REVIEW. HAMNET: To Thine Own Kitsch Be True.

Jessie Buckley (L) and Paul Mescal (R) in Chloé Zhao's Hamnet.

To grieve or not to grieve. That is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in cinema to milk

The tears and sobs of the audience's heart

Or show restraint against box office competition.

Or, perhaps, take on a slew of other Oscar contenders

By drowning them in a sea of a thousand wet fantasies.

Alas, the conundrum Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao (for 2022's Nomadland) accepted when she signed on to make Hamnet, a movie based on the 2020 novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, which Zhao co-wrote with the author. Hamnet centers broadly on themes of loss and grief. Specifically, it speculates that William Shakespeare's Hamlet was his personal treatise about grief on the loss of his son Hamnet: The two names - Hamlet and Hamnet - are said to have been interchangeable at that time, though that theory is unclear, given the wide variations in spelling during the early Renaissance, including Shakespeare's own name.

How, then, to portray these real life "characters," given the numerous gaps in historical information about Shakespeare's personal life, and craft a coherent connection between the death of Shakespare's only son and the tragedy of the fictional Prince of Denmark. O'Farrell's book is widely known and even praised as a kind of allegory for healing. Hamnet was previously adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti as a play for the London stage (2023), with critics quickly labeling "tastefully crafted melodrama" - but melodrama, nonetheless.

Is Zhao's screen adaptation more than mere sentimentality, or something more? Critics have labelled Zhao's new movie as everything from "the best movie of the year" to "grief porn." One review read "Hamnet is Shakespeare for the TikTok Generation." Time Magazine proclaimed, "Hamnet Might Make You Cry, But That Doesn't Make It a Great Movie." Nonetheless, Zhao's movie is currently on the short list for multiple Oscar nominations, notably Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Jessie Buckley) and Best Supporting Actor (Paul Mescal). But those odds, like Wicked: For Good, may change once more reviews are published and box office receipts calculated. With both Critics' Choice and Golden Globe nominations out this week, though, Hamnet will ride the wave of Oscar-worth buzz, at least for now.

LA Times's film critic, Amy Nicholson called the movie a "soggy story about love and grief with enough tears to flood the river Thames." Now I love a good tear-jerker as much as anything. When I was a teenager, my mother was convinced I rated a film by how many tissues I used: the more tissues, the better I liked the movie. But I don't like being manipulated to cry. I can handle that emotion on my own just fine, thank you. My tears need to be earned, not coerced, and Hamnet unfolded in such a way that it seemed calculated in its grief manipulation. So, if you rate movies on how many tissues you exhaust, the Hamnet may be your movie, though I did not shed one tear. Not one.

There are more to great movies than mere emotion, especially when those feelings are shamelessly manuevered and exploited. I'm sure many reading this review will disagree. Though lushously photographed with each scene carefully framed, the supposed tie-in's between Shakespeare's real life and his plays were too easy, glib. After an early rendez-vous with Agnes (Jessie Buckley), we see Will (Paul Mescal) alone in his room formulating the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet: "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" he whispers. Seriously?

Later, after a tense conversation with Agnes about the death of their son Hamnet, one in which Agnes blames Will for not being there when their son took ill, Will returns to London to rehearse what will become Hamlet. As he watches the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene, he clearly associates his poetry with Agnes's grief. Then, frustrated by the actors' lack of intensity expressing emotion, Will heads to the river (Thames?). Standing on the edge, contemplating suicide, you can guess the next words Will will utter, the ones that will become the play's signature: "To be or not to be." 

At that point, I thought my husband, a Shakespearean scholar, was going to bolt out of the theater. That sort of simple-minded depiction of the creative process bothered me. Granted, inspiration comes to artists in various forms, but Will is often seen as a clumsy (if charming) oaf whose poetry emerges as a kind of elementary cause-effect, knee-jerk emotional reaction.

I kept thinking, what dreams may come from O'Farrell's exploration of a kind of forbidden passion (between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway) turned into unbearable loss and grief? Was it their defiance of the traditional social mores that led to their suffering? Was Anne/Agnes a witch, as suggested by the townsfolk, a sorceress who bewitched a young William (Anne Hathaway was almost a decade older than William)? Were their woodland trysts part of the natural order of things, or a metaphor for the power of nature over human desires?

Symbolism runs rampant here: Zhao uses the imagery of the forest, Agnes's pet hawk, and the nearby Avon River as euphemisms to convey notions about life and death, the natural order of things, personal freedom, and spiritual omens. None are subtle and, by movie's end, predictable.

