Hamnet was the only son of William Shakespeare, and he died at age 11, maybe of the plague, but that’s not certain. If you didn’t already know this, you’re likely to hear about it quite a bit more with the release of the new movie Hamnet, which adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s heavily lauded novel that tells the story of the boy’s death and his parents’ grief. And if you noticed that “Hamnet” sounds a whole lot like “Hamlet,” then you’re onto something.
I’ve not read O’Farrell’s novel, but I’ve gotten the feeling that its fans aren’t all that enchanted with this adaptation, so fair warning to those of you out there. The movie focuses heavily on Agnes, who many of us know as Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife and Hamnet’s mother. And we see how difficult it is for her to manage with a somewhat absent husband who’s often attending to his art, her fierce love for her three children, and her searing pain at the loss of her boy. The movie’s directed by Chloé Zhao, who’s an exceptionally talented filmmaker when she’s working with an improvisational style and nonprofessional actors, but who still hasn’t entirely found her way when she’s dealing with material that requires much more structure. And so the film fights with itself, especially in its first hour, as we see Zhao trying to reconcile her filmmaking instincts with what’s actually needed for this movie to succeed—we sometimes wonder why she’s put the camera where she has, and the actors, good as they are, don’t always feel as if they’re sure of what they’re supposed to be doing, or how big they’re supposed to be doing it.
But once we hit the second half of the film, I’m not sure any of those problems really matter because of the almost overwhelming emotion the movie produces. We see how Shakespeare may have taken Hamnet’s death and used it to create Hamlet, and how such extreme feelings can generate an intense emotional truth in art. Whatever the movie’s flaws, I sat with my mouth wide open during these scenes, barely able to move, and after the credits rolled, all I wanted to do was to hug my kids.
Hamnet is in theaters.
