Don't be afraid to admit 'Hamnet' is terrible
Focus
It would be unfair to call “Hamnet” one-note, because it hits two: “shhhhh” and “AHHHHHHHHH!” This may look like sure-thing prestige — an acclaimed book adapted by the author (Maggie O’Farrell) and an Oscar-winning director (Chloe Zhao, “Nomadland”). In reality, this is a quiet movie with no subtlety, performances that seem to have been directed only by shouting the word ACTING! into their faces, and messages that extend no farther than “Child abuse is bad” and “Dead children are worse.” Making a movie about horrible things isn’t a free pass to do a horrible job with them.
Less “Shakespeare in Love” than “Shakespeare in Lust” and then “Wait, Where’s Shakespeare?” “Hamnet” introduces Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and Will (Paul Mescal) and before you can deliver the same story about Orpheus and Eurydice featured so beautifully in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” — wait, no, it’s soon after doing that, actually — she’s saying “He’s got more inside of him than any man I’ve ever met” based on almost nothing. (Or maybe she just hasn’t met very many dudes.) Oh, she’s also pregnant, and Zhao races through the pregnancy and then another pregnancy and then like THE FIRST 11 YEARS OF THE TWINS’ LIVES, even though Will’s gone most of the time and 16th-century England wasn’t exactly overloaded with amenities that made raising three kids as a solo parent super easy. There is no subtext and almost no text, with the events only seeking to exploit viewers’ fondness for the Bard as well as children’s pain and family members’ devastation after a loss.
There are ways to handle this with empathy and authenticity (“Train Dreams”) and there is “Hamnet,” which dials up every scream while overlooking the connections between the characters until even terrible events generate no feeling. Buckley and Mescal were extraordinary contributors to the beautiful, heartbreaking and complex “The Lost Daughter”; in “Hamnet” they are pushed toward hysterics, unredeemed by the magnitude of their characters’ experience. And even that comes off as a few bullet points in lives whose interior experience is set at great distance while amateur filmmaking and Max Richter’s laughable attempt at a haunting score fumble awkwardly in search of anything that sticks.
The appalling moments just never let up, from a painfully overdone monologue by Mary (Emily Watson) to a long sequence of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) in pain to shallow imagery that’s meant to be mystical. Never did I think I’d yell “Please don’t touch the actors” at a movie about putting on a play or that a film about supposedly creating art from agony would have so little sense of the person writing the material. We just don’t know anyone outside of their tragedies or their wails; priorities are overlooked in favor of empty showboating and awful dialogue like ”What should I do?” “Keep your heart open.” Barf.
D
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