Note: this film was watched as part of the 32nd annual Austin Film Festival.
Anything can wield importance. Gaze upon an empty room and you might simply see a place to house a bed and some books. Others might see the four walls housing their child’s first steps or fond memories of doing puzzles on a rainy afternoon. An old country song that’s trite to one listener is inextricably tied to a first kiss to another. For most, the 2009 Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway Blu-ray is just another title in the Big Lots discount DVD bin. When I look at it, I remember how it was one of the last movies I watched with my Uncle Doug before he passed away a few weeks later. I can still hear him singing along to those Rent tunes every time I see that piece of physical media.,
That’s the beauty of existence. Living day-to-day is a tortuous process filled with endless anguish. Yet amidst the turmoil is our love for certain people. Those bonds so strong that they don’t dissipate when loved ones leave this moral plain. They simply bubble over into objects, scents, environments, and countless other entities. Suddenly, reminders of our most treasured connections materialize in the most unexpected of places.
Writer/director Chloé Zhao’s latest cinematic triumph, Hamnet, unflinchingly chronicles corporal agony. It also beckons viewers to examine the world around them. Take in the natural world around you. Listen to a stage production’s dialogue a little more closely. Hold the hands of the ones you love. Whether it’s a hawk dancing across the sky, a woman many dismiss as “that witch in the woods”, or familiar lines in famous plays, anything can ressurect the past, even just for a fleeting second. Agony is everywhere. So are odes to the people that make life worth living.
Zhao’s works have always concerned lost souls searching for solace in Earthy tableaus following cataclysms (a father’s death, a rodeo accident, the 2008 recession). She and co-writer Maggie O’Farrell (the latter adapting her 2020 novel of the same name) keep that spirit alive in focusing Hamnet on Agnes (Jesse Buckley). She’s a young woman haunted by her mother’s death, unwilling to conform in society, and most at home in the wilderness. Others see Agnes as an oddball worthy of shunning. Not William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal).
He becomes infatuated with Agnes and it isn’t long before the two set off on a romance. Zhao and O’Farrell’s writing chronicles the two Shakespeare lovers in a naturalistic fashion echoing the realism of the former artist’s previous works. Their bond eventually produces a family, including their sole son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). Ordinary days of domestic existence are visually related in a similarly fly-on-the-wall fashion. Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal even echo Roma’s gently moving unblinking camera to capture recognizably routine early morning antics between Hamnet and his twin sister. Unimaginable agony can even strike such grounded surroundings and character dynamics.
These subdued and observational camerawork proclivities reflect Hamnet’s greatest strength. This is not Shakespeare in Love redux. Nor is it a music biopic where musicians stumble onto famous song titles in offhand remarks from secondary characters. Agnes and William are not written so that audiences spend the entire runtime pointing at the screen like DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This makes their realistic worlds so absorbing. Zhao and O’Farrell’s script secures audiences investment in these characters through traits specific to this film (like Agnes and her love for hawks or evocatively dreamy imagery) rather than relying on ceaseless namedrops to maintain your attention.
History will carve out these people as special. During day-to-day life, they’re fragmented human beings. Hamnet’s emphasis on this reality lets Zhao love for zeroing in on people society often overlooks shine. That gift is especially potent in her fully dimensional rendering of Agnes. In many history books or other Shakespeare biopics, she’s merely a footnote. Previously, this fiilmmaker percieved the rich lives in folks displaced by the 2008 recession or former rodeo stars. So too does Zhao unearth all the compelling material in Agnes Shakespeare.
Just the striking dissonance between Agnes’ default red dress and the muddy forest terrain keeps one absorbed. Further fascinating details about this woman, including her unflinching approach to death or complicated response to William’s constant absences, are realized with immense depth. Within a figure so many (including William’s own family members) dismiss as a loon is a world of anguish, yearning, compassion, and more. These details are made all the more transfixing in the hands of leading lady Jessie Buckley.
Like with the feature’s director, Hamnet lets Buckley build upon a glorious motif in her filmography. Starting with her richly human Wild Rose work portraying a Scottish aspiring country singer, Buckley’s made fleshed-out people out of souls that could’ve been either caricatures or faded into the background. Others might not see the depth in people like the wife of man hospitalized after unspeakable chaos in Chernobyl or a young woman clinging to toxic societal norms in Women Talking. Buckley uncovers those fascinating layers with such absorbing ease.
