The two stars are knockouts in Chloé Zhao’s poignant adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel with a stirring tearjerker ending
By Richard Lawson
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 remain, 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.