Shakespeare Weeps, Zhao Howls

Tender and tough in equal measure, and virtually bursting with cathartic tears, Hamnet processes grief with Shakespearean eloquence. Chloé Zhao’s stirring drama beautifully translates Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 work of historical fiction, which speculates how the premature death of William Shakespeare’s son inspired the play Hamlet. Zhao has a way of evoking inner worlds through the tactility of her characters’ surroundings, and her latest film seems perfectly suited for her immersive style of plumbing emotional depths.

Hamnet ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Chloe Zhao
Written by: Chloe Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
Running time: 126 mins

Helping in no small measure are her formidable leads, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, whose intense commitment to their respective roles as Agnes and Will feel richly overwhelming, while occasionally being just the slightest bit overbearing. Expect forest howls, drunken midnight outbursts, hollow-eyed silence, and ear-piercing maternal anguish. Stoicism is not a color in their acting toolbox, while histrionics come in every shade.

Following the example of O’Farrell’s book, Zhao’s film explains that Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable spellings and pronunciations for the same name in the late 16^th century and early 17^th century. It also never identifies Shakespeare by his last name, only by Will; nor does it use the more familiar moniker for his wife, Anne Hathaway, preferring the name Agnes, which is how her father reportedly referred to her in his will.

So here they are just Will and Agnes, and the effect reframes the couple in a fresher and more humble context. In Hamnet, he is simply an over-educated Latin tutor and frustrated playwright, while she is the restless, forest-loving daughter of a sheep farmer. They fall quickly and awkwardly in love, the consecration of their attraction leading to an unexpected pregnancy that hastens their wedlock.

The scenes from their marriage start off rosy and joyous, though punctuated by Will’s resentment towards his abusive father John (David Wilmot), a fine glover but poor businessman whose debts he makes Will pay off with tutelage lessons. Agnes, wholly believing in her husband’s writing talents, sees how the country life is suffocating him, and — even as she’s pregnant once again—encourages him to leave them and go to London so he can better connect with the world. She knows the city will inspire him, and even proposes that, while there, he sell his dad’s gloves and expand the business.

But the separation causes its strain, as Agnes gives birth to twins — one of whom she almost loses in childbirth. Superstitious and touched with a gift for premonition, Agnes is rumored to be the child of a forest witch. But the reality is that her biological mother, who died in childbirth trying to deliver one of Agnes’s siblings, had a talent for medicinal herbs and a way of being in touch with nature that she passed down to Agnes.

“The women in my family see things that others don’t,” says Agnes, who fought in vain against her mother-in-law Mary (Emily Watson) to have her twins outside in the woods instead of at home in a bed. She also had a vision that, at her death, two of her children would be at her side. And now that she has three kids, Agnes is even more rattled that one will die prematurely. “What is given may be taken away at any time,” Mary tells her. Mary should know, having lost a few babies herself in an age when infant mortality was common and the air was ripe with pestilence.

Mortality hangs over Hamnet like a shroud, beginning with Will and Agnes’ courtship: he woos her with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and how she ends up trapped in the Underworld forever. When Agnes’ pet hawk passes away, she teaches her family a farewell ceremony that points to the bird’s afterlife. There is a palpable sense of a world beyond the veil, what Will later refers to in Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as the dread of something after death, “the undiscovered country.”

What Hamnet most illuminates is parental pain, that sustained sense of unease when it comes to loving and protecting your own children. Zhao threads that disquiet within Elizabethan life, especially within the pastoral realities of pitch-black evenings beaten back by candlelight, muddy walks and ever-dirty clothes, and the constant peril of seasonal shifts. “Autumn is coming and the children will fall ill,” says Agnes when Will suggests they come with him to London — it’s a fear borne partly out of genuine concern for city living and partly out of a settled sense that the country is a more controllable threat. (As if threats are actually controllable.)

After the couple endures the most devastating tragedy, worsened by their distance apart, Agnes hardens her heart to Will, while Will buries himself in work, using his writing as a way to bear the unbearable. And when that unexpected production called Hamlet unfolds at the Globe, with a slack-jawed Agnes witnessing her own pain filtered through the lens of a mourning Danish prince — and with Will on stage playing royal ghost to the bereaved son — suddenly the play’s multifaceted meanings take on even more dimensions. It’s both family therapy and grief counseling, writ large as universal experience.