Now I love Hamlet, especially Derek Jacobi's Hamlet - but I like any version that plays up the humor in the "me thinks I see my father, Horatio" scene. After Hamlet says that line, Horatio says: "Where, my lord?" and looks around frantically because it so happens he just came directly from seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, and then Jacobi, as Hamlet with just the tiniest bit of impatience in his voice responds: "in my minds eye."
You can watch the whole thing for free here! But with commercials, alas.
But HamNET - oh dear god so freaking PORTENTOUS!
If there's one thing I hate about a play or movie, it's portentousness.
The "I see my father" bit comes at minute 20, not counting the accursed commercials. Here's what Jacobi looks like as he's saying "In my mind's eye."
Even in the middle of a capital-T tragedy, Shakespeare gets some humor in. Shakespeare was not portentous, which is why he is great, and Hamnet is not.
To my great relief I see I'm not the only one who feels that way. There are some great reviews out there, including ones that use the word "portentous." Let's enjoy.
Zhao conveys this exposition through tasteful images, an evocative if occasionally overdone score, and just a hint of the heavy emoting to come. In the first of the requisite agonized birth scenes, the director shows some restraint, as Agnes flees the oppressiveness of Will’s parental home to a favorite spot in the woods, a great tree with a dark opening where, as her crimson gown contrasts with the mossy green of the surroundings, she huddles to give birth. This image — the opening in a tree leading into blackness — will recur throughout the film, matched later by a doorway in the fake forest scenery at Will’s London theater that passes through illusion into the void.That subtlety gives way to hamminess, mawkishness, and absurdity, a shameless effort to exploit the universal experiences of frustration, rage at iniquity, and grief. Mescal starts it off, chewing the scenery as a drunken Will agonizes in a candle-lit attic attempting to write his masterpieces. Agnes sees his need to escape the tyranny of his father, the strictures of a growing family, and the oppressiveness of a future as a glovemaker. She orders him to go off to seek his fortune in London.Then it’s Buckley’s turn. Once again she gives birth, indulging in its agonies but with enough strength left over to endure a flashback to the death scene of her own mother. This time she gives birth to twins, but one, the girl, is stillborn! Everyone weeps! But no, Agnes coaxes her back to life! Tears of relief! But later, the plague strikes the 11-year-old bonded pair, first Judith, then Hamnet, who offers his life in return for hers to the specter of Death. He kicks the bucket entwined with his surviving sister — just before the errant father can rush home from touring with his company — giving Mescal the opportunity to indulge in the grief orgy with an added twist of guilt.These performances bring to mind Hamlet’s thespian advice to the players:
O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.
I suspect Hamlet would not have approved of the acting in Hamnet.
Amen.
Oh Jesus, there is so much screaming in this movie. I like the review by Adam Nayman in "The New Republic" because it gives a shout-out to the far superior movie "Shakespeare in Love" even if Nayman and Harold Bloom (ugh) are a little snobby about it:
Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”
Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.
Oh man, he is not kidding about the primal screams. Thankfully I did not see it in the theater and could turn my computer audio down whenever someone started screaming again.
Unlike Hamnet, I actually did tear up at the end of "Shakespeare in Love" because it packs an actual dramatic punch, in spite of its humor and charm. And it was at least as popular as Hamnet, demonstrating that you can please people and still make a good movie about Shakespeare.
Having sat through it twice, it’s clear to me that Hamnet is not a film made up of intelligent choices. From the epigraph – explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are functionally the same name – to the finale scored to Max Richter’s Volvo advert-friendly “On the Nature of Daylight,” Hamnet is a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain. It has been marketed as a film that burrows down to a primal, base feeling – an effective way of writing off its crude creative decisions. It dramatises Shakespeare and his wife’s response to their son’s sudden death from the plague, and it has one mission statement that it knows you cannot find fault with: the death of a child is a universal tragedy. If you take issue with Hamnet creatively then you are, of course, a cold-blooded cynic who doesn’t possess enough love in their heart.
Even better, the review explains why the movie is so far from anything to do with the works of William Shakespeare:
Hamnet’s wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare’s work appear to make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction. It would be easy, then, to consider Hamnet a work of fan fiction, but Zhao is – by her own admission – not a fan of Shakespeare. She has spoken about how, as a Chinese-born filmmaker, she wasn’t raised with Shakespeare as a cultural standard-bearer and that she relied on O’Farrell and Mescal to navigate the text. But the plot of Hamlet cannot, like tracing paper, be cleanly laid over the life of William Shakespeare. Hamlet himself is the vengeful, arrogant Prince of Denmark, not a frightened little boy. There is a specific reason why O’Farrell maintained minimal reference to the play in her novel and focused almost entirely on Agnes’s internal maelstrom of emotions. Hamnet doesn’t actually make sense if you know even the tiniest thing about Hamlet.
Thank you for that.
And here's Fiona Mountford in The I Paper:
Thus, Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s family life, the death of his eponymous young son and the staging of his – as well as the world’s – most famous play should have been a dream come true for a cinephile theatre critic like me. So keen were my friend Deb (a long-time admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel) and I to see the film that we went on the very first afternoon of its release last week. Reader, I hated it, and so did Deb, finding it unforgivably overwrought and portentous...
Exactly. Portentous!
The Globe was a famously rumbustious place, and yet in this film, a reverential silence cloaks the audience from the very first line (and let’s not forget that Hamlet’s unedited running time is more than four hours). They are, Zhao is at great pains to tell us, utterly bewitched by the magnificence of Shakespeare’s words; I confidently predict that theatre sceptics who watch this will have all their worst assumptions confirmed for ever more.
Agnes alone, of course, understands the real life rooting and connections behind the play, so I’d have been more than happy for Buckley to be visibly transfixed and to hold out her hand to the young actor playing Hamlet during his Act Five death scene. But the whole audience doing this? Come on. After four hours, a good percentage of them would have been less rapturous and more desperate for a pee. Idolising – embalming, even – theatre like this does no one any good.
Hamnet fails tragically, comically, pastorially and historically.
I feel about Hamnet fans the same as I feel about fans of "Love Actually" - they are so insensitive and unperceptive that they need to be bashed in the face with ham-fisted hysterics to feel anything.