In Hamnet, she keeps viewers glued to her every move even in wide shots where Zhaos camerawork and Buckley’s performance vividly depict Agnes surrendering herself to the natural world. It’s also remarkable how this Lost Daughter veteran aces her character’s biggest and quietest moments with equal levels of success. The various birthing scenes in Hamnet, for instance, see this acter wailing in such realistically uncomfortable pain. These are moments as deeply externalized as they are exceedingly superb.
However, her softer, yet incredibly firm line deliveries are just as gripping. In hushed tones, Buckley communicates the unshakable convictions fueling Agnes.
Seemingly contradictory elements (haunting intimacy and commanding sorrows of lament) in Jessie Buckley’s masterful Hament turn are a thesis statement for the whole film. She encapsulates how this entire production fuses together conceptually inhospitable ingredients to create riveting cinema. Take, for instance, how the proceedings are at once dreamlike yet also communicate aching realism. The latter element materializes in sequences like William struggling to both write and convince himself he’s not just a doppelganger of his abusive father. The unblinking camerawork and raw dynamic between married souls in this scene echoes filmmakers like Kathleen Collins and John Cassevettes.
However, Hamnet also has heightened digressions (including recurring cuts to ominous holes in trees or on stage) that convey more surrealistic impulses. Zhao’s juggling of these opposing aesthetics is extra impressive since she excels within both modes. She’s just as excellent at capturing unflinching chronicling’s of domestic strife as she is exploring heightened visuals representing aspects of death. Just as crucial, though, is that embracing these elements makes Hamnet even more authentic to the process of grief and navigating life’s daily anguish.
We’re all in pain. We’re all reeling from unspeakable losses and trauma. Navigating and existing with all that psychological turmoil is a messy process. It involves as many tears as it does dark bursts of laughter and fits of rage. Zhao, Buckley, and other Hamnet artists embracing varied tempos throughout this movie perfectly crystallizes the intricacies of this process. Even focusing on the intimate corners of the world’s most famous playwright echoes the incongruous dichotomies underpinning day-to-day anguish.
Whether it’s embracing down-to-Earth realism or more surrealist digressions, Hament constantly displays a stunning level of craftsmanship. Żal, for instance, stunningly translates the precise visual impulses from previous works like Ida and The Zone of Interest to this feature. His vast nighttime interior images featuring such striking contrasts between flickering bursts of candlelight and overwhelming darkness are especially powerful.
His camerawork’s immense specificity (including when and where he opts for rare extended close-up images) is remarkable. The same is true for his and Zhao’s ability to make Hament’s various images feel so immediatey lived-in. Much like with Nomadland and The Rider, this period piece is comprised of shots reverbrating impactful wistfulness and bittersweet emotions. They echo Saoirse Ronan and Lucas Hedges romping through a garden in Lady Bird or how Emily St. James described Nickel Boys’ cinematography in using cinema to translate the idea of wandering through someone else’s memories of the past.
16th and 17th century European backdrops are comically far off from my everyday Dallas surroundings. Yet Żal and Zhao’s emotionally rich imagery conjured up the lump-in-throat inducing melancholy of wandering through memories of the past. Agnes’ affection for the natural world, her husband, her hawk companion, Hamnet and her other children, they all come through just in the reflective and poignany aura summoned by Hamnet’s outstanding visuals.
Similar expertise flows through Max Richter’s transportive and emotionally rich score. Tracks like “Of the undiscovered country” revibrate with fascinating collisions of haunting choirs and soaring string instruments. Once again, the jagged messiness of grief manifests in Hamnet’s intricate artistry. Even just the enthralling yet so quiet affectionate interactions between Agnes and William radiate confident artistry. Zhao wrings such effective and bittersweet poignancy out of the most subdued gestures or lines exchanged between the duo.
In these fleeting moments, they’re away from the judgmental world. In these fleeting moments, there is solace, however temporary.
We’re all in pain leaving us convinced nobody else can understand our anguish. Internal turmoil’s a universal ailment that’s also so isolating. It’s as true for you and me as it was for Agnes and William Shakespeare. Hamnet unflinching chronicles this reality to exceedingly moving effect. Once again, Chloé Zhao’s wrung immense pathos out of the tiniest details and aching yearning. All the world’s truly a stage, and the play we’re all performing is one rife with turmoil. Hamnet beautifully confronts that truth while also demonstrating the tender connections encased within that performance.
Hamnet takes center-stage in select theaters on November 26 and theaters everywhere on December 12.
