In Hamnet’s final scene, Shakespeare’s wife Agnes – played with a kind of restless vivacity by Jessie Buckley – goes to see her husband’s new play, Hamlet. She turns to her brother and frowns, “What are they talking about?” I mean, same, Agnes. I didn’t love studying Shakespeare at school (and we didn’t even have ChatGPT then to translate it), so I wasn’t in a massive rush to go and see a film about the death of one of Shakespeare’s children, even more so because I had a precious child of my own last year. Iambic pentameter and the worst thing I could ever imagine? No thanks!
I did not expect, then, to be sitting here telling you why that film should win the coveted Best Picture prize at the Oscars. But I am, and it should. Yes, Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning novel, falls into the category of emotionally traumatising films I never want to watch again (see also: Marley and Me). But it moved me in a way that made me feel alive to the infinite, expansive possibilities of creativity, something that feels essential at a time in which our attention is farmed by algorithms and the world is on fire. It’s also a noble, deeply felt study of motherhood that feels epic, that refuses to be confined into the small, neat box of the “domestic” that these stories normally find themselves in.
Director Chloé Zhao (already an Oscar winner for Nomadland in 2020) and O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay, and what they have done is extraordinary, when you think about it. They’ve taken the biggest figurehead in English culture, arguably in all of history, and used him to subvert time-old narratives about what subjects are worthy of “great” art, who gets to make it and what that costs.
For us Brits, Hamnet represents our big hope on the global stage, with Buckley a deserved frontrunner for the Best Actress award (although she and co-star Paul Mescal are Irish). She’s already swept the board across awards season and it would be a huge injustice were she not to win, even if she is mean to cats. For years she’s been one of our most assured rising talents, making continually interesting choices, from weirdo horror film Men to emotionally intense Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter, a punky Sally Bowles in the West End to a small but perfectly judged role in the immaculate parable Women Talking. Despite the trial by fire of coming of age on a TV talent show, she nurtured an audacious belief in her own talent, choosing to study at RADA rather than take up an understudy role in the West End. The bet she took was the right one.
Buckley’s feat, no less, is to seem much, much cleverer than her husband – actual Shakespeare – at all times. With her dirty face and searching eyes, Agnes is more attuned to the world, and she’s also hard as nails. She gives birth in a forest (no epidural)! When her mother-in-law refuses to allow her to give birth (to twins!) in that forest during a flood, she is actively annoyed. Agnes is never dazzled, always knows what to do, until the worst thing in the world happens. It hurt me to watch her in the scene where she realises that hope is gone, Hamnet is gone; he goes to a place he can never return from, and so does she.
“Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable as names during Shakespeare’s time, and he wrote Hamlet five years after his son’s death. O’Farrell’s insistence that Shakespeare was likely inspired by his own family is crucial: it turns on its head the clichéd stereotype that only women use their lives as material in their work. It also challenges the idea of important literary men with important literary callings, and makes all that seem incredibly silly. When Shakespeare mutters about going back to London just after Hamnet’s death, Agnes wallops him. Because obviously. What is he doing? Floating about in London writing plays after his child has died? He thought the world was out there. Doesn’t he realise that actually it’s here?
Because in Hamnet, the storyteller is not “the bard”, but a forgotten woman from history with dirt on her face, who gets down in the soil to show her children how to grow things, who makes up a ritual when their bird does to bring them comfort. They would believe any word she said.
Zhao said in an interview about Hamnet that the cast and crew “felt the film in our bodies and our lives were changed by making it”, that something about the film felt “fateful and inevitable”. And there is something a little bit mystical about it: beautiful sprawling shots of trees and roots, a sense you can almost feel the cold bracing air of an early morning in Stratford-upon-Avon. Is it grief porn, as some critics suggest? I don’t think so. Is it historically accurate? Probably not. But it is a very human film, that humanises Shakespeare even as it questions him as a national myth. He wrote the plays, but his wife did the mothering. What was the more important work? The film ends with a giant close-up of Jessie Buckley’s face, its features changed by the cost of it, and that seems to tell you the answer.