Jessie Buckley's performance is undeniably ferocious, visceral, untethered but, ultimately,  unconvincing. Her Agnes, the central character and life force around which the plot revolves, first appears curled in the fetal position at the base of a large tree. The visual message is clear: Anne Hathaway's family came from the Arden Forest, which is also the setting for As You Like It. Agnes is an almost ephemeral sprite - part enchantress, part shrew - and Buckley milks the emotion for all it's worth. Talk about scenery chewing. She brings multiple interpretations to the sound of weeping.

At times, Buckley's feral cries became unbearable. She begins the movie with such a strong emotional pitch, there's almost no where else to go as the plot unfolds. Near the end of the film, when Agnes shows up at the premier of Hamlet, she cries out, "What does this have to do with my son?" I was beginning to ask the same thing myself. Buckley will undoubtedly receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, if critics' predictions prove correct and, if the winners were announced today, she'd probably win. We'll see where she is in March.

Paul Mescal as a young William Shakespeare doesn't fare as well, from this reviewer's perspective. Playing Will as a kind of inarticulate clod (I'm borrowing my husband's phrase), he seems clueless, almost childlike for most of the film, until we see a kind of epiphany near the end. If Zhao intended to show a kind of primal attraction between Will and Anne/Agnes, one that ended in unspeakable heartache, she left out the passion necessary to build to that conclusion. The early scenes of their courtship lacked chemistry and came off more awkward than lusty.

I like Mescal and the body of film work he's created these past few years (except maybe Gladiator II), but I didn't find his performance or his grief particularly compelling or memorable. I wasn't sure whether Zhao was trying to make Shakespeare hunkier and more appealing, or just dopey and unaware. He's being shopped in the Supporting Actor category, and he'll have tough competition from Adam Sandler in Jay Kelly, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro in One Battle After Another, Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value and (my favorite) Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein.

Maybe Buckley and Mescal, like Zhao, O’Farrell and everyone else involved in making this film, were trying too hard to convey grief from a woman's perspective. Though I get the feminist angle, it seemed as though Shakespeare as a character was sacrificed on the altar of human suffering. His major function appears to have been sperm donor to Agnes's maternal instincts. And, though there is little documented evidence about Shakespeare's personal life, I find it difficult to believe that 1) he was an immature, goofball writer, and 2) Hamlet was the direct result of his young son's tragic death. There are too many things that just don't add up here, including the time gap between Hamnet's reported death, the premier of Hamlet, and other plays (re: comedies) written in the interim.

Overall, Hamnet is luxuriously photographed, with each scene carefully framed through a sumptuous outdoor or claustrophobic indoor (with lots of sunlight-infused windows) lens, though sometimes the interior settings looked like they were stolen from a museum. You know, let's visit the medieval home and walk through the various rooms: here is the simple dining room table, the rugged bed frames, the stone pitchers, etc. Zhao has envisioned a beautiful movie, but I kept wondering if her focus on how the movie is styled sometimes overshadowed its subject, with more emphasis on how the shot looked than how emotions and ideas were conveyed.

Too, I kept thinking about other movies that explore grief and loss: Ordinary People,  Manchester By the Sea, A Single Man or Supernova. In each of these movies, the grief wasn't so much shown as felt, with the respective actors (Mary Tyler Moore, Casey Affleck, Colin Firth in the latter two) internalizing much of their pain, yet still inviting the audience into their heart quietly, powerfully. The character development was nuanced, personal and yet undeniably strong. And it was in that profound stillness that grief was expressed and shared. That kind of restrained hush was not the approach Zhao chose in Hamnet.

2020's Pieces of a Woman has similarly extended, uncomfortably grueling scenes of childbirth to those in Hamnet. Vanessa Kirby received a Best Actress nom for her brutal depiction of a woman who becomes emotionally isolated after the death of a child. Here, Buckley imbues Anges with a sense of primordial dread, a sense of foreboding that Hamnet's death confirms, while her conflicted relationship with Will remains in a kind of unresolved limbo. In between, there's lots of lamentation. 

I really wanted to love Hamnet, especially since I found Zhao's Oscar-winning Normadland elegantly minimalist and utterly moving. Unfortunately, there is little restraint here and Hamnet pretty much left me cold, wanting more in terms of emotional depth and complexity. Like Pieces of a Woman, Hamnet is overflowing with noise and an arguably gaudy and tasteless display of sorrow from everyone, especially Agnes: tears, cries of despair, wailing and moaning punctuate every scene. The rest is silence.

As I left the theater, I kept wondering....

To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream you could

Escape this sentimental Arden and and re-watch Shakespeare in Love. 

*******

Hamnet opened to mixed reviews (mostly positive) and to wide theatrical release this weekend. It is rated PG-13 for Renaissance romping, child-birthing pain, and a glimpse Shakespeare's tush.