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Parents and children became an unplanned viewing theme for me last week. It began on a light note with the 2009 college comedy Easy A, which I enjoyed most of all for the goofy, irreverent relationship between Emma Stone’s character and her parents, who often say outrageous things apropos of nothing. This gives their scenes an eccentric quality, guarding
against over-sentimentality, but also making it clear that this unconventional family is rock-solid and grounded when it comes to the important things. But then came a 180-degree shift to much grimmer terrain: Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (which releases here next week), an intense adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the death of an 11-year-old boy – the son of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway.
Films about parental grief aren’t easy to watch, even when (or especially when) they are brilliantly done. Last year I hosted an online discussion about this subject, and the many ways – determined by culture, personality, or filmmaking approach – in which it has been treated onscreen. For instance: the way in which the narrative of Manchester by the Sea (which I watched for the first time last year) moves imperceptibly between past and present, never signalling when a flashback is about to begin or end – thus indicating that the protagonist’s horrendous tragedy is always with him, paralysing everything, even as he puts up the surface appearance of being functional. That there are things you don’t get over.
There are distinct little moments, markers, epiphanies in each such story. Such as a scene in the series Trial by Fire where a mother, rendered uncommunicative after losing her children in the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire, rushes to another woman for solace because she thinks the latter’s child has also died; and her sense of shock, even betrayal, when she realises this wasn’t the case. Or a scene from In the Bedroom, where a woman who lost her sole child responds in a distracted, mechanical fashion when she hears about another woman who lost one of four children; it is almost as if she is thinking to herself “What could *she* know? It isn’t the same thing at all.”
But coming to Hamnet: there is much to admire in this stately-paced film, from the superb production design to the central performances by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. I was intrigued by the purported link between the real-life tragedy and Shakespeare’s most famous play. The link can seem tenuous (and has been criticised by scholars who dislike facile connections being made between life and art) but it is also resonant in a way, even if you don’t want to play connect-the-dots. Here is a depiction of a man (who has neglected his family) reaching out – the only way he knows, through his art – to a spouse in a moment of mutual grieving. (Of course, his wife, though illiterate herself, has performed her own, more potent “creative” act in giving birth – and the film underlines this with a visceral, prolonged childbirth scene.)
The film’s final passage involves an early staging of Hamlet in London, with Agnes and William finding different forms of catharsis. What we see here is that a father, haunted by a son’s ghost, has reversed the roles and written a drama about a son haunted by a father’s ghost. (While also playing the Ghost himself on stage, implying that he is both haunter and haunted.) In Hamlet the play, the dead don’t want to be forgotten by the living; in the real-life story (as presented here), the living don’t want to be “forgotten” by the dead. Which suggests a mystical, not fully knowable view of the after-life being as real as the world we know. I was reminded of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, a superb book where the liminal space, or bardo, where Lincoln’s little son finds himself after his death is just as real as the “real world” occupied by his grieving parents – and perhaps more alive and dynamic.
My Hamnet experience was oddly complemented by another Oscar-nominated period film, the gorgeously shot Train Dreams, in which a taciturn logger deals with filial bereavement. There is a big gap in the specifics: Hamnet is built on the conceit of a great playwright, destined to be remembered through the ages, writing one of the most celebrated literary works ever as a part-response to his tragedy; in Train Dreams, an “ordinary” man, leading an unremarkable life, not practising any sort of creative expression, grieves quietly alone and fades away when his time comes. But the anonymous logger’s story is no less potent or moving than that of the Shakespeare family, and as a viewer watching the two films together you may be fascinated by how they seem to converse – or parry like Hamlet and Laertes in the final act – offering contrasting perspectives on one of the profoundest human experiences. P.S. I also liked that some of the Hamlet lines used in Hamnet were slightly different from the ones we have in the “finished” version of the play. With some dialogues even shifted around a bit. A writer searching for the right order in which to set his words, like parents searching their way through the thickets of grief and catharsis...
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