‘Hamnet’ and the act of creation as communion

Jessie Buckley and Joe Alwyn in Hamnet Photo by Agata Grzybowska FOCUS FEATURES LLC The second time the girl with the falcon and the Latin tutor meet he s embarrassed The first time they met he mistook the girl Agnes Jessie Buckley for one of the serving girls and in quite a forward move kissed her before she ran off He has since learned that she s the eldest daughter of the family he s been working for and has come chagrined to apologize But he doesn t necessarily regret his actions just his mistake He s fascinated by Agnes In fact she renders him a bit dumb I find speaking to people sometimes laborious he tells her Agnes finds his inability to speak a little ironic and has no difficulty calling it out And it is a bit ironic given that the Latin tutor is William Shakespeare Paul Mescal Not yet known for the works that will make him the greater part famous playwright in history but a known intellectual and wordsmith around their small town no less As his stuttering dies down Will decides to tell Agnes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice He transforms then from an awkward boy to a man alive with the power of the poetry pouring out of him This will become a theme in Agnes more commonly known as Anne Hathaway and Will s relationship her emotions coming easy raw and unfiltered while he finds it necessary to process his through art Hamnet Chlo Zhao s adaptation of Maggie O Farrell s novel of the same name dramatizes that dynamic in connection with the death of the couple s -year-old son Hamnet Jacobi Jupe which in turn inspires perhaps Shakespeare s majority of famous play Hamlet The film begins with by telling us that those two names would have been interchangeable at the time While a bit clunky in its narrative setup Hamnet slowly nestles into your heart evolving into a beautifully considered meditation on art and legacy but not necessarily in the way you expect a movie that s at least in part about William Shakespeare to be Although Hamnet is unmistakably about grief it feels trite to pin its considerations down to just the process of dealing with unimaginable loss Instead Hamnet is also about the pain and delight of creation both in parenthood and art It s about two people in a constant dance with each other and the world reckoning with their pasts in an attempt to build something stronger together With Hamnet Zhao seems deeply invested in what the novel has to say about legacy Not from a grand perspective but rather how we reckon with what it is our parents have left us Agnes has a strong desire to stay connected to the physical world around her a trait she picked up from her late mother and a desire thoroughly divorced from that of her husband who falls into his imagination to escape his abusive overbearing father and even that isn t far enough away Her fingernails are dirty her hair a tangled mess She chooses to have her firstborn daughter Susanna Bodhi Rae Breathnach in the woods the wind wailing moaning and screaming with her These are all superficial markers of a woman connected to the natural world but for this character it s less about the forest itself and more about reaching for specific spiritual connection to the mother who loved the woods well and who left her too early The second time Agnes gives birth to her twins Hamnet and Judith Olivia Lynes she s forced to stay inside She wails for her mother for the relative ease of this process when she could feel her presence in the trees This second birthing scene also represents one of the core ideas of Hamnet which is creation as communion It might be a very singular thing to give birth or to write a play but the effect is communal Agnes mother-in-law Mary Emily Watson is firmly in the anti-Agnes camp when they first meet but it s here where an understanding completely blooms between the two women In Agnes pain and grief Mary comforts her by telling her that her husband was born in this very room Took his first breaths over by the window in the corner She is communicating to Agnes that she and her children belong here as much as they belong in the woods soothing a fear and creating a new safe haven in the process Will and Agnes are often creating together but even the things they ostensibly create separately he misses the birth of the twins his imagination forever taking him away to London and later she is unaware that he is writing a play that shares a name with their deceased son are forged with both of them in mind There s a reason the backdrop for Hamlet looks exactly like Agnes woods She is up there as much as he is When grief strikes though it s demanding to find that sense of togetherness again Zhao films a large number of of the scenes in Hamnet like a play a static camera that lets the actors move about the space The effect can be strangely alienating at times but when it works it captures the tragedy of change There is a particular shot of the twins room that repeats throughout the film the shot is the same but the context is different a simple way for Zhao to show us the sadness of a space despite its physical characteristics barely changing In that sadness it becomes painful to create It s agonizing to put so much of yourself into something dedicate your life to nurturing and protecting it and have it be gone in an instant There s a tension between Buckley and Mescal s performances throughout the film but their reactions to Hamnet s death draw out those stark differences Buckley is so free with her movements whether it be an upward quirk of her mouth or the guttural scream she releases upon the death of her son Mescal feels more self-conscious in a very male artistic sort of way He lets out a small That s my boy when he looks upon Hamnet s body the tears only fully coming when he s alone Agnes has no issue telling him how little she thinks of how he handles his grief She derides his decision to retreat back into that place in his head to go back to his stories instead of confronting this head on the way she is forced to There is an argument to be made that he s running away Even with the film s eventual end with Will confronting Hamnet s death through his work he still left a family behind to do so He retreated into himself leaving them to go it alone The movie never really contends with that damage rushing through Agnes hurt over finding out about the play whereas the novel wraps you up in her boiling rage And yet in his retreat Will finds another act of creation not to recover what he has lost but to share in that grief and bliss and wonder with his wife and the world in the way he knows how Hamlet thankfully does not represent a one-to-one of the tragedies of Hamnet So as the rest of the world feels the pain of a young man avenging his father feels Agnes and Will s pain siphoned through a different lens Agnes is able to certainly hear her husband s grief as best he can express it to see her son s desire to be one of his father s players borne out in the young actor at the show s helm Noah Jupe the real life brother of Jacobi Jupe It s just as it was in the beginning when she was able to hear Will s love and affection for her through the lens of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice Through Hamlet one of the aims of art is achieved Will Agnes and Hamnet s story becomes something universally understood but it is still theirs something forged out of their own pain and pasts and joys Shared but perfectly their own The post Hamnet and the act of creation as communion appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta