Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 largely fictional novel has been adapted by director Chloe Zhao and O’Farrell, with Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife, Agnes Hathaway. It concentrates on the impact of the tragic death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet on their relationship, which inspired Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
Hamnet is squarely in the awards shake up but for the first half of it, I was puzzled by the adulation it received. I found the story very sluggish and felt emotionally detached, even during the last moments of the boy’s life. I spent a lot of time trying to remember the name of the film about the bard’s last days from a few years ago, All is True. That was despite a superbly earthly performance by Buckley and a telling one by Emily Watson.
The depiction of Agnes as a witch like character, a lot of semi mystical mumbo jumbo and tons of shots of a tree and its exposed roots did not help. Neither did the stilted performances by the three actors playing William and Agnes’s kids. It feels mean to criticise them, but there have been some terrific child acting on screen recently, and they felt like they were fresh out of stage school.
But then, it completely changed for me for the last 45 minutes or so, when I became completely absorbed and moved. That was largely due to seeing parts of Hamlet performed, highlighting the astonishing prose. The power of art and how it can be used to process grief is examined, none more so than in the fantastic scene of Agnes seeing Hamlet in The Globe and finally realising how devastated her husband was by the loss of her child. It is not perfect in the later stages as there is an embarrassing scene of William reciting “To be or not to be” whilst contemplating whether to throw himself in The Thames, but I left feeling much better about this film than I did half way through.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10