Hamnet

Chloe Zhao, Paul Mescal, and Jessie Buckley

My reactions to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet find me in a sea of relativity. It is a fine literary adaptation, but fine can be a limiting adjective. It is a better film than Train Dreams, at least the characters in Hamnet have dirt under their fingernails, but Denis Johnson is a superior writer and storyteller compared to Maggie O'Farrell. Ms. O'Farrell collaborated with Ms. Zhao on the screenplay and it hews closely to the novel. The only thing that I especially missed was the opening chapter in which a ship docks in London and a rat escapes to gift Britain with the plague, but I can certainly understand why it was dropped. The film is well cast, it is refreshing to see a Anne Hathaway (here called Agnes, as in her father's will) who is actually older than her mate. Mescal is good with his readings, but I would have preferred more of a hint of rascality in his portrayal of the Bard of Avon. O'Farrell's book centers on Agnes, as does the film, and Jessie Buckley is up to the challenge. She is always capable and intelligent in her choices. What has earned her awards this time is that awards are given not to the best performance, but to the most performance. Buckley gets to howl at the moon in pain and grief twice in Hamnet, but I am a little dubious of the notion of trauma being alchemized into great art. 

Countering the calumnies visited upon her by Frank Harris and others, O'Farrell and Zhao turn Agnes into an Earth Mother Courage roaming the forest searching for wild herbs and roots with her pet hawk. Zhao is able to derive a chthonic pull from Agnes' journeys into the forest primeval. On the whole, though, this is Zhao's least distinctive film. Most of the flaws of this film stem from the book which suffers from the misperception that the Elizabethans were just like us. The concerns of Hamnet owe more to 2020. The technological and moral latitude of the Elizabethan age was a world apart from ours. If you want to get an idea of what is missing in Hamnet's portrait of this world, I'd two Elizabethan novels by Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun (in which Shakespeare is the protagonist) and A Dead Man in Deptford (in which Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist).