Is there anything new to be done with the Bard? We've already seen Shakespeare in Love and Shakespeare in his dotage (2018's Branagh-driven All is True) and Shakespeare in a perpetual midlife strop (Ben Elton's BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, with David Mitchell in the lead). With Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel, sometime Oscar winner Chloe Zhao offers us the sight of Shakespeare in grief - and attempting to alchemise his loss into enduring art. He is also, in this telling, a young Shakespeare and a notionally sexy Shakespeare (he's played by Paul Mescal, so individual mileage may vary), and you can't quite shake the suspicion that Zhao, herself trying to recover after the post-Nomadland turbulence of Marvel's The Eternals, must have pitched the project as some kind of Shakespeare origin story, as if the playwright were another Peter Parker. We join this Bard in his twenties, teaching Latin to his neighbours' children so as to pay off his glover father's debts; while there, he bumps into girl-next-door Agnes "Anne" Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). They have it off on a table in the pantry (sexy Shakespeare!), she inspires Romeo and Juliet, they wed, they have several kids, only for several of them to die either in childbirth or infancy, one son lending (a version of) his name to one of the writer's best known plays. Set against the playful, knowing, self-aware Shakespeare of the texts mentioned above, this is plainly serious Shakespeare, sober Shakespeare, sensible Shakespeare, simplified Shakespeare - and here, I'm afraid, is where Hamnet's problems begin.
What O'Farrell and Zhao intend to commemorate here is a period in their august subject's life where the natural order was comprehensively overturned, resulting in a father burying his son. Yet this seems to have been the case creatively, too: in most respects, Hamnet is the image of the dourly po-faced Hollywood history that would normally inspire ribald sending up in shows much like Upstart Crow. Certain scenes border on the ridiculous, many of them rooted in the conception of Agnes as some straggle-haired nature girl. Doubtless O'Farrell did her fair share of research into the limitations of 16th century midwifery in the course of writing the novel, but Zhao has her heroine giving birth alone in the forest with a mighty roar, and then - after a tasteful fade to black - reappearing with babe in arms, nary a tousled forelock out of place on either. Zhao's tendency to prettify everything is, I guess, a contrast to the ugliness of so much shot-on-digital fare, which may be one reason Hamnet has seduced as many awards voters as it has: if you're just in the market for sundappled English woodland, there's plenty of that here. But more often than not the prettification is misapplied, erodes credibility, invites snickering. Hamnet certainly has a Young Star Problem, in that the leads aren't remotely believable as historical figures: they're well-moisturised, gym-hardened young adults who've been invited to dress up on a school awayday to Stratford. The minibus is parked just off-camera throughout. (The one player who seems lived-in to any degree is Joe Alwyn as Buckley's brother, and that may only be because he courted Taylor Swift.)
In the absence of internally generated insights, this script keeps trying to impose 21st century psychology from without. Smacked around by a brutish dad, Will worries what kind of father he's going to be; after Hamnet's death, he starts work on a text about dads and lads (and ghosts). This really is Shakespeare for dummies: aha!, we're meant to go, so that explains that! (Toss all Shakespeare's writings off a cliff, and let's never think of him or his plays again.) Such persistent neatness is in conflict with the complexity and ambiguity that have kept folks coming back to this playwright over the years; worse still, it makes for punishingly flat and prosaic drama. Towards the end of its third series, Upstart Crow itself tackled Hamnet's death in a way that proved unexpectedly affecting, earning its emotion through good writing and playing. Zhao, by contrast, insists on having Buckley wail like a banshee every twenty minutes, recycles well-used Max Richterisms that signify this is A Serious Film, and concludes with a very silly scene in the Globe where Agnes, agog, has the experiences of the previous two hours reflected back to her through the medium of mummery. Aha, so that's what art does! (Toss all art off a cliff.) That Hamnet has occupied the place it has in the awards conversation may be down to slim end-of-year pickings - two consensus choices (One Battle After Another and Sinners) and then whatever you can cobble together - and/or that it's the sort of thing that has traditionally grabbed votes, nods and gongs: keywords Shakespeare, period drama, British craft credits, trauma. It struck this observer as an obligation nomination, phoney art, and - most bizarrely - a tale told far more rigorously in a lowly sitcom, surrounded by knob gags.
Hamnet is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment