‘Hamnet’ review: Shakespeare film is moving but too cautious

I first heard it about 15 minutes into the film, when Agnes tells the village tutor whom she likes, and who’s crazy for her, that she can read landscapes on his hand. “You saw a landscape?” he asks with a smile. “Mm hmm,” she replies. Later on, the tutor tells Agnes, whom he's now married and has three children with, that he’s acquiring a house in Stratford for them. To this also she says, “Mm hmm.”

Hamnet wants Shakespeare as a hook to hang its tragic story on. It wants a few details of his life. It wants a smattering of the plays. But it wants nothing to do with the language. I don’t know if they said ‘mm hmm’ in 16th century England; for all I know they said ‘uh oh’ and ‘uh uh’. But it feels inadequate. It’s a strange impulse, to want to make a film about someone who changed the way people speak, yet have barely any of that speech coursing through it.

Hamnet is adapted by director Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell from the latter’s novel of the same name, which imagined William Shakespeare (not identified by name) and his wife, Agnes, devastated by the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Soon after, he begins to write Hamlet. The book’s alternating timelines have been made linear by Zhao; we proceed from courtship to blissful home life to tragedy to catharsis. More crucially, O’Farrell’s rich language has been sanded down into something functional and unintimidating to modern ears, a lot of okays and yeahs and constructions one might use today.

Perhaps Zhao felt that poetry would come in the way of tragedy. Hamnet is certainly an accomplished tearjerker. Even at its most stressed-out, it’s seamlessly done. Łukasz Żal’s stately camera finds Agnes (Jessie Buckley) among the roots of giant trees and Will (Paul Mescal) writing at his desk by candlelight. The soundtrack by Max Richter has limpid strings and ethereal soprano. Mescal has the challenge of playing Shakespeare away from his work; he gracefully cedes the film’s centre to Buckley, whose Agnes is both a force of nature and inseparable from it, forever rolling herbs and planting and dealing with adversities of temperature, water and air.

Like Zhao’s other films, Hamnet often drifts into reveries. It’s jerked out of these by a handful of extended, agonised scenes, like Agnes giving birth to twins (and one appearing to be stillborn), or when she’s desperately trying to save Hamnet with her herbs and remedies. These moment are a showcase for Buckley’s fierce interpretation of Agnes’ mental and physical agony—but that’s all they are. There’s nothing new in their imagining or staging; they’re expert but unremarkable.

At times, Hamnet seems to adopt the psychology and attitudes of modern relationships. Agnes argues with her brother about encouraging Will to pursue his playwrighting dreams in London; keeping him close will kill their relationship, she reasons. There’s a scene of communal healing at the end that’s so hungry for tears I found it appalling. The film is so caught up in note-perfect seriousness that it risks seeming unnatural. When Will tells his son he must return to London, 11-year-old Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) looks at him like a young Orson Welles and says, “I know, I understand.”

As Will becomes an established playwright, a bit of his work creeps into the film. His children recite the Witches’ Song, though Macbeth is some years in the future; I like the suggestion that Will has bits of good material just lying around, waiting for the right play. The river breaking its banks the night Agnes almost dies might suggest “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia”. His daughters read one of his sonnets with pride. We see rehearsals for Hamlet, followed by a weepy performance of ‘To be or not to be’ by Will himself, on pier alone at night, gazing at the sea and maybe thinking of ending his troubles.

The one sustained blast of Shakespeare is at the end, with the maiden performance of Hamlet. Agnes has never seen one of her husband’s plays. The death of their son has embittered her; she comes to London to bury Hamlet, not to praise its author. The sight of the actor playing Hamlet—Noah Jupe, Jacobi’s elder brother—with his golden curls and sword like her son, disconcerts her. Initially, she’s too agitated to notice what Will has done. But as the performance continues, it dawns on her how much of his grief her husband has transmuted into the writing.

It’s a magnificent scene, the kind of synthesis of poetry and conjecture and emotionality I was waiting for all through. Perhaps for the first time, Agnes realises that ‘the place in his head’ she’d accused Will of running off to wasn’t an escape but a refuge. Yet, at the very end, there’s a twin choice that dragged me back to doubt. As Hamlet dies in the play, he stretches out his hand. Instinctively, Agnes, who sees so much of her son in him, reaches out to comfort him. Had it stopped here, it would’ve been perfect. But then the audience members next to her also stretch their hands out. Then a whole section has their arms extended.

Zhao chooses this moment to play the Max Richter composition ‘On the Nature of Daylight’. This is a haunting, funereal piece—but extremely overused in film and TV, shorthand for a profound emotional breakthrough. It doesn’t help that its most famous use is in Arrival, a film about a mother grieving her dead child. To use this composition with this scene is, to my mind, a fatal excess of caution. Over a moment of ultimate catharsis, the film hovers like one of Agnes' falcons. Hamnet makes no great demands of the viewer. It doesn’t need you to take arms against a sea of troubles. It just wants to hold your hand.

‘Hamnet’ is in theatres.