Hamnet, which just opened in theaters around Israel, is a movie about William Shakespeare’s family that really wants to be about something else.
What it wants to be about is Shakespeare’s wife, generally known as Anne Hathaway, but here called Agnes (a name by which she was reportedly referred in at least one document), who is played by Jessie Buckley.
Agnes is portrayed as a wild, free-spirited woman who keeps a hawk in the forest, knows all kinds of herbal remedies, and has the gift of prophecy, while Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is a mostly affable, occasionally tormented nonentity.
I hate to be a grouch, but few things bore me more than wild, free spirits with the gift of prophecy, and nothing interests me more than the works of the canon of English literature, so I was disappointed that in Hamnet, Shakespeare’s writing takes a backseat to Agnes’s wild romping and intuition. It’s part of that trend of looking at neglected women of history, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable.
The title, Hamnet, was the name of Shakespeare’s son, who died of plague at the age of 11, and a title at the beginning informs us that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in that era. But if you thought that the movie would focus on Shakespeare’s reaction to his son’s death, think again. That reaction is there, but it’s very muted; the movie is Agnes’s story.
It’s only in a section at the end that Shakespeare’s writing plays any part in the film, and if you changed the characters’ names, the rest of it could be about any family in the Elizabethan era.
The movie depicts how the death of children was tragically common in that era. Buckley, playing Agnes, wails in scenes when their 11-year-old contracts the bubonic plague and passes away, in just the kind of over-the-top performance, sometimes described as a tour de force, which generally wins Oscars.
'Hamnet' nominated for eight Oscar awards
Nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Buckley will likely win this year’s Best Actress award for this film. The movie hammers at the theme of her vision of Hamnet’s death and then the reality of it so relentlessly and in such an unimaginative way that what should be the emotional center of the movie left me cold.
Little is known about Shakespeare’s wife and his marriage, although there are many theories about them. Hamnet is really the story of a woman who thinks she has found her ideal partner, a man she intuits has a great deal of feeling and complexity in him, only to discover that he is a selfish careerist who takes off to London to make a name for himself. She won’t bring their children there, reasonably fearing the plague, and so they are separated for most of the movie.
It’s only in the final 15 minutes or so that she goes to London to see the opening of Hamlet, which, in the movie’s telling, reflects the playwright’s struggle to decide whether to go on living following the death of his son.
Agnes, who tried to get William to let her read some of his writing in an early scene but who never mentioned it again after he said that he wasn’t finished yet, is transfixed by Hamlet’s soliloquy and holds the actor’s hand. I almost forgave all the parts with her romping around the forest and making herbal remedies when the scenes toward the end showed the excitement of the crowd at the Globe Theatre filing in to see Hamlet and some moments from the play, including the soliloquy.
But the complexity of that play, which has given us such a wealth of great lines that are still quoted to this day, is tamped down in favor of a literal-minded explanation that it is Shakespeare’s way of expressing his feelings over Hamnet’s death. At least the movie presents scenes from the play, so viewers can understand why we are being asked to care about this family.
Hamnet was directed by Chloe Zhao, who made Nomadland, which glorified the life of an educated woman living in a van, arguably the worst and most annoying movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Here, Zhao manages to reduce the story of a central event, one of the only documented events, in the life of the greatest dramatist of all time, to a kind of footnote to his wife’s prophecies and pain, wrapped in an Oscar-bait package. Shakespeare lovers will feel compelled to see this movie, but they will leave disappointed and frustrated.