The scenes from the play “Hamlet” will make you cry in this latest film from Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), but there is a catch. The scenes don’t occur until more than 90 minutes into “Hamnet,” after a story that focuses on a free-spirited woman named Agnes. Her story becomes a romance, then a family drama, then a study of grief, all during which, somewhat coyly, the name “William Shakespeare” is never uttered. We only hear it after the movie moves from the fields and farmhouses of Stratford to the playhouse in London.
But it may well be necessary to sit through these lyrical, leisurely, sorrowful 90 minutes to experience Shakespeare’s words the way the director intends.
Agnes (Jessie Buckley) prefers to sleep in the forest – that’s how we first see her – and keeps a pet hawk (or maybe they’re just friends.) If she herself is an odd bird, she captivates a man (Paul Mescal) hired to tutor the young boys in her family, who spots her out the window of the classroom, ignoring the students who are reciting their Latin. Is this a subtle foreshadowing of the dynamic in their relationship? They marry against the wishes of both of their families, have a family of their own – three children, including the twins Judith and Hamnet; the children are primarily in Agnes’ care, after her husband starts taking trips to London for a career we understand to be in the theater. When Hamnet dies (as the real Hamnet did, at age 11) Agnes blames her husband for not being there.
Soon after the man (whom we eventually know as Will) meets Agnes, we see him writing (and mumbling aloud) the first snippet of the Romeo soliloquy in the balcony scene (“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks”) Shakespeare is said to have married his wife Anne Hathaway when he was 18 (and she 26), but he is believed to have written “Romeo and Juliet” at least a dozen years later. We also see his three children in dress-up playfully putting on the three witches scene for their parents in their backyard; it’s a wonderful scene. Again, Hamnet is said to have died in around 1596, a decade before his father wrote “Macbeth” You don’t need to be a Shakespearean scholar to realize early on that “Hamnet”, which is adapted by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell from O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, is speculative fiction (some of which is demonstrably inaccurate.)
The takeaway from “Hamnet,” though, is not the particulars of the plot, but the premise – that Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” as an outlet for his grief, and that it proved healing for his wife.
Whether or not his can withstand scholarly scrutiny, it’s what makes “Hamnet” – and the scenes from “Hamlet” – so devastating.
The last half hour is taken up with Agnes taking a trip with her brother and protector to London for what we are led to believe is the first time in her life. She is conflicted about whether she wants to see this play that her husband just wrote, which she’s outraged to learn takes the name of their dead son (We are told upfront in a screen title that “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” were seen as the same name in 16thcentury England.) She winds up going to the playhouse, but is resistant to the play at first; she complains about it loudly to her brother, which causes irritable theatergoers to shush her (apparently a common theatergoer practice from the get-go.) But she becomes mesmerized by the scenes (It doesn’t hurt that they are underscored by the exquisitely somber “On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter.) A range of emotions play out on her expressive face, and she is won over at last by the actor who portrays Hamlet. So are we. The actor is Noah Jupe, and, not coincidentally, he is in real life the older brother of the actor who portayed Hamnet, Jacobi Jupe – a quite brilliant piece of casting, and a payoff to which purists might call sentimental, but only after they’ve wiped away their tears.
