Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures.

Author’s Note: ‘Hamnet’ opened last week in my area. Includes spoilers shown in movies trailers and in a 400-year-old play.

Sad to say but art has always been a product. Ever since the advent of the “professional artist,” art itself has been a commodity to be bought and sold. Even much of what history records as humanity’s greatest artistic achievements – the Sistine Chapel roof, Angkor Wat, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” that time Shia LaBeouf wore a paper bag reading “I am not famous anymore” – were done for or with a financial intention. The entire reason we remember these historic works of art are because they were successfully marketed as a product. In the same way that history has a natural tendency toward erasing bad art memory, there is an unimaginable number of amazing, mind-blowing, life-changing, history-altering works that no one has the chance to remember. Books of transcendent beauty that never found a publisher. Songs heard in the soul but never on record. Paintings or drawings buried among the belongings of someone who never had the support to become a “professional artist.” This fact has only become even more evident in the time of “content,” when the mediums that used to be art are pumped out faster and faster, made more disposable, and those who succeed are less interested in developing their craft than in building their brand image, social media marketing, and prompt writing.

This, in my opinion, has always been what separates an artist from an entertainer, or, to use the updated term, a content creator. That’s not to say that entertainment or even content can’t also be art, just look at the previous examples, but the vast majority of material, or content, created for “entertainment” is aimed toward commercial or financial gain rather than the sheer love or need of expression. To me, the real “artists” are the ones who do it even it isn’t their profession. It’s the ones who plan their days around their craft. Who use their skills and talent, as vast or limited as those may be, to create something that speaks to their experience of our shared existence. Who work through agony and frustration and love every second of it. They’re the ones who recognize that art isn’t the result but the effort of attaining that result.

To the rest of the world, art is a product. To the artist, art is a process.

Nature in ‘Hamnet’ is untamed and volatile, just like Agnes.
Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures.

As a piece of art, Hamnet is a beautifully filmed and powerfully acted tale of marital estrangement and processing grief. Far from the golden hour glorification of most modern historical dramas, nature in Hamnet is untouched and primal. Thick, twisting roots and lush, green growth make the woods outside of Stratford feel like exactly the type of place that would inspire Shakespeare’s elements of superstition and witchery. Much like the barrens of middle America in the Oscar-winning Nomadland and the globe and history spanning vistas of the over-hated Eternals (which I still contend is an excellent film when viewed as separate from the Marvel universe), director Chloe Zhao retains her talent for capturing the wonder and beauty of the natural world, particularly in the way it persists regardless of the uppity humans attempting to control it. The first act of Hamnet, where an adopted “daughter of the woods” meets a Latin tutor whose name we hear maybe twice but all know, makes it easy to understand why a world ruled by Christianity would find nature both wondrous and foreboding. Neither offer any sense of control, yet both the pious and the mystic believe certain practices will earn them favor. For the former there’s prayer, for the latter offerings and rituals. Much like Hamnet itself, the subtle conflict of civilization, as exemplified by Christianity, and mysticism, as exemplified by nature, presents two contrasting approaches toward the same goal. Whether through prayer or herbs, each seek to preserve life. So when death inevitably calls, both are shaken to their very core.

Like nature itself, Agnes (Jessie Buckley) is unrestrained. Buckley disappears so much into the role that by the end the actress seems as little in control of the performance – the artist in as much control of the art – as the character is of her emotions. She flows through the entire range from calm and distant to passionate and furious. She is as much a tempest and as she is a midsummer night’s dream. Rumored as a witch, Agnes uses her knowledge of naturopathy to accomplish things that prayer and Elizabethian-era medicine can’t, even reviving a deceased newborn and healing that same newborn as a preteen through a bout with the plague. It’s when Agnes’s talents fail her that Buckley unleashes her most second most powerful piece of acting, releasing a feral scream of anguish that seems to tear at the viewer’s soul before folding into the numb, lifeless despair of someone for whom hope is a distant memory. Her performance is one that doesn’t so much call attention to itself as form the entire film around itself, turning the focus from any narrative or thematic structure to the emotional journey of this singular character. Yet it’s also this intense focus on Agnes which causes Hamnet on a whole to under-deliver on its intended emotional experience.

The entire family doesn’t spend much time together in ‘Hamnet.’
Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures.

