‘Hamnet’—transcendent performance overrides historical issue
Early January is a theatrical dead zone in Los Angeles. The Nutcrackers have packed up, Tiny Tim is skiing in Mammoth, and actors are lumbering back into studios as rehearsals for shows opening in early February click back into gear. In short: nothing to review.
This year, however, my understanding editors suggested I take a look at Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, her film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. If you don’t know by now, the book/film’s thesis (at least in regard to Shakespeare) is that “Hamlet,” first published in Quarto in 1603 (the small books, not the big First Folio of 1623), was inspired by the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, in 1596. It also posits that the 11-year-old died of plague (possibly; other scholars suspect dysentery caused by unsanitary conditions—which does not make a great plot point).
There are several problems with this assumption, not the least of which is that the “great-man-turning-his-grief-to-art” trope went out with the late German Romantics. More problematic, it assumes that Shakespeare (assuming “Shakespeare” actually wrote his plays) churned through “King John,” “Merchant of Venice,” both parts of “Henry IV,” “Julius Caesar,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,” and quite possibly “Troilus and Cressida,” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (all written between 1596 and 1602) before finding an outlet for his grief in “Hamlet.”
The book and film take cover under (and, indeed, the novel is a response to) Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that Hamlet and Hamnet are interchangeable spellings of the same name. (The film puts Greenblatt’s assertion on the first frame.) There seems to be no actual proof of this (“truthiness” is not limited to politics), and it ignores the fact that Shakespeare based his play on a 12th-century Danish legend, whose main character is named Amleth. The story would have been known to Shakespeare through a 16th century translation from the French of Belleforest.
Does this make “Hamnet” a bad film? No. Depending on your appreciation for three-hankie melodramas, it is either a brooding elegy on loss and recovery, or, as The New Yorker’s reviewer called it, “grief porn.” I, on my editor-approved busman’s holiday, kept getting pulled out of the film by its Shakespearean inaccuracies, such as the children performing the witches scene from “Macbeth” for their mother (the amazing Jessie Buckley), when the Scottish play was written four or five years after “Hamlet,” a decade after Hamnet’s death. We’ll leave the inaccuracies about the Globe in the film’s last half hour for another day.
But the film is not about the Globe, Hamnet, Hamlet, or Shakespeare, but about Anne Hathaway (maddingly called Agnes here), who, at 26, was 8 years older than Master Shakespeare when he, as they say, knocked her up. Germaine Greer (in “Shakespeare’s Wife”) and others have tried to give Anne some agency in recent reappraisals, but there seems to have been little of love’s labors lost between Mrs. S and her husband, who could only bring himself to leave her his “second-best bed” in his will.
Again, none of this matters. Jesse Buckley’s performance (it’s her film, frankly) would be as transcendent if she were the wife of Stratford’s garbage collector. Hers, as Roland Barthes wrote of Greta Garbo, is the kind face for which cinema was invented. Like Ingrid Bergman’s, or Liv Ullmann’s, or Julie Christie’s, it is a face “that represents the fragile moment when cinema is about to extract an existential beauty from an essential beauty…when the carnal essences will give way to a lyric expression of Woman.” (“Mythologies,” 1957). In other words, she’s really terrific!
My review: if you want Shakespeare, stay home. If you want Buckley—go!
What to watch for
And speaking of Hamlet, Eddie Izzard brings his one-person Hamlet to the Montalbán Theatre, through Sat., Jan. 31; ticketmaster.com.
The Greenway Arts Alliance presents the world premiere of Stacey Martino’s The Circle, about three generations of families and the 2016 elections; Fri., Jan. 30, through Sun., Feb. 22; boxoffice @greenwayartsalliance.org or 323-655-7679 (ext.4).
Former weatherman Fritz Coleman continues his long-running, one-man show, Unassisted Living at Noho’s El Portal Theatre through March; tickets and details: elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html.
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