestures and line readings all more or less melt together, while Mescal—after Aftersun, the millennial patron saint of on-screen Sad Dads—tries to compensate with a coolness that, while exquisitely shaded in places, succeeds mainly in making Will a sloe-eyed cipher. Both actors make something of the aftermath of Hamnet’s death, reproducing the stark and telling contrasts of behavior in O’Farrell’s novel, with Buckley inhabiting the omniscient narrator’s observation that “there are many different ways to cry … the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes” and Mescal deftly approximating Will’s reaction upon seeing the body: “the sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight.”
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.
It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Agnes—at this point estranged from her husband, having been heartbroken by his decision to return to work on his opus instead of staying behind to mourn—is front row center at the premiere of Hamlet, or that the film’s structure obliges us to see the play via a kind of dual vision: through our own collective familiarity with what is basically a secular myth—a relocated Greek tragedy with Freud waiting in the wings to analyze it—and through Agnes’s anguished, gradually widening eyes as she comes to understand the true nature of her husband’s achievement, which was to locate and resurrect their son so that he might be bestowed on the world, as a gift.
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.”
