The Irish actors and Academy Award nominees are no strangers to melodramatic movies that play out like a Shakespearean tragedy, and it doesn’t get any realer than Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet – it will leave you breathless.
From Normal People to Aftersun, Paul Mescal has proved his sad boy acting chops time and time again. Last year’s Gladiator II gig was a career peak for the Hollywood heartthrob, a first glimpse at what mainstream success can offer. Jessie Buckley’s track record also holds up strong with a string of accolades thanks to stirring pictures like The Lost Daughter, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Women Talking. Much to the delight of many a cinephile, they’ve joined forces with the critically acclaimed Chloé Zhao, Best Director winner at the Oscars for Nomadland, on a new historical adaptation.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet is a fictional account of the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son in 1596. It had its world premiere at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival and went on to win the TIFF People’s Choice Award, and it’s understandable why it was rated as such. Perhaps its only worthy opponent for the coveted “best film of the year” title is the similarly melancholic and meditative Sentimental Value. Though it’s hard to compete with sentiments shared by the great Steven Spielberg, one of the film’s producers. Speaking at the film’s Gala premiere at the 69th BFI London Film Festival this past weekend, in a surprise appearance he expressed, “I really believe that when you see Hamnet, you’ll be able to feel the seismic heartbeat of the earth because of Chloé Zhao.”
Opening with idyllic expectations of the career climb from Latin tutor to iconic playwright, grass is greener on the other side, or so it seems, with Zhao’s lush Stratford world build. “The minute I sat in that pod in the middle of that tree, I knew I was about to get into a very, very deep river,” Buckley told the BFI. Cavernous terrain predicts a very dark turn when disaster strikes out of the blue, and life comes quickly crashing down on the Bard of Avon and his forest faithful Agnes following the unexpected loss of their only son. Leaving room to explore the awful intricacies of grief through the combating lenses of a damaged couple, all of a sudden, Elizabethan England has never looked greyer.
In climactic scenes, it’s a ghostly white Paul Mescal in cracked face paint performing the inspired Hamlet on the stage of his own Shakespeare’s Globe. Numb and vacant, he sobs backstage to fill a black expressionless void. Rather than the “academic”, the “genius” that is Shakespeare, Mescal’s calibration of the human condition of his character is sophisticated and well-drawn. On how he embodied such a role, Mescal admitted: “I read his plays over and over. I loved the script, I think the script gives us a totally different perspective of who this man might be.”
Jessie Buckley’s heartbreaking delivery as Agnes, particularly in the horrible aftermath of those last breaths of her little one, is especially deserving of recognition. It’s an excruciating yet extraordinary watch, conveyed in a multifaceted mixture of blank stares, primal screams, fits of rage and profound stillness. To match the weight of a mammoth role like William Shakespeare is no easy feat, and Buckley should be commended for showing up and showing out. Her chemistry with Mescal is electric despite sombre circumstances, together with impassioned presentations from brothers Jacobi and Noah Jupe in the respective roles of Hamnet and Hamlet. In short, Zhao’s latest venture boasts a meticulously put together ensemble that strengthens her reign as the queen of empathetic cinema.
Words – Douglas Jardim
