By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 1.5 cats
Director: Chloé Zhao
Starring: Jacobi Jupe | James Lintern | Jessie Buckley | Joe Alwyn | Noah Jupe | Paul Mescal | Zac Wishart
Year: 2025
Running time: 125
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14905854
Cheryl says: “Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet is being touted as an Oscar contender, having swept the festival circuit with audience awards at Toronto, London, Mill Valley, and San Diego. It has an A-list cast, with strong performances from leads Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes as executive producers, a score by Max Richter, and a marketing campaign that included a bookstore crawl with the novelist and a chance to win a trip to London. But the film ultimately fails to live up to the hype.
“It is dark, both figuratively and literally, with only a few fleeting moments during the two-hour run time where the sun breaks through the symbolic forest, domain of the other-worldly Agnes. The set design captures the time-period well but after the first thirty minutes, we feel as trapped as Will did and long to escape rural Stratford for the equally dismal, but one hopes, more cosmopolitan city. The focus on the near death of Judith and Hamnet’s brave decision to take her place enhances the claustrophobic melodrama. The music is haunting and the story is depressing – not exactly a “feel-good” holiday movie. It will have a tough time competing with Wicked: For Good.
“Granted, it’s only a novel, but at least the book version intentionally never mentioned the name ‘William Shakespeare’. From the opening scenes, the anachronisms and anomalies came fast and furious, too many to keep track of. The protagonist is a Latin tutor at the local grammar school. His love interest is a falconer. His children study Greek at the grammar school and recite it at home. Susanna reads one of dad’s sonnets for her sister. Three times. The three children perform the opening scene from Macbeth as the weird sisters. John Shakspere was not a nice guy. And Agnes is alleged by the locals to be the daughter of a witch because she knows how to use herbs as medicine. Among these many attempts to incorporate aspects of the playwright’s apparent knowledge into the story, the ability to read Greek immediately reminds one that Edward de Vere’s mother-in-law Mildred Cecil was a Greek scholar and the Greek bible was read daily in the Cecil household where de Vere was raised after the sudden, suspicious death of his father. The hasty remarriage of his mother also appears in Hamlet, as do references to William Cecil as Polonius, and Anne Cecil as Ophelia. Anne Cecil, to whom Edward de Vere was married, was known as an accomplished healer, adept at using natural remedies. Coincidence?
“But it’s only a novel. We know so little about the man from Stratford that a vast canvas is required on which we might imagine his life. O’Farrell is not the first to fill in he gaping blank holes (symbolized in the film by an ominous open pit in the woods?) and she will not be the last. The story of Shakespeare is truly evergreen. There are endless possibilities for alternative narratives.
“Hamnet Shakspere was buried in 1596. The first recorded mention of the play Hamlet dates to 1589. The second is in Henslowe’s Diaries: a performance at Newington Butts in June 1594. The third mention by Thomas Lodge is dated to 1596 and is thought to be a reference to a performance at the Theatre in Shoreditch – not the Globe. The sources for Hamlet present another set of problems: they are Latin, French, and Italian: Danicae Historiae’s Amleth (1514), the French translation by Belleforest (1576), Seneca, Plutarch, Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy, Juvenal, and The Murder of Gonzaga as recounted in an Italian text published in Venice in 1546. This does not include any of the Greek sources of the play. For more about the play’s sources, see Eddi Jolly’s excellent essay in Dating Shakespeare’s Plays and Earl Showerman’s Shakespeare’s Greater Greek. There is no evidence that William Shakspere could read Latin, French, Italian, or Greek. It is likely that he was illiterate.
“HAMNET purports to be ‘a powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet’. Caveat emptor!”
Michael says: “Left me cold. 1 1/2 cats.”