The most devastating movie I’ve seen in years

We know almost nothing about William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, apart from the fact that he and his twin sister Judith were born at some point in 1585 and was buried in August 1596, 11 years later. The cause of death is even unknown, although the deaths of young children were not completely infrequent at that time; Three of William’s own sisters had died in childhood. Understandably, the shortage of our vision of Hamnet’s life and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to complete the details with their own imaginations. As an opening appointment of Shakespeare’s scholar, Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, both in the disturbing 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet And the new adaptation of Chloe Zhao: “Hamnet and Hamlet are, in fact, the same name, completely interchangeable in Stratford Records at the end of the 16th and early seventeenth century.” Which means that we know one more thing about this boy: a few years after his death, his father wrote the best play in English, and bears his name.

Premiere at the Telluride Film Festival before a November theatrical release, Hamnet It is devastating, perhaps the most emotionally devastating movie I’ve seen in years. The book was also overwhelming, and when entering a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to spill some tears. Still, I really didn’t expect to cry this a lot. That is not only because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the image reinvents the poetic act of creating Village. The Shakespeare game is on the highest shelf, set by the dust of centuries of acclamation. It is almost as impeccable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a film that dares to explore its beginning. The attempt itself is noble, and perhaps a little shameless; that is successful feels frankly supernatural.

Hamnet It remains mainly faithful to the novel (O’Farrell collaborated with Zhao in the script), but the two works focus on different parts of the imagined timeline. The book ends with our first glance of Villageand his final words belong to the ghost of the work: “Remember me.” The film, on the other hand, fights directly with the connections between real life and art, which shows how the work (and his own role in him) became a ship by Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to face his sadness and help bring his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) of her. Village It is thought, not incorrectly, as a work on revenge and the conflict between thought and action; In fact, it was Shakespeare’s version of an existing and popular revenge work. But when changing his approach, Zhao embraces completely somewhat obvious, but he often ignores: as reworked by Shakespeare, Village It is also a work on pain that consumes everything, one driven at all levels for loss and guilt and questions about how to cry properly.

It is a fascinating theme to imagine, but how exactly is a story in such an indescribable sadness? Hamnet He speculates that the child was a victim of bubonic plague, but approaches tragedy with a kind of magical realistic sensitivity. In this narrative, the constitutionally weaker Judith (played by Olivia Lynes in the film) is the one that initially gets sick, and the loving and laborious hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who often exchanged clothes with her as a game to deceive her parents, makes a final sacrifice, pretending to be her twin sister sick and, therefore, extracting the disease of her and inside her and inside her and inside her and inside her and inside her and inside her. The transfer is, therefore, in the heart of this story, narrative, formally, structurally.

The novel jumps from one place to another in time, but continues to surround Hamnet’s death, while the adorned prose of O’Farrell transmutes a horrible event into something almost unreal, although no less heartbreaking; His efflorescent descriptions of nature capture something strange and sinister about the world (not very different from the flowery pain of the damned Ofelia in Shakespeare’s work). Zhao’s film is more linear, so he does not live so long in the details of death itself. Instead, your breathless and tide energy drags us. Getting helped by Max Richter’s score, Zhao finds melancholy not in stillness and reflection but in movement and activity. We see how Young Will, a sensitive and shy Latin tutor, met Testaruda Agnes, once a child of nature ruled out as “a forest witch” and raised by an indifferent stepmother. Buckley, an actor who can be ethereal and earthy at the same time, is an ideal option for Agnes. This is a woman who does not belong to the world and, nevertheless, seems to have left her own soil. He loves stalking in the forest with his pet hawk, is competent in herbs and remedies, and has the gift of the forecast. Despite his reluctance to marry, Agnes has already seen that in his death bed he will be surrounded by two children. But she has already had a daughter, Susanna, before Judith and Hamlet arrive, so the eventual birth of three children terrifies her to the core.

Will, the “grassy scholar” persecuted for his meekness, sees and loves Agnes for what it is, but marriage and a family also mean a domestication of their wild spirits. They are related souls: He can also work with dark magic, only with his words. Zhao suggests that, although Will was rarely at home, his family life fed his art. We see the children doing the opening enchantments of the witches of MacbethAnd, of course, Hamnet and Judith, the cross dress and the game of Judith’s performance echoes the plots of many Shakespeare comedies. All this might seem cheesy, but the family is represented with so much love specificity that we buy everything. Many historians have been perplexed by how a man as apparently simple as Shakespeare could have written works of such greatness and depth. So here, then, there is a home full of astonishment and game that could have inspired part of it.

That, of course, aggravates tragedy. Agnes could have access to certain powers, but cannot bring Hamnet back. “It can’t have disappeared,” she says. “All you need is that I find it. It must be somewhere.” Will simply responds: “We may never stop looking for it.” But the movie has already shown us where Hamnet is. While looming between life and death, we see a vision of the young man wandering through an improvised forest that is clearly a backdrop. Then enters the dark emptiness of a door in the center of the stage, from which Will Shakespeare will emerge later, wrapped in white dust, playing Hamlet’s ghost. The non -discovered country is art itself.

Sometimes we forget what a mescal phenomenal actor is. This is probably because it has not yet done a good action hero, which is a scarlet letter in our day. But also, we love to quantify, classify and dilute complicated artists in simple impressions; Despite the fact that he has only been acting in movies for five years, we believe we already know what it is. But he is not really the softboi that has been memory for the lack of meaning. With his unexpected elections both in cadence and affection, he is somewhat closer to a young Christopher Walken. In HamnetHis response at first glance of his dead son represents the best performance I have seen; Later it is combined when an essay of Hamlet’s speech “get thee to a nunnery” and delivers it himself with so growing autocompleter (“I could accuse me of such things that it was better that my mother was not born to me!”) That he and convincingly reinterprets the most famous game in the world before our eyes. Agnes accuses the will not is Village. And yes, we can see the actor as William Shakespeare reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy “being or not” in this film, one of the two very different interpretations of the same speech that Zhao presents, as if to recognize that everyone has their own. Village.

Will not spoil anything to say that Hamnet concludes with a staging of VillageOne in which the twisted reflection of the poet’s work becomes more evident and gains complexity. Perhaps the biggest fulfillment that I can pay to Zhao is that this recreation of such a familiar job still manages to surprise, because we see it through Agnes’s incredulous eyes. The drama on stage not only echoes and explains Will’s pain, but also serves as a kind of lifeguard for Agnes, and when we see Village As an effort of a afflicted person to reach another, everything opens in magnificent new ways. There are references to other stories that travel HamnetAnd one of them is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Will tells Agnes during one of his first meetings. It is a story of resurrection, passion and art, and how a final yearning look catches a lover in the underworld forever. As presented here, it is not applied in any schematic or obvious way to the drama of Shakespeare’s life. But underlines a fundamental truth in both Hamnetand Village: That to see and be seen is something cheerful and scary.