Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O’Farrell’s so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.
Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this. The humbler dimensions of her films The Rider and Nomadland are missed here; Hamnet too often gives off the effortful hum of prestige awards-bait.
But Zhao’s hallmark compassion and curiosity remains, qualities necessary to Hamnet, which could easily tilt into the realm of manipulative tearjerkers. Hamnet was, records tell us, Shakespeare’s son, who died at a young age and is thought to have inspired, at the very least, the title of Hamlet, the story of a young prince who meets a tragic end. What O’Farrell and now Zhao imagine is that the writing of Hamlet was an exercise in grieving, a way for Shakespeare to honor his son and bid him adieu.
It’s a persuasive idea, even if it takes some literary contortions to really buy into it. While Zhao sometimes strains to sell the notion – a scene in which a weeping Shakespeare stands on the banks of the Thames and speaks a snippet of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy is perhaps a bit over-egged – she has mostly convinced us by the end. Or, at least, Hamnet has justified the bold speculation, using a leapt-to conclusion to illuminate a fundamental aspect of living. Ultimately, what does it really matter if it actually happened this way?
Hamnet invents many other facets of Shakespeare’s history. It dreams up the courtship of young William (Paul Mescal), then a Latin tutor, and slightly older Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), an oddball loner about whom the villagers whisper in fearful tones. William is drawn to exactly that strangeness, the individuality that will come to inform so much of the family’s domestic routine. Zhao spends a fair amount of time on these early days, maybe too much. Some of it could be better spent on the years in which Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) occupied the house alongside his twin, Judith (Olivia Lynes), and their older sister, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). One longs to truly know Hamnet before he is so wrenchingly lost to the world, to feel the agony of his absence that much more acutely.
Whatever Zhao doesn’t supply, though, is mostly made up for by the richly felt performances of the film’s two leads. Mescal is able to be far more expressive than he’s been allowed in quieter films such as Aftersun and The History of Sound. It is a pleasure to see the full breadth of his range, from seductive to shattered. It’s Buckley, though, who wholly envelops the film, giving staggering breath and body to Hamnet’s portrait of loss. She is nothing short of a wonder. (She also recorded a new version of the audiobook and does a terrific job at that.) It is on her shoulders that the film’s knockout climax rests. As she rises to the task, it is as if she is no longer acting but instead channeling a whole history of human lamentation.
That may all sound rather grandiose. But the final five minutes of Hamnet really are that striking. So much much so that one can totally forgive the use of composer Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, already used to embody grief over a child so effectively in the film Arrival. In these final moments, Zhao finally makes clear the whole purpose of the film. It has not been merely to show us a prettily shot sad thing, as the film can too often seem. It has, it turns out, been building toward a grand meditation on art’s great capacity. We watch in awe as something so personal to Agnes and her husband becomes, in a transformative instant, universal. It is the power of creation made manifest, a private sorrow blossoming into one of the most enduring works of art the world has ever known.
This sublime finale does not completely absolve the film of all of its problems. There is still its lopsided storytelling, still the persistent feeling that this is all strong-arming us into doleful submission, still the ever so slightly cloying quality of Agnes’s woodsy mysticism. But that Zhao manages even a few minutes of such transcendent catharsis may tip Hamnet into greatness anyway. In that closing, as Agnes both reaches for and says goodbye to the son who slipped away, the tears flow naturally, they need no effortful wringing out. It proves a lovely experience, to sob in a movie theater alongside strangers, mourning for Agnes and William’s loss and for our own, amazed and relieved that a faraway, unknowable person has made something to connect us all.
