Film Review: HAMNET, In Cinemas

There are many times you catch yourself, as a parent, doing things you never thought you would do - worse, that you would scoff at if reported by others. I recall looking at one, probably both, of my sons in their crib and becoming aware that I couldn’t see or hear them breathing. You walk away (“It’s nothing”), then you come back. You pause. You tell yourself again that it’s ridiculous. But then you check, and the world falls back into order.

That memory of atavistic fear came back as a wild-eyed Agnes first all but loses her daughter, Judith, to plague and then does lose her son, Hamnet. The agony on screen is prolonged, the misery wallowed in to the point where the dramatic gives way to the indulgent - but I’m sure I won’t be the only one giving a rare free pass, as I have looked, briefly, into that dark crevasse and once feared what lies out of sight and, usually, out of mind.

Having already won the Best Actress Award at the Critics' Choice Awards, it’s a scene that is likely to tip any balance (the bookies have already anointed her) that remains with regard to the Academy Award for which Jessie Buckley can start dusting off a spot on her mantlepiece now.

Her performance as Shakespeare’s wife (called Agnes rather than Anne), an atheist herbalist who communes with nature in the woods and sees human souls carried off by birds, impressed me more with its restraint than with its (expected and eye-catching) wailing and gnashing of teeth. Okay, she does spend most of the second hour of the film either in tears or about to be in tears (with Chloé Zhao’s camera often in tight close up for us to feel her pain, were we in any doubt) but many other actresses would have milked the agonies more and seen drama drowned by melodrama.

She does her best work early on with Paul Mescal’s reluctant teacher / reluctant glover (but soon to be celebrated playwright). We see the two outsiders instinctively fall in love and create an unconventional household in which the husband is often away from Stratford for prolonged periods in ‘That London’ en route to becoming one of the most famous Englishmen in history. When Hamnet dies, his father racing, with a large helping of historical licence, home on horseback thinking it was his daughter in danger, Agnes’s resentment at his absences turns into a deep bitterness, to be salved only by the transformative power of theatre.

Mescal is good, but he has little to do as, good father though he is when present, he becomes emotionally detached from his wife as his work subsumes all. Like much else in the film of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 book (which was also adapted for the stage by the RSC) it’s a little over-explained but, like the emoting, the exposition is mercifully only marginally intrusive. 

There is good work too in cameos from Emily Watson as Shakespeare’s mellowing mother and Joe Alwyn as Agnes’s understanding brother, but this is Buckley’s movie except…

The focus switches to London for the last twenty minutes, in which we see the first performance of Hamlet at The Globe. Buckley is not absent in person, as she is front and centre of the groundlings, eyes narrowing and widening as she sees that the pain of her son’s death was shared after all, the father pouring his grief into his quill then realising it on stage. It is an extraordinarily harsh call, but it is in hearing those speeches, in seeing King Hamlet’s ghost (played by Shakespeare the actor with Mescal fantastic), in witnessing the power of words, that we become aware of the relative shallowness of merely seeing grief’s external manifestation, the warp and weft of the previous scenes. 

Tears are not enough.  

Hamnet is on general release in cinemas from 9 January

Photo Credit: Focus Features