The literal-minded Hamnet abandons cultural outreach.
The best joke in the 1995 military service comedy Major Payne introduced a classroom of young, poorly educated recruits, one of whom identified Shakespeare’s Hamlet as “the play about a little pig.” The new quasi-British historical film Hamnet is hardly better. It deduces that Shakespeare’s most famous play resulted from the death of his only son, named Hamnet, who was in fact his mother’s most cherished child. The mother, Agnes (pronounced An-yehs), came from a rural Celtic tribe, supposedly born of a forest witch. But as portrayed by Jessie Buckley, she is Inspiration itself — the ultimate earth mother, and a headstrong wife, to whom the West’s greatest poet owes a debt. This revisionism is a major pain.
Hamnet is an Oscar-bait prestige picture aimed at Hollywood’s known prejudices, its period setting meant to convince viewers that all is good with a feminist bourgeois approach to the world — same as the ersatz Shakespeare in Love (1998).
By elaborating on Millennial feminist theory, Hamnet heroizes Agnes through Buckley’s firebrand temper, plain features, and ruddy complexion. She sleeps in the woods as if anticipating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and flies a hawk, which is how she meets young Latin tutor William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, mopey again), who is struck by her independence and craftiness. He’s literate, but she represents oral tradition, chanting her family creed against superstition: “You defy venom. You defy air illness. You defy the horror that stalks the land.”
They begin courtship reciting the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Underworld, but Agnes’s touch reveals Shakespeare’s destiny: “I saw undiscovered countries. . . . He’s got more inside of him than any man I’ve ever met.” Stalwart Agnes self-delivers their firstborn in the woods while he baptizes himself in a nearby pond — an attempt at visual folk poetry consistent with the film’s contemporary gender bias.
Director Chloé Zhao is a fully assimilated Western feminist. Buckley’s broad, likable smile mitigates the penchant to use her as feminist weapon (I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Men). But to then present Mother Agnes as the embodiment of the Great Audience, the first to fully appreciate Shakespeare’s greatness, is the flip side of feminist condescension. Zhao indulges English mysticism merely to tout Agnes as a prophetess. It is an accident of casting plus timing that Emily Watson gets only a small role as a midwife; though not Agnes, Watson is luminous. Her “We must never take for granted that our children live” scene conveys profound womanliness.
Nothing else Zhao does has comparable effect. Eerie scenes such as the one in which cherubic Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) trades his life for his twin sister’s and then wanders in the Underworld, or the bereaved parents tussle in a wide shot because Zhao can’t figure out where to best put the camera, fail to maximize the film’s conceit. Mescal’s improvising the “To be or not to be” speech during a suicide attempt against sounds of lapping waves and sad piano music is embarrassing, yet Shakespeare eventually conquers idiocy.
An earlier recitation of a sonnet by Shakespeare’s young daughters precedes Agnes’s witnessing the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre. Zhao doesn’t replicate the appreciation of English tradition that Olivier brought to the Globe scenes in Henry V (1945), so the switch from rural vernacular to London verse is puzzling (as in the diversity quota of black folks in the peanut gallery). Still, Hamlet’s exactitude is thrilling. When Mescal’s Bard performs as the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (Mescal wears an earring, his face caked with make-up like Bob Dylan’s in the Rolling Thunder Tour), the line “All that lives must die / Passing through nature to eternity” is simply too profound to destroy.
Playing the first Hamlet, a blond ingenue (Noah Jupe) provokes Agnes to exclaim, “He has swapped places with our son!” This pathetic idea that Shakespeare married an illiterate woman is inexcusable. Zhao’s cut to a mother who can’t grasp the line “It shows a will most incorrect to heaven” diminishes the movie but not the poetry.
Hamnet’s dumb conceit gives the lie to prestige-movie pretense (from impresario-producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes). Once Agnes gets it (Buckley laughs in hearty recognition) and reaches out to return the stage actor’s reach, the idea contradicts metaphorical interpretation, succumbing to the worst aspect of contemporary culture and poor education. This era can’t appreciate the famous Dietz Schwartz lyric about Hamlet: “Where a ghost and a prince meet / And everyone ends in mincemeat.”
Everything about Hamnet is condescending, just as everything is literalized in today’s movies because Hollywood has thoroughly abandoned outreach.