It isn’t a spoiler to say that Hamnet, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Maggie O’Ferrell’s 2020 novel by the same name, is a fictionalized retelling of the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A basic overview of the film tells us that the story takes place following the death of Agnes and Will’s son. The film then spends its first act focusing on the meeting of the two. The material itself is engaging, with the tension within both families contrasting with the magnetic connection of Agnes and Will. It’s also oddly comforting to see Shakespeare as a struggling writer, a failure at glove-making who frets over rough drafts and struts on stolen time. Paul Mescal plays Will with the quiet restrain needed to keep Buckley grounded. Their attraction, with its fits of furious passion followed by long periods of separation, love mixed with resentment, nicely typifies that which many artists feel toward their art. It’s not until the second act that we actually meet the titular character and begin what we all know will be the story of his demise.

No film about grief works without first establishing an emotional connection between the characters who grieve and those for whom they grieve. In Hamnet this connection is between Agnes and Will and their three children, eldest daughter Susanne and twins Judith and Hamnet. Judith, being a girl and the newborn Agnes restored to life, receives an exceptional amount of care and worry from their mother, while Hamnet, being a boy, is especially involved with their father. The pairings are primarily captured through brief, at times too precious, interactions: a play all three children put on that’s clearly the working draft of Hamlet’s Weird Sisters (a depiction it seems a “witch” like Agnes would find offensive), Agnes teaching Judith about herbs in a way that parallels Ophelia, and Will practicing stage combat with Hamnet and making the son promise to protect the rest of the family in the father’s absence. In fact, there are times when the film takes on elements of a musical bio-pic in the way it portrays the imagined inspiration of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, running through lines from Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, and, of course, the entire “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. The most effecting connection with the children is that of the twins themselves, introduced by failing to pretend at being each other. Thus when Hamnet dies toward the middle of the film, marking the actual start of the story, we’re less invested in Agnes and Will’s connection to their son than we are in Agnes’s singular journey. Of course, this could be a way of compounding Agnes’s pain, that she spent so much time worried about her daughter she neglected her son, but as a narrative this film about grief doesn’t spend much time in grief.

It’s a shame we don’t spend more time with the quality of child acting in ‘Hamnet.’
Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures.

Now, we need yet another movie about Shakespeare about as much as we need another movie about the Beatles (let alone four released on the same day). We already have Shakespeare in Love, another fictionalized story of the inspiration behind another of Shakespeare’s most known plays. Focusing on Agnes’s journey rightly shifts the scope from perhaps the most over exposed figure in literary history to one whose most known trait is sharing her real name with an Oscar-winning American actress. Yet, Hamnet’s entire raison d’etre is depicting how the death of Shakespeare’s son inspired him to write Hamlet. In waiting until halfway through its runtime to finally get the viewer to the point we knew walking in, the film places itself at an emotional deficit. Yes, we know Agnes’s history, we understand why she feels the way she does, but we don’t follow Will’s grief closely enough to make the connection between Hamnet and Hamlet. Instead, we’re offered selected scenes of Will screaming at actors, improvising his greatest hits, and the play’s debut, highlighted with moments Agnes interprets as particularly resonant. We don’t see how Hamnet informed Hamlet. We’re told it did.

Despite any doubt and distance, the final sequence of Hamnet is undeniably powerful. Speaking mostly in fragments and silence, Buckley’s journey from bewildered anger to transfixed awe to, finally, peace, is breathtaking. Combined with Zhao’s returning motifs and Shakespeare’s words, Hamnet creates the type of moment to which all of art aspires, one where time, place, and rationality slip away and we find ourselves wholly engulfed in this feat of creative expression. Personally, I’d question the humanity of anyone who isn’t moved by the moment. Yet, once that moment passes, and its grip upon us loosens, we’re left wondering what any of it means. Rather than showing us how the artistic process helped these parents with the loss of their son we receive a Cliff Notes version of Hamlet made poignant because of our connection to Agnes. We’re not shown art as a process. We’re given art as a product and watch Agnes heal through interpretation of her husband’s work.

The final sequence of ‘Hamnet’ is undeniably beautiful.
Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures.

Yet, beyond this particular (in my opinion) failing, Hamnet does speak to the fundamental truth that art is essential to human existence. The singer feels most alive when in song. The dancer finds their purpose in movement. The painter pours their vision on to canvas. The poet feels release in their words. The author lives a thousand lives in a thousand worlds while writing in only one. We express our happiness in hope of sharing and we pour out our pain in hope of healing together. Anyone who would skip that process, whether done through accident, ignorance, or intention, denies the very thing which gives art any value. No matter how successful the product may be, the art itself is worthless.

As demonstrated by Hamnet, we, as keepers of the present, must retain the notion of art as quintessentially human. Rather than focus on a mere product, we should build a renewed appreciation for the care, the effort, the agony, and the intention which created that product. And when none of those are there, we need to reject the result. While history has a tendency toward erasing bad art from memory, the present has the responsibility to decide what is remembered.

Rating: 3.5 / 5