Two kinds of grief in 'Hamnet'

  Hamnet, director Chloe Zhao's adaptation of a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, takes us into the Elizabethan world where Shakespeare began both his career and domestic life. Perhaps to clarify matters about the title, we're immediately informed that in Shakespeare's day, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. 

  By necessity, Zhao's grief-laden movie (more to come on that) must be regarded as speculative. As the author of 38 plays, four long narrative poems, 154 Sonnets, and some shorter poems, it's no wonder that the English language's most famous author didn't have time to keep a diary.

  Zhao (Nomadland) builds her story around the marriage between Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jesse Buckley). The pivotal event arrives when the couple's 11-year-old son, Hamnet, is struck down by the plague, shifting the story toward Agnes's inconsolable grief and simmering resentment. 

   Busy establishing his theater, William wasn't around when Hamnet passed.

   On screen, the independent-minded Agnes embraces nature and considers herself inseparable from it. A pet hawk rests on her gloved forearm when summoned to feed. She spends so much time with trees, she might as well be moss-covered. 

   Communing with nature aside and writing with a quill pen aside, William and Agnes had time to have three children, a daughter (Bodhi Rae Breathhach) and twins (Olivia Lynes and Jacob Jupe). 

   Mescal's performance has both cheery and doom-struck aspects, but Zhao focuses more on Agnes, who carries most of the burden of child-rearing. Preoccupied with running The Globe in London, William left Agnes in Stratford. She insisted he go off and fulfill his destiny as a writer, but later came to resent his absence.

   I guess it's a new take, Shakespeare as the workaholic dad and absentee father. 

    Zhao makes the most of the wooded mysteries around Stratford, Agnes's leafy domain. Make what you will of Zhao's fondness for turning dark holes into a motif. Ah, the deep void, the gaping yaw in which undiscovered countries can be found, as Agnes puts it, echoing the line Shakespeare gave to Hamlet. 

    Hamlet, you'll remember,  referred to death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."

   Throughout, we're primed to expect problems. When we first meet William, he's working as a Latin tutor to pay off the debt his irresponsible, glove-making father had accumulated. The looming marriage between William and Agnes isn't greeted favorably by either family. Agnes's brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) seems more sympathetic.

    So what is this movie trying to accomplish? 

    When Hamnet's death scene arrives, Zhao gives full vent to the agony of loss. Garments may be rend both on screen and off as Zhao contrasts two kinds of mourning: Agnes's, direct and visceral, and William's, expressed through writing, the arena in which he presumably could deal with it.

    Jupe's performance as a playful kid who's devoted to his twin sister augments the grief.

   In Zhao's finale, William takes on the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father in the first production of the play. Agnes becomes a vocally avid member of the audience, initially derisive but ultimately understanding that Will grasped the agonies poor Hamnet endured. Dying from the plague was a gruesome ordeal, reflected in the ghost's speech about being poisoned by his brother, Claudius, and recited by William during the movie's recreation of the performance of Hamlet on the Globe stage. 

    It's better written than anything in the movie.

    "The leprous distilment, whose effect

         Holds such an enmity with blood of man

         That swift as quicksilver it courses through

         The natural gates and alleys of the body,

         And with a sudden vigor it doth (posset)

         And curd, like eager droppings into milk

         The thin and wholesome blood."

     Did the death of Shakespeare's son really inspire Hamlet? Having seen a number of productions of Hamlet, I'm dubious. And it's impossible to watch Hamnet without constantly reminding ourselves of what Shakespeare was destined to become no matter how much Zhao grounds him in 16th century realities.

     That's a problem for any movie that brings Shakespeare into view; it must withstand suspicions that it is trying to gain prestige through association with greatness. Hamnet can't entirely dodge such doubts, but Zhao -- particularly in the movie's final scenes -- finds a startling immediacy in Buckley's unadorned grief, revealed finally without the embarrassment of artifice by an actress unafraid to walk out on a limb grown from unbearable pain.