Quick thoughts on Hamnet (and Hamlet)

Much to unpack after watching Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet last night (followed by some stimulating discussion today with friends on my film groups). Quick notes for now:

– I mostly loved the film. Very intense (which is sort of given with the subject matter, the death of the 11-year-old son of Will Shakespeare and Agnes/Anne Hathaway). This is a stately-paced work that takes its time and demands some patience: lots of still frames and elegant long-shots where a moment is held for a little longer than you might expect it to be in a regular narrative film. The art design was excellent, as was the cinematography (by Lukasz Zal, who also created many memorable static frames for The Zone of Interest).

– I get what a couple of friends mean when they felt Hamnet had a somewhat emotionally distant quality, given the great trauma at its core. But of course there can be many different ways of processing/dealing with even something as unthinkable and personal as the death of one’s child. And many different ways of treating it in art (also based on cultural norms or ways in which grieving is expressed in different societies).

Some of us had a thoughtful chat about the final portion of the film – the staging of Hamlet in London, with Agnes and William both finding different forms of catharsis – and if the purported link between the real-life tragedy and Shakespeare’s most famous play was convincingly made. I’m a little undecided (I also haven’t read the Maggie O’Farrell novel, which might elucidate some of this in ways that the film doesn’t). Initially I felt that the theatre scenes came close to making forced links between the play and Hamnet's death, only steering clear of this in the end – instead becoming a more abstract depiction of an artist-husband (who has neglected his family) finding his own way to reach out, the only way he knows, through his art, to a spouse in a moment of mutual grieving.

Later, after reading a comment by my friend Nikhil Kumar (who has read the novel), I felt that the link with Hamlet was subtle but solid enough. Put in very basic terms: a father haunted by a son’s ghost reverses the roles and writes 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 of course suggests a mystical/not fully knowable view of the after-life being as real a place 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.)

In this context I’m also thinking of Hamlet’s first soliloquy in the play - “Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother / Nor customary suits of solemn black / Nor windy suspiration of forced breath… That can denote me truly”, which - if directed by the actor to an audience member - might be read as a spectral son reaching out to a grieving parent from the great beyond. (Though it’s interesting that the film didn’t use most of this soliloquy - if I recall right they used a modification of the lines as they now exist.)

– I have been a big Jessie Buckley fan for years, she is terrific here, but given everything I had heard about her centrality to this film, I was a tad surprised that she had a diminished role in the final passages. Anyway, this is an obviously author-backed part, and she is the clear Oscar favourite, but I have liked her equally in some of her earlier work, e.g. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Men, Women Talking, The Lost Daughter, and even her small role in Chernobyl.

– I also liked the fact that some of the lines used in the staged performance of Hamlet were slightly different from the ones we have in the “finished”/current version of the play. With some dialogues even shifted around a bit. A nice reminder of how many drafts of these plays – as performed on stage – must have existed in WS’s time, with plenty of improvising until they got to the versions collected in the First Folio.
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. Felt like there was a link there…