“Hamnet,” the latest film from Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao, is filled with heart-wrenching scenes, some of them quiet and ponderous, some so loud and painful you wish they would stop, but none of them are as powerful as one beautifully fleeting moment involving a hawk and wishes blown into the sky.
Even thinking of it now makes my eyes water, and I’m not a crier, rarely in real life and even less often at the movies.
The scene comes in the final hour of the film, when a soon-to-be-famous father is rushing from London to see his wife and children in the British countryside. He knows one of his children is sick. But, this being the era of the Black Plague, before electricity and telegram, he doesn’t know the details, only that he must return immediately. And so he does, riding fast and furious across a pastoral field before looking to the sky, where the tiny dot of a hawk is briefly silhouetted against ominous gray.
I won’t ruin your experience of the scene, except to say that it ends nearly before it begins, and it sticks with you until the closing credits not because it is big, but because it is so small.
This is a film of grand gestures and timeless stories, of vibrant forests and bleak homes, of a canonical author whose work keeps giving us new ways of interpreting life as we know it.
“Hamnet” is of course inspired by “Hamlet,” the tragedy of “To be or not to be,” and maybe the Bard’s most emo tale of death, fate and regret. A blip of text tells us those two names were interchangeable in Shakespeare’s time. Is the text necessary? Not really, but like much of what you see over the next two hours it reminds us that “Hamnet” is bigger than what we are seeing on screen. This is Shakespeare, after all, and when we think of Shakespeare, we assume Big Things. It’s like making dinner with knives by Jiro Ono and pans by Wolfgang Puck. Does that make my midweek stir fry any better?
The film begins with a young woman, Agnes, curled up like a fetus at the base of a giant, gnarled tree. Behind her, framed by roots and rich soil, is a deep, black hole. She blinks awake and emerges from the womb to follow her falcon and, reluctantly, returns to her adopted mother at a farmhouse they share with her older brother. Their biological mother, we learn, died when they were young. Death pervades this film, just like “Hamlet.”
The imagery in that opening scene is on the nose, but Zhao shoots it confidently and carefully, with lush colors and loving close-ups of Agnes, played by Irish singer-turned-actor Jessie Buckley. Within five minutes we know whose story this is.
Or, we think we do. Because you know Shakespeare must appear at some point. And soon he does, although he is never called by last name, and only by first name in the final few scenes. But we know. Of course we do.
Young Will is a tutor for Agnes’ step siblings, which gives him time to meet her secretly while the younger children recite Latin. Agnes biological brother doesn’t understand what she sees in him.
“Why marry a pasty-faced scholar?” he asks. “What us is he?” To which she responds, “He loves me for what I am, not what I ought to be.” To which the brother responds with a shrug and a blessing. Their relationship is tiny but mighty, like all the best parts of this film.
What follows is the first half of a young, vibrant love story, maybe no different today than in the 16th Century, complete with a disappointed father, a disapproving mother – she calls Agnes the daughter of a forest witch – and two young lovers who could give a damn what anyone thinks, as long as they have each other. This story is theirs, not hers or his, and it is refreshing. They are people, not their private parts.
Then, the children arrive. First a girl, and then fraternal twins. Agnes raises them to appreciate the dirt beneath the fingernails and the smell of herbs, ground to paste in their palms as a remedy for anything that might ail them. Their father raises them to appreciate poetry, as when the eldest daughter recites Sonnet 12 to her sister. It’s no mistake that this sonnet is steeped in natural and parental imagery. Like “Hamlet,” it knows of death but revels in life. It’s a lesson Agnes teaches her three children when her pet falcon dies, and we see how her husband, the Bard, learns more about life by simply watching his wife.
Hamlet, both the prince and the play, makes an appearance when Agnes goes to London. We join her as she sees Will for the first time in his other life, at the theater, where he is a perfectionist in rehearsal and a ghost on the stage. We join Agnes as she watches from the floor with the peasants and paupers. We wouldn’t want to be in the balcony with the patrons anyway, not when “Hamlet” delivers his most famous lines, and especially not when Agnes herself becomes a part of the play. There is catharsis there, the kind of release Agnes can only feel by doing what she has always done, by being there, on her knees, in the dirt, present and alive and living.
Would “Hamnet” work as a love story without Shakespeare? Maybe, but I’m thinking not. It can be slow and ponderous. It can also be unrelentingly bleak. Like a name-brand knife, this story works in part because it relies on familiarity. I’m almost certain that is why the 2020 book of the same name was a best-seller, and I’m positive Zhao’s film will win at least one of its eight Oscar nominations. She is a confident director, effortless with her imagery and her actors. She won with 2020’s “Nomadland” the very first time she was nominated. “Hamnet” will not be her last.