Festival Review: Hamnet (dir. Chloe Zhao)
Plot in a nutshell
When Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) meet, it’s love at first sight. Against their families’ wishes, they marry and start a family. William, already a famous playwright, gets a contract to live and write in London and he does so at Agnes’ behest. But when tragedy strikes, grief rips them apart more than any distance ever could.
Whenever someone starts framing their thoughts on a movie in terms of how many Oscars it’s likely to be nominated for or win, I start to check out. Films like One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value and others have been getting “Oscar buzz”, but I will always find it weird to think of movies from filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson or Joachim Trier in the context of how much representation they’ll get at the Academy Awards, a.k.a. the highly politicized pageant show that’s essentially the most expensive popularity contest on the planet. It’s so clear to me that these movies just aren’t made with awards in mind.
The flipside to those kinds of movies is something like Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. Here is a film that eye-roll-inducing phrases like “Oscar buzz” and “Oscar bait” were made for. After the critical success of Nomadland (2020), another overrated slopfest posing as serious art, which won Best Picture and Best Director, Zhao completely lost her way in Hollywood’s Luna Park by directing the forgettable box-office Marvel turd Eternals (2021). Not something she is proud of, I’m sure. So now she’s back to where she feels more comfortable: directing emotionally engineered movies that pull at the heart strings like Quasimodo pulls on those Notre Dame bells.
That’s not to say that Hamnet is all that bad. Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and the young Jacobi Jupe who plays young Hamnet are all super committed and give great, expressive performances. My personal favorite of the three is Mescal, who apart from a few unnecessary scenes (did we really need that “to be or not to be” scene?) internalizes his sorrow and grief in ways that are truly moving. Buckley just unleashes in very melodramatic ways, and all those Gen Zers on Film Twitter who are screaming “queen’s going for that Oscar!” are not wrong. She is going for it and she’ll likely get it.
While no doubt beautifully shot and scored, Hamnet is just too heavy-handed for my tastes. And when I see my fellow critics lapping it up the way that they are, I can’t help but think it’s much ado about nothing much. Perhaps I’ve been too spoiled by three exceptional films that tackle grief in more sophisticated, subtle and profound ways - the aforementioned Sentimental Value, It Was Just An Accident and Train Dreams. Either way, since I’m not made of stone, I was of course stirred by the scenes that Zhao, her actors and composer Max Richter wanted me to feel with all my feelings. I was stirred, but not shaken.
It was really only the final scene that truly seemed to move the ground beneath my feet. Both Mescal and Buckley deliver their career-best work in these final moments, and as an English Lit major who has revered Shakespeare since high school, and someone who considers Hamlet the greatest piece of literature written in the English language, the final scene hits multiple right notes for me. It’s just a shame that the beauty of this final evocative scene renders everything that came before it even more ostentatious and contrived. But hey, Shakespeare in Love (1998) was also beloved by the critics when it came out and ended up making a big splash at the Oscars. How did that one hold up?