Four years after a not terrible but also not entirely great surprise foray into the world of blockbusters with Marvel’s Eternals, Chloe Zhao is back with Hamnet, a film that feels like a much more natural step into the mainstream for the auteur behind The Rider and Nomadland. Here is a tale based on novel, but with a biopic’s awards heft, that will play very well in this year’s BAFTA/Oscar season while allowing Zhao to maintain her natural instincts of tactile landscapes and amazing performances from seasoned actors and newcomers alike. It’s still not the kind of perfect recipe that she found with her pre-Marvel films, an often bitty and uneven piece, but it’s held together with phenomenal acting from top to bottom.
Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell (who co-wrote the adaptation alongside Zhao), Hamnet revolves around Agnes (a fictionalised Anne Hathaway played by Jessie Buckley), her husband William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), their love for each other and their children, and their soul-crushing grief at the loss of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). It’s this grief that will lead Shakespeare to write Hamlet, Zhao and O’Farrell examining not just love and loss, but the ways in which we use art to share feelings that would prove overpowering if confronted directly.
First things first; the cast are incredible. Buckley is the Oscar frontrunner as it stands for Lead Actress and, while I would personally give that crown to Jennifer Lawrence for Die My Love, she would be a very worthy winner – Agnes’s grief is something truly primal, while her love for her family in happier times is just radiant. Mescal’s role is quieter, but he gets one truly remarkable moment in which you see Shakespeare lose a part of himself in real time when he realises his son is dead. The kids, too, from Jupe (younger brother of Noah, who himself appears as the Hamlet actor at the Globe) to the two Shakespeare daughters, are brilliant (a great showcase of Zhao’s talent in *finding* performances), and the scenes of the family just playing together before the tragedy have such a warm, lived-in texture.
It’s a texture that is also found in some great set design, costuming, and hair and make-up work, while the verdant and woody landscapes pop with colour. What is less convincing, though, is just how Hamnet is structured. At points it almost feels like a long, slow montage, taking its time without ever providing much depth – the cast give a hell of a lot more than what is on the page here, the writing itself only giving a limited sense of who these people really are.
Much has already been written about Hamnet’s finale, and how it will reduce you to tears. I do think this is a film with the power to make you cry multiple times, but this ending is less of a knockout than I had been led to believe, certainly affecting but also just a little bit silly, relying on the (sublime) music from Max Richter to elevate it. There is a great but inconsistent beauty to Hamnet, and its cast is close to faultless, enough to disguise a creaky foundation without fully overcoming it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 