Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
The
greatest play in the English language was born of father
and mother’s wrenching loss of their firstborn
son. That’s the premise of Maggie O’Farrell’s
historical novel “Hamnet,” now turned into
an intimate Chloé Zhao period piece about a child’s
death at a time when half the children born didn’t
make it past their fifth birthday.
It’s
about William Shakespeare’s home life, the earthy
older woman this would-be “scholar” fell
for and how they coped with a marriage neither family
wanted, with the perils of 16th century childbirth and
child rearing and the theatrical career demands of a
glove-maker’s son labeled “useless”
by his own father, but who’d become a playwright
celebrated the world over, a famous figure in life and
a towering one after his death.
Whatever
else this film accomplishes in reminding us that parents
are shattered with the loss of a child no matter what
era they lose him or her, “Hamnet,” the
little boy playing him (Jacobi Jupe) and Jessie Buckley’s
performance as his bereft mother and wife of “The
Bard of Avon” will break your heart.
Zhao,
bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals”
paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance
between a distracted young man of letters and a woman
so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows
the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations
that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the
“daughter of a witch.”
Young
Will (Paul Mescal) is Latin tutor to some higher-born
Stratford folk when he starts to notice the sister of
the landowner (Joe Alwyn) who wanders the woods and
fusses over her hawk.
Will
may catch hell for being “useless, tradeless”
and for putting on “airs” above his prospects
by his glover-father John (David Wilmot). But he catches
the wary eye of “Agnes” (as Mrs. Shakespeare,
Anne Hathaway, was sometimes called) after he puts himself
in her path — repeatedly — when he’s
supposed to be teaching her brother’s children.
He’s
not much on conversation, Shakespeare admits. “So
tell me a story,” she challenges him. And so he
does, that of Orpheus and Eurydice. He was instantly
smitten with the ethereal Agnes. Now she’s taken
with this rash lad who pretty much proposes on their
second meeting.
“I
must be hand-fastened to you. No one else will do.”
Her
brother isn’t inclined to endorse or interfere,
but his mother (Emily Watson) is thrown into a “She’s
bewitched you” fury. As Agnes is pregnant when
all this comes out, there’s nothing for it but
for Will to piece together work, write on his own time,
in the evenings by the fire, and impregnate his new
wife a second time.
But
Agnes knows he must go to London to find his destiny.
He will have to do it alone, as she fears the contagions
and risks of the city more than she fears him having
his head turned. Having Will around between theater
seasons, teaching and wardrobing his three children
to play “the wyrd (weird) sisters (witches)”
from his latest play, “Macbeth,” giving
stage combat lessons to his son Hamnet, will have to
do.
But
with plague about, his career will keep them apart at
the moment Agnes needs him most.
Zhao
keeps the focus of this fanciful spin on history domestic,
as the story is very much told from Agnes/Anne’s
point of view. Our heroine frets over omens, the dream
that she will have “two children” at her
bedside as she dies, struggles with her mother-in-law
and loneliness in her husband’s absence, with
raising their children her main focus but not the only
one as she keeps home and hearth together.
Buckley
makes Agnes flesh and blood and longing and fear and
superstition and anxiety a woman of her era with feelings
deeper those of the famously-deep female stage characters
her husband was writing and young men were typically
performing in drag on London stages.
Mescal
gives us a Shakespeare of obsessive drive and a poet’s
ear — snatching songs and phrases such as “the
undiscovered country” (death) from Agnes for a
soliloquy to come. This Will is callous enough to know
he must write while he has the commissions, and nothing
— not even tragedy — can dissuade him from
the notion that the show must go on.
And
young Master Jupe, playing the Orson Welles-at-10 cherub
Hamnet, whose name was interchangeable with Hamlet back
then the author (and director) assure us, will steal
your heart. He is sensitive and brave, theatrical and
noble. Jupe’s performance transcends the way the
character is written to make Hamnet such a cornerstone
of all their lives that it’s easy to believe his
loss would be both gutting and inspiring.
The
story’s third act yanks those final heartstrings
as a grieving mother wonders what manner of outrage
her distant husband has perpetrated on their loss by
writing “The Danish Play.” We see that play
anew, as Agnes might have, and Buckley makes us feel
the hurt that cuts more than the Shakespeare script
and the callow young player (Noah Jupe) bringing him
to the stage of the Globe for the first time show.
But
everything leading up to that — the curious courtship
to the trauma of childbirth, Will’s world of words
meeting Agnes’ mercurial feelings and folkways
— is what gives that finale its heart and soul.
And Buckley ensures that her character accumulates emotions,
grievances, worries and trauma and that we feel all
of it every time it matters.
It’s
a great, understated performance. And if you forget
to bring tissues with you to see her mourning her “Hamnet,”
that’s on you.
