Death Be Not Proud: Film Review of Hamnet
★★★★
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
We know much about the life and times of William Shakespeare. Dozens of books have been written about his life, his loves, and his works, but there are still some mysteries. Was he the actual author of his works? Why did he will his second-best bed to his wife Anne Hathaway? Was there another woman in his life?
There have been an equal number of attempts to connect his life events to his work. Were some of his histories written with an eye toward the leanings of the Crown and Parliament? Did the ascension of King Charles affect the content of his later plays? We’ll never know the complete truth for certain.
One thing we do know was that Shakespeare lost his son Hamnet at a very young age, and that he penned his masterwork Hamlet four years after the event.
The beginning of Chloe Zhao’s film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, flies a quote stating that the names Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably in Elizabethan times, declaring non too subtly to the audience a correlation between Shakespeare the playwright and Shakespeare the father.
The film opens with a shot of Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) curled up in the root of massive tree in the forest. She wakes, calls her falcon, and sets about collecting herbs. Dressed in red and darker tones, she seems to have sprung from the forest floor. At the foot of her tree is a dark hollow, a cave really, a mysterious portal between Agnes and the wild. She has a reputation as a “forest witch” because of her skill with herbal cures and her talent for telling the future. She can also see the future, forecasting future greatness in Will’s palm, and herself dying with two living children.
William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), forced to tutor the Hathaway children in Latin to help mitigate his father’s debts, spies her through the window, he is smitten. The two connect, Agnes gets pregnant and the two—over the objections of their families—marry. They seem quite happy in their union. When her time comes, Agnes goes to the woods to have their first child, Susannah.
Will becomes increasingly frustrated working with his father and his inability to write. Agnes encourages him to go to London to pursue his calling, which he does. Agnes continues at their home, hearing of Will’s success but unwilling to see, or even acknowledge, his work. A subtle but growing resentment about Will’s constant absence takes root in her heart.
After going into labor, Agnes prepares to enter the woods to birth her second child but is physically restrained by her mother-in-law Mary (Emily Watson). Agnes delivers Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and then another child, Judith (Olivia Lynes), who appears to be stillborn. Agnes revives the baby and names her Judith. The twins grow strong and become inseparable. Hamnet tells his father he wants to become part of his troupe.
Judith contracts the plague, and using all her powers, Agnes tries to cure her. Hamnet lies beside her, telling her he wants to take her place. She recovers but Hamnet becomes ill and eventually perishes. William returns to find his son lying in repose.
Angered that her husband must return to London, Agnes finds herself increasingly debilitated by grief. William, in London, is similarly stricken. In one scene, he walks to the edge of a pier overlooking the Thames, reciting parts of his “to be or not to be” speech, while apparently contemplating suicide.
Learning that a production of Hamlet is being mounted in London, Agnes, angry because she believes that her son’s memory is being mocked, travels to London with her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), where—after loudly voicing her outrage during the play—she understands that the production is not only a tribute to the memory of her son, but an acknowledgement of her husband’s, and her own, grief.
Linking the personal traumas of an artist directly to their work in a narrative is at best risky and at worst, trite. As Justin Chang states in his New Yorker review, “here is, too, the inherent kitsch in reducing one of the richest, most intellectually prismatic works in English literature to an instrument of healing.” (The New Yorker). Creating a transformative narrative linking the creative process to an emotional catharsis is both simplistic and misleading.
While the play Hamlet does wrestle with themes of death, betrayal, suicide, and grief, and uses the child’s name—or its twin variant—in the title, the tragedy should not be regarded as a couple’s emotional lifeboat.
Director Chloe Zhao, along with co-screenwriter O’Farrell, dodge this particularly kitschy conceit. While it seems evident that Shakespeare is working through some personal issues while writing Hamlet, Zhao drops other breadcrumbs from his life that end up in the film, Ophelia is linked closely with herbs and flowers, like Agnes, and the ghost of Hamlet’s father—played enthrallingly by Pascal—is wearing make-up that looks like dried river mud, evoking the mask of the despair and grief he felt while contemplating taking his own life in the River Thames. The doorway in the set, from which Hamlet’s ghost appears and into which young Hamlet disappears, is eerily reminiscent of Agnes’ cave at the foot of her tree, the same place where Will originally told Agnes the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is the gateway into the underworld.
In the hands of a less-talented director and actors, this film might very well have turned out to be another cheesy life-to-art melodrama like The Agony and the Ecstasy. Instead, framed by the lush natural forces springing around and from Agnes and anchored by the emotional weight of the Shakespeares’ relationship, Hamnet is a film that addresses the unrelenting grief, regret, pain, and finally redemption of parents who have suffered the greatest loss imaginable.
Jessie Buckley not only plays a force of nature in the film, she becomes that force of nature. She transforms seamlessly from a mysterious, independent, and powerful woman of the forest to a loving wife and mother. At times, she is tougher than a bar of iron or as fragile as a straw. Buckley’s raw and sometimes brutal emotionality of the childbirth scenes and her frantic attempts to cure her plague-stricken children seem to burst through off the screen. The final scenes, as the dawning understanding of her husband’s intentions light her up during the production of Shakespeare, exhibit an acting tour-de-force unlike few that have ever appeared on screen.
Hamnet is not about William Shakespeare. Except for the final sequence, the audience never sees his plays performed, and rarely ever sees London. The film is about the joys, the tribulations, the agonies, the forgiveness, and the rewards of family. It is mostly a very tender film. Even when Agnes resembles a mother bear more than a woman, she is eminently human and eminently humane.
This is a beautiful and stirring film, one well worth seeing. Don’t expect a lot about Shakespeare’s life and times. Expect more.