Every year, in the time between when the Academy Award nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OUT FRONT Magazine movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. Can she make it through all 10 films again? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!
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I grew up being a weird Shakespeare nerd. Ever since I watched the Kenneth Branagh 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing, I found myself with an odd fascination around the Bard. In high school, I played Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve always found Shakespeare’s prose to be gorgeous and his stories are so compelling they get retold over and over again. These days, I consider Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing to be my favorite film adaptation of Shakespeare, although there’s a lot to be said for Akira Kurosawa’s two Shakespearian adaptations: Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear).
When I first heard about the film Hamnet, I was thrilled by the idea of it, and I even tried to get into an early screening of it at the 48th Denver Film Festival when I covered that last year, but, alas, the screening sold out quickly. So I’m glad I got the chance to review this film for my Road to the Oscars series this year.
In the film, we meet a young writer named William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) as he tutors some young boys in Latin to pay off his father’s debt to their family. As he does so, he meets the boys’ older sister, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and instantly falls in love. The pair, knowing their respective families would never approve of the match, get pregnant on purpose to force their families to allow them to marry, with Agnes giving birth to their first child Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). After the couple weds, they have a second pregnancy, which turns out to be twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). Years later, when the twins are about 11, Judith comes down with a severe illness, which Hamnet catches, and the boy dies, which drives a wedge between his two parents. But William turns his attention to a new play, called Hamlet (which the prologue lets us know was considered to be the same name as Hamnet at the time) and he and his wife find healing through his new play about fathers and sons.
An interesting device I noticed in the film is that it very rarely uses the name William Shakespeare anywhere in the film. I only noticed its use once, and it was very late in the film. Even the subtitles on the screener I watched just called him “Husband” instead of “William.” I felt like this was an interesting tactic to humanize Shakespeare and see him as a father and a husband first and foremost and a writer and historical figure second.
Still, as much as the film is ostensibly about William Shakespeare, this is a film about Agnes more than it is about William, and Buckley gives one of the most powerful performances of the year in the role. Buckley gives us 360 degrees of Agnes ranging from a young woman in love to a nurturing mother to a woman stricken by grief for her child. Particularly in the last scene, where Agnes sees the play that her husband wrote, Buckley’s performance is powerful and moving.
Overall, director Chloé Zhao does a great job of looking at the human side of historical figures. While much of this film is speculation (scholars are still unsure as to Hamnet’s true cause of death), it’s a beautiful fiction that’s based, in some ways, in reality and allows us to view a great man in a different light.
Remember last year’s Oscars when the Best Picture category forerunner kept changing from month to month until, by the time we got to the ceremony itself, it was hardly a foregone conclusion as to which film was going to win Best Picture? Sadly, that won’t be happening again, as Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is pretty much a lock for Best Picture with the Vegas odds* listing Hamnet as a very distant third in the Best Picture Race.
However, the one award that Hamnet seems poised to win is Best Actress for Jessie Buckley, and that’s great because it’s well deserved. Rose Byrne is the second likeliest in the Best Actress category according to Vegas odds, but that’s a very distant second and Buckley seems guaranteed the award this year.
Rating: 93/100
Hamnet is in theaters now and you can find local screenings here.
*I use the Vegas odds in my Road to the Oscars reviews to give us an idea of what the odds are of who will win what. I want to make it clear that betting on the Oscars is illegal in Colorado and OFM does not condone illegal gambling.
Photo courtesy of Instagram
