Hamnet: Get Thee to the Theater
Zhao, Buckley, Mescal, Watson and Noah Jupe Give Us Passion, Love, Birth, Death, Loss and Healing
It came and went from theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area with great reviews and passionate fandom from some, but it wasn’t in the movie houses for long. Then came award seasons, and the brilliant beauty of Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes Shakespeare, Will’s wife, started running away with everything. It was backed up with an underrated and spectacular performance by Paul Mescal—a quiet wonder of acting prowess of subtle power from Emily Watson—a solid, heartful performance of excerpts from Hamlet from a maturing Noah Jupe—and a quietly overpowering performance as Bartholomew, Agnes’s trusted brother, by Joe Alwyn.
Underlying it all like a foundation laid by angels is the direction of Chloé Zhao, whose ringing perception is evident in every frame. The cinematography, especially in the forest scenes, is ravishing.
It is a mesmerism that begins with the splendid script co-written by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, from O’Farrell’s 2021 book, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and a NY Times Best Seller. Yes, it’s fiction, and those of us who believe Shakespeare was probably the 17th Earl of Oxford—or a group, involving Ben Johnson, which closed down when its woman writer died—but it’s brilliant fiction, especially in how O’Farrell draws the character Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife.
Like her mother before her, Agnes is an Earth woman, a magic woman, a healer, a psychic, a passionate lover, a warm mother, a kind friend. Her closest compatriot is her brother, and they love each other deeply. Her compassion for Shakespeare, an abused son and an sometimes tormented genius, is boundless.
O’Farrell and Zhao do not spare the audience the profound terrors of women’s lives: the scenes of childbirth in this film are riveting and gripping for their absolutely fair rendering of how hard giving birth really is. Agnes does things that seem inexplicable, like leaving the house to give birth, and then we find out she just doesn’t want to have a child in the house where her mother died in labor.
We are also not spared from the horrors of Bubonic Plague, which tormented Europe for 400 years, “flowering” roughly every 10 years—that forty sieges of this disease—and what a terrible way to die it was. The plague claims Hamnet, and Will is off in London writing plays when it happens. His absence cleaves a wide chasm between himself and Agnes, one that seems impossible to heal.
In London, Will writes Hamlet, and Agnes is encouraged to go. Her brother Bartholomew delivers the terse line that becomes the movie’s lede line: “Leave your heart open.”
And so it is that Agnes travels to London to see the play that bears an analogem of her lost son’s name. Hamlet is played by the former child actor Noah Jupe, who is maturing into an adult actor of tremendous talent and craft. And it is here that we find healing. How beautiful that healing is, is something rarely found in any work of film or literature.
Now nominated for eight Academy Awards, Hamnet it is back in metropolitan theaters, and I hope you will see it in the theater for the full effect of the ravishing cinematography and its brilliant performances by Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emma Watson, Joe Alwyn, Noah Jupe and a host of brilliant children, including Jupe younger brother Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet. Jessie Buckley is odds-on favorite to win Best Actress, and I hope Zhao wins Best Director. The touch Zhao has is soft and as weightless as light.
So, get thee to the theater … In these extremely hard times, we could all use a little healing, and this movie delivers it. Art helps heal even life’s worst of wounds.
Planning to see it this week!