Hamnet

William Shakespeare, that indestructible cornerstone of English literature, is determinedly humanised in this intimately cathartic family drama about the impact of the death of his young son Hamnet upon him and his wife Agnes Hathaway. For devotees of his actual plays, the film also charts how he metabolised their grief into one of his greatest and, in this case, most eponymous works.

In migrating from twenty-first century America to sixteenth century England, Chloé Zhao has forsaken her preference for magic-hour twilight. Instead, the sun’s rays have to seep through overcast skies and penetrate the interior gloom of timber, wattle and daub, where it might illustrate strongly guarded emotions on the principals’ mostly backlit faces.

As this visual information is organised into long-ish takes and middle-distance compositions, we’re obliged to study the images closely to root out the drama of what’s happening. But sparsely, Zhao grants us a few close-ups that capture the actors’ exquisite self-control cracking open in moments of powerful enlightenment.

Some of the longer shots are broad enough to encompass the entire set, foreshadowing the actual stages where William’s professional life takes place. We don’t see those until deep into the third act, and while at first these tableaux contain the frustrations of his and Agnes’s lives as they defy parental wishes and struggle with their own spiritual and mental health, later London’s Globe Theatre becomes a space in which those frustrations might be more gainfully expressed.

Composer Max Richter uses the steady oscillations of limpid choral voices and plangent strings to establish a funereal mood, but their ascending scales are as full of grace as their descending scales are of mourning.

We’re privy to the very beginning of Agnes and William’s relationship as they conduct their lonesome meet-cute in an Edenic space of unspoilt forest, its countless little dimensions a network of refraction for Łukasz Żal’s clear, flat lenses to catch the light finding its way around twig and leaf. We should all be so lucky to court our true loves in such a darkly romantic environment, even as the pain of loss resonates in odd harmony with the hope of stronger human connection.

Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is a free spirit whose rebellions against the social strictures of her time and status are modest, but the gossip they inspire tells us what those strictures are, allowing her to focus her performance on the rolling waves of an inner life. Her earth-mother defiance makes an understandably attractive magnet for the affections of Paul Mescal’s awkward, aimless William.

Even her blood-red dress is an affront to the plainer costuming of her peers, and when her waters break she retreats to the spider-web roots of a great tree, as if her child might be discharged from the soil itself rather than her distended belly. Her crimson figure cuts a striking image as it writhes among all that green and brown, civilisation temporarily abandoned to the womb of nature.

But when that defiance curdles into the numbing rage of bereavement, Will’s artistic temperament and perpetual absence threatens to separate them forever. Their difficult but devoted marriage, seemingly rehearsed to the point of appearing as improvisation, has a vulnerability and sincerity to which Zhao’s reverent naturalistic direction is perfectly attuned. She understands that if this bit works, then the whole movie works.

Perhaps cruelly but completely necessarily, we’re also given time to get to know the titular son himself. Eleven-year-old Jacobi Jupe contains any tendencies to stage-school theatricality within a tight doublet of real-kid sensitivity. He’s a character and a human being, not merely the plot device he might have been in lesser hands, and his fate hits so much harder as a result of this essential narrative decision.

With good-natured deviousness, Hamnet draws in the crowds with the surefire, award-sniffing selling point of historical figures playing out a drama based on true events. But rather than rest on reliable commercial laurels, it spends time and effort reforging those figures into such real people, and making their bittersweet life experience so sympathetic, that frankly they could be any one of us.

The film articulates the emotion of grief in all its slings and arrows, with a dedicated and sometimes painful sense of reality. It reminds us that, while Shakespeare’s work may be immortal, in his life mortality lay all around him.

-Stew Mott-