Hamnet
After winning Oscars for Frances McDormand and herself by portraying contemporary America as “Nomadland,” director Chloé Zhao goes back 400 years to Elizabethan England to create her next masterpiece.
It's called “Hamnet.” It's excruciating and profound. You probably won't get through it dry eyed. It breaks your heart … then makes it soar.
Revolving around Jesse Buckley's force-of-nature performance, almost every name in the credits – beginning with executive producer Steven Spielberg – is an award nomination in the making.
Co-written by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's historical novel, “Hamnet” is a love story. Many love stories, actually.
The first is the fable of a Latin tutor named Will (Paul Mescal), who aspires to be a writer. He forgets all about the two boys he is teaching when he sees their older stepsister Agnes (Buckley) emerging from the woods, her falcon riding on her wrist.
Like the bird, Agnes seems a wild creature of the forest. Zhao, who displayed a singular talent for mining landscape for meaning in “Nomadland,” does even more powerful visual alchemy here.
Through her lens, the forest is enchanted, dangerous, alive with magic.
The son of a glove-maker who has no use for Will's uselessness around the shop, the young man brings a new falconer's glove to his next encounter with the forest nymph. Instead of accepting it, she bids him tell her a story. He tells her the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice.
That's a good story, she acknowledges. Meaning that despite the disapproval of their families, she will marry him.
They wed. Their children are the film's next love story, with Agnes a devoted, resourceful mother and Will a loving father before he heads off to London to improve the family fortunes and chase his dreams.
This chapter in their lives is cut tragically short by a devastating loss.
Which is as much of the plot as you'll get here. For those who don't connect the dots on their own, there's an Aha! reveal in the third act that changes everything that has come before, and everything to follow.
“Hamnet” is a work of poetry, with the visuals saying as much as the words in the script. Chloé Zhao is a cinematic architect, creating scenes for the audience to live in rather than merely watch on a screen. A bedroom loft illuminated by a shaft of sunlight through the window. The pace of life in a rural village. The teeming streets and alleys of London, where we join the throngs of commoners, and can almost smell the foul breath of the groundlings in its most famous theater.
Author O'Farrell told The New York Times, “I knew Chloé was never going to be a person to make a pristine, costume-y costume drama.” Their resulting collaboration is a combination of high art and gritty realism, like the best works of Elizabethan theater.
Buckley's performance spans the transcendent joys and the most unbearable pains of motherhood. Along with the endless giving. Mescal probes the downside of the creative process, the self-destruction of not being able to find the words for the fires burning in his mind. All the supporting players are pitch perfect, led by Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn and young Jacobi Jupe in the title role.
“Hamnet” illuminates family bonds on the deepest levels, and shows the forces that can mercilessly tear families apart. It is also a work of art about art, about the labor pains of creation, about bringing something original to life in the world.
Art is also – or at least can be on rare occasions – the path to immortality.
It's this realization that brings a smile to Agnes' face in the movie's final moments.
We smile with her, from a place deep in our souls.
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