Movie Review
Hamnet
Directed by Chloé Zhao
CHLOÉ ZHAO’S latest film — adapted by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell from O’Farrell’s well-regarded 2020 novel — is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask is: does it earn its tears, or are we overindulging?
Right off I start by saying I haven’t read O’Farrell’s book so I can’t approach the material that way — I can only go off on what’s visible on the big screen.
The film starts impressively enough — Zhao’s camera looking up into the sky or down a hole, both sky and ground crowded by giant beech, their roots furry with moss. We see a hawk swoop down to the glove of one Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), catching along its glide path the eye of a young man (Paul Mescal).
Attraction, connection, commitment: Agnes marries the man, is disowned by her family, is forced to move in with her newfound husband. Gives birth to a daughter, Susana (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). And at about this point more or less one notices an oddity: we hear the man referred to as “tutor,” “husband,” “son,” “father” but not by name, the reason for this being simple: this isn’t the man’s story.
Zhao’s film — and O’Farrell’s novel presumably — is a member of that subgenre of metafiction, where a well-known tale is retold not through the eyes of the protagonist but of a supporting character’s, in this case Agnes. Tom Stoppard did this as early as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, (about the eponymous pair and their adventures with a certain Danish prince) back in 1966; Gerardo de Leon pulled it off (with the help of Teodorico Santos) 15 years earlier than Stoppard with Sisa (the story of Noli Me Tangere through the eyes of its most memorable minor character). Sidenote: 32 years later Stoppard wrote a version of Romeo and Juliet where the author immortalizes his true love in a play; Mario O’Hara that same year remade Sisa with its equally real-life writer-hero immortalizing his true love in a novel. Might strictly be me but Stoppard seems to write fanfic in eerie parallel with Filipino filmmakers, was even at one point anticipated by a decade and a half.
I’m being silly of course. Stoppard retells a well-known play through the eyes of one of its minor characters; O’Farrell retells a well-known life through the eyes of the man’s wife. Stoppard is working with an established text (The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark), O’Farrell is filling in the gaps in a biography with guesswork and imagination.
Another noted difference: Stoppard’s play (I saw the 1990 adaptation directed by the author) is often funny, full of absurdist Beckettian humor (as befits two characters with little else to do); Hamnet offers few laughs, if any, and the dearth can be overwhelming. This is heavy drama, and gets heavier as it unfolds.
Paul Mescal has been dinged for being too pretty and I see the critics’ point: if O’Farrell’s purpose is to tell the story of Agnes and not of Agnes’ husband, or at least only enough of Agnes’ husband to establish that he’s emotionally distant or becomes emotionally distant when tragedy strikes, it doesn’t help to have an actor with melting Spaniel eyes, with a gaze so soulful he keeps you worshipping even when he’s a self-centered jerk. The smarter money would have been to cast someone less immediately eye-catching — this generation’s equivalent of Gary Oldman or Tim Roth (I don’t know that many young uns), able to alienate us then (if they or the filmmaker so chooses) eventually win our affections the hard way. A Humphrey Bogart, if you like, of contemporary indie cinema.
Critics also ding Jessie Buckley for being one-note and I say: phooey. The actor knows a good thing when she sees it and as far as she’s concerned, she’s going all the way, from playful coyness to hard births to desperate resuscitation attempts to primal screams loud enough to raise the dead. And it isn’t all acting with a capital “A”: Towards film’s end, when she finally attends a performance of her husband’s long-awaited handiwork, her expressions and mutterings — consistent with her tendency to mutter incantations during moments of stress or when she needs to focus — help us to a better understanding of what her husband hath wrought onstage.
O’Farrell notes that she based much of her novel’s emotions on her feelings when her child was sick — in this case of meningitis, a terrifying disease — and of her own experiences as a child suffering from encephalitis. If she presumably invests so much feeling in her novel, can Zhao do no less? Should Zhao hold back, make the scenes of sickness and suffering tasteful, maybe even artful? More phooey; any parent — me included — knows exactly what Agnes and through her O’Farrell are going through, and any husband or father will be just as dumbfounded when they realize that whatever terror or sadness or despair they’ve experienced is nothing, a mere foothill, to the volcanic upheavals a wife and mother will have undergone.
I already admitted to having failed to read O’Farrell’s book (I am currently committed to a really long read, likely take years to finish), and will admit to being a sorry nonexpert on Elizabethan drama (I’ve seen film adaptations if that helps). If more knowledgeable heads can hang the label “grief porn” on this film then so be it — but it’s well-made porn, I submit, nevertheless, and I’ll admit to having given in to its spell more than a few times.