Do Oscar voters covet a good cry? At a moment when movies struggle to capture serious awards attention, Hamnet is being lauded by critics for its emotional clout, yet also critiqued for its limited focus.
Chloé Zhao’s movie, impeccably co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, represents a soul-searching challenge to more raucous award rivals like One Battle After Another, the present critical favorite.
Having won a shelf full of Oscars in 2021 for her disciplined, almost austere movie Nomadland, Zhao turned to a popular novel by Maggie O’Farrell for a glimpse of Renaissance England — one that is at once bursting with cultural rebirth and haunted by the Black Death.
The Shakespeare family in Hamnet consists of young Latin tutor Will (played by Paul Mescal), and his vivacious wife, Agnes (a superb Jessie Buckley). She covets her pastoral life with her 11-year-old son, Hamnet, and two daughters, but seems confounded by the scattered, stumbling genius of her young husband.
Will seems to be perpetually scribbling one play after another by candlelight, then drifting off to London to pitch his shows to an emerging disarray of theatrical producers — aspiring manipulators who have money and titles as well as risky political entanglements.
Filmgoers might wish that Zhao, in addition to reading Hamnet the novel, also had a chance to study a book titled Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt, which delivers a riveting account of a chaotic society mis-ruled by Elizabeth I and torn by atheism, atomism and a potential resurgence of Catholicism.
Its suffocating Puritanic culture is suddenly rocked by an exhilarating theater movement fostering the likes of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, but also by an underground of intrigue and dissent that’s hatching schemes to blow up Parliament and extinguish royal rule.
Even as the Black Plague looms, a mix of spies and enforcers are tracking heretics like Will’s brilliant friend and occasional collaborator Christopher Marlowe, who defiantly propounds (and) practices “gender fluidity.”
While Will is feverishly negotiating with a powerful vicar who wants to censor Love’s Labor’s Lost, he is devastated by the 1596 loss of his son to the plague. Later, his brilliant play Hamlet reaches the stage even as his always-embattled friend, Marlowe, is mysteriously murdered, the motives never revealed.
‘Hamnet’
Focus Features / courtesy Everett Collection
Amidst these cross-currents, Agnes’ grief lends emotional power to the film, which, to some critics, drifts toward emotional overload — a problem exacerbated by the filmmaker’s dependence on a score featuring songs like “On the Nature of Daylight” previously used in other films (Arrival, 2016).
Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning depiction of Renaissance chaos (The Swerve, in 2011) lends intrigue and intellectual context to the Shakespeares’ emotional ordeal — becoming an extraordinary subtext to the Hamlet play.
Zhao’s unique aesthetic contributes its own impact to the powerful film, one that will doubtlessly be richly awarded during the coming weeks of awards season.