In 2021, Chloé Zhao won Best Director and Best Picture for her film Nomadland, positioned as an awards movie months before the pandemic hit and all that most people ever saw was that still of star Frances McDormand winking at the camera. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was on Netflix and millions and millions of people “watched” the movie in the background as they did the laundry. Either way, in a year with no movies, the Oscar had to go to someone, and something, and even if no one remembers that surreal ceremony in the bus (or was it a train?) terminal in early-2021—it’s the following year’s SLAP that will go down as the Oscar moment of the decade, barring any furthers brawls at the Kodak Theater.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the juggernaut swallowing up all the precursor awards, and Anderson will undoubtedly win his first Oscars for the film, by far his worst; Timothée Chalamet, bouncing back quickly after last year’s abominable A Complete Unknown (and his deserved, necessary Best Actor loss), will likely win next year for Marty Supreme; and Hamnet, Zhao’s latest, will be nominated in multiple categories, but it’s only a lock on one category: Jessie Buckley for Best Actress. Maggie O’Farrell will get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, but that’s Anderson’s award, however far it strays from Thomas Pynchon’s far superior novel Vineland. I can’t say whether or not O’Farrell has successfully adapted her 2020 novel here—I haven’t read it. I read Hamlet in high school. That proved more than enough preparation for Zhao’s latest.
Hamnet begins with a quote from the novel, essentially that in early-17th century England, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable. The first shot has the camera looking up at the trees, lolling gently before gently tilting and panning down onto an overhead shot of Buckley lying in the dirt at the base of a trunk of a giant tree. All through its 126 minutes, she’s the alienated long-suffering wife of hard-working William Shakespeare, just another punter from Stratford-Upon-Avon; the in-laws aren’t into the marriage, and while their twins—a boy and a girl—survive a difficult childbirth, one of them is famously not long for this world. The girl gets sick first, whatever plague was going around at the time, and then the boy gets it and dies; trying to comfort his sister, he gets in bed with her and breathes in and out into her mouth. Cue Buckley’s howling, bone-bleached grief, and eventual salvation and, perhaps, catharsis through the work of art that her husband produces to survive his son’s death.
It goes without saying that O’Farrell’s character beats are entirely speculative and fictional—you knew this going in. Still, I didn’t expect such blinding anachronisms as Buckley, mid-argument, letting out an annoyed grunt, arms out 45 degrees. I don’t even think that was around during the 1920s. Further obstacles to suspension of disbelief: the cinematography by Łukasz Żal is a very bad digital, lenses wide open, higher frame rates, all cold, dead detail. Film will always look better than digital, but you can get by with the latter—with period pieces, it becomes much harder to make something not only real but pretty. The outdoor scenes in Hamnet look like screensavers, stock photos loaded into phones and beamed out over broken billboards and shuttered storefronts all day every day. It’s not as if Shakespeare lived on another planet, but shallow focus, some gauziness, and more saturation go a long way in evoking his time.
Buckley does what she’s supposed to do in this movie: be oppressed, get traumatized, experience grief, end on a note of mild optimism. Paul Mescal’s role as Shakespeare is mercifully small, while I was pleasantly surprised to see Emily Watson as Shakespeare’s mother. Hamnet ends with Buckley making her way through the crowd at the Globe Theater, stumbling into Hamlet during its initial run, heckling the stage like Regina Hall in Scary Movie. She reaches the lip of the stage, and at the end of the “To be or not to be” speech, the actor playing Hamlet puts his hand out, and the crowd, following Buckley, put their hands in his. It’s a powerful moment, but it reminded me of that video of hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea jumping up and down in sync singing along to “Gangnam Style.” It’s like a yawn or a sneeze: they’re contagious, you can induce them, but is it that impressive in and of itself in a film?
Hamnet is a dying breed, the solemn and overly self-serious drama made to win Oscars; although it’s uninspired, maudlin, and limited in just about every way, what did you expect from this movie? As cheap as Hamnet is, Zhao isn’t a bad filmmaker, and although the movie looks terrible because of the bad digital cinematography, it’s not poorly-composed or paced. It does what it’s supposed to do, and fortunately, in this case, people are rejecting that kind of exhausted New Yorker-approved film grammar and manners. Still, knowing full well what I was getting into, I wasn’t bored during Hamnet’s 126 minutes, unlike Eternity, which bored me silly the day before. Is Hamnet a movie you can sit and watch? Probably. But I’m going to need a little bit more than that.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith