‘He loves me for what I am, not what I ought to be...’
The Academy loves films related to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture (an absolute travesty), Laurence Olivier’s iteration of Hamlet was the first British film to win Best Picture in 1948, and now we have Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet nominated for eight Oscars at this year’s ceremony. Maybe it’s because Americans believe that anything related to the Bard is worthy of prestige, but this film should absolutely not be in the running for Best Picture…
Hamnet charts the relationship between Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), from its charming beginning through to starting a family and eventually losing a son (the titular Hamnet). The thesis being that this event inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet, perhaps his most famous play. The problem with this is that the most striking thing that people don’t realise about Shakespeare is how little we actually know about him. We don’t know what he looked like (that portrait you always see of him might not be him), we don’t know his birthday or the day he died, we don’t even know for sure how to spell his name (the five surviving signatures of his name are all spelt differently). And so, any work of fiction depicting a significant event in Shakespeare’s life is just that – fiction. With this in mind, it’s up to the director and the cast to make us care about a story which is essentially fan fiction. This is a remit in which all parties emphatically fail.
To say this is a film about the death of a child, it’s surprisingly unaffecting. This is partly because Mescal is hideously miscast, and partly because the dialogue is pedestrian (criminal for a film about the greatest writer who ever lived), but whatever the reason, I never felt the grief that I was supposed to feel about this tragic event, despite all of Buckley’s wailing. That being said, her performance, along with the set design, costumes and cinematography, is what saves Hamnet from being a true turkey. She does the best with what she’s been given, but the material is so uninspiring that even she can’t fully elevate it.
Hamnet is a drab, joyless film with a preposterously overwrought ending that has somehow convinced both the Academy and a slew of critics that it has something interesting to say. It doesn’t. Don’t be fooled. This is bad filmmaking.
