Review: Hamnet — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Hamnet

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Stars: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell (based on her novel)

Director: Chloé Zhao

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

The world knows next to nothing about the private life of William Shakespeare. There are even those who insist he may never have existed, but that has never stopped writers and filmmakers from speculating about the backstory of the Bard.

Hamnet, a viscerally gritty, bravely understated account of the playwright’s early years, does those Shakespearean speculators one better by fleshing out the life and legend of a woman about whom even less is known: Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway.

It is Anne we meet first, rambling through the forests near Stratford-upon-Avon, communing with the flora and fauna — especially a friendly hawk, which, when summoned with a soft whistle, swoops from the heavens and perches on her forearm. Played with casual, dreamy-eyed abandon by Jessie Buckley (Oscar-nominated for The Lost Daughter), Anne greets the world with a crooked smile and a healthy cynicism.

I should mention that Anne, as history knows her, is here exclusively referred to as “Agnes,” which may or may not have been the name Shakespeare’s wife preferred. Co-writer/director Chloé Zhao, a double Oscar winner for Nomadland, chooses not only to use a more obscure name for her female protagonist, but also takes pains to refrain from having anyone refer to Agnes’s husband (Aftersun Oscar nominee Paul Mescal) as “Shakespeare,” or “William,” or even “Will” until fully three-quarters of the way through the movie.

Indeed, aside from the fact that the handsome young Latin teacher occasionally picks up a pen and dashes off little nothings like, “But soft; what light through yonder window breaks?,” there is scarcely a hint that we are in the company of what will prove to be one of literature’s all-time power couples. Even the movie’s title, Hamnet, while a direct reference to the couple’s only son, merely teases its inescapable connection to the playwright’s work.

And that, perhaps, is where the true genius of Hamnet lies: Strip away the names and literary context, and what you have is the universal story of a young couple who meet, fall in love, defy their parents, and raise some kids. Remaining at home when her husband must go work in the city (his precise occupation is left unmentioned for most of the film), she is left to suffer an unspeakable loss on her own. Guilt and acrimony nearly tear the two apart — until the healing nature of art brings not just reconciliation, but enduring solace.

Among film’s most visionary directors, for the film’s first half Zhao channels director Terrence Malick; her long, wordless, nature-evoking sequences calling to mind Malick’s what’s-your-hurry artistry in movies like Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life. The approach requires a bit of patience, but the payoff is more than worth it, especially when Agnes ventures to London in search not only for her husband, but also for a way to make sense of a world that seems incalculably cruel.

In the end, she and Will both discover — appropriately enough — that the play’s the thing.