A review of the new award-winning film “Hamnet”
We know so little about the life of the greatest English writer William Shakespeare, but that does not stop us wanting invented stories about him including earlier films “Shakespeare In Love” (1998) and “All Is True” (2018). What we do know is that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died aged 11 in 1596, that three years later the Bard wrote his most famous play “Hamlet”, and that – as this film tells us in its opening shot – in those days Hamnet and Hamlet were different pronunciations for the same name.
It is from that sparse knowledge that Maggie O’Farrell crafted her hugely successful 2020 novel, a book I’ve not read but one consumed with devotion by many of my women friends, including my partner with whom I saw this film. The novel is non-linear and structured around interior thoughts, whereas the film is linear and necessarily visual, but the essence of the book is maintained in the film by O’Farrell being both co-produced and co-scriptwriter.
For such a quintessentially English story, it’s striking that, as well as Farrell, the lead actors – Paul Mescal as William and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes – are Irish, while the director is Chinese, Chloe Zhang who won an Oscar for “Nomadland”. But the film is a triumph and Buckley is simply outstanding in this heart-wrenching tale of grief. This is an England both bucolic and bubonic, when life was precarious, but theatres like the Globe staged stories that would live for ever.