Hamnet <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 <\/p>\n
Director: Chlo\u00e9 Zhao<\/p>\n
Cert: None<\/p>\n
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Justine Mitchell, David Wilmot, Louisa Harland, Freya Hannan-Mills<\/p>\n
Running Time: 2 hrs 5 mins<\/p>\n
Laurence Olivier<\/a>, who knew a thing or two about Shakespeare<\/a>, talked long ago about a famous scream he delivered, while apparently tearing out his own eyes, in a 1946 production of Sophocles\u2019s Oedipus Rex. <\/p>\n He thought of animals in traps. \u201cIn the Arctic they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed as Oedipus.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a suggestion of that in the wail Jessie Buckley<\/a>, playing Agnes Shakespeare, gives as the character absorbs her son\u2019s death in Chlo\u00e9 Zhao<\/a>\u2019s devastating adaptation of Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/a>\u2019s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague<\/a>. <\/p>\n There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion. But technique is always in control. It is among the marvels here that Buckley gives so much without giving too much.<\/p>\n Before we get there, we have a pastoral meet-cute between Paul Mescal<\/a>\u2019s William Shakespeare, then a struggling Latin tutor, and the instinctive earth spirit this project imagines Agnes Hathaway (elsewhere, often Anne Hathaway) to have been. We first see her coiled up beneath a tree as a fox might rest following a successful hunt.<\/p>\n Zhao, who wrote the script with O\u2019Farrell, is inviting a leap that may ask too much of more cynical viewers. Agnes, at home to summoning hawks from clean air, is connected to the woods by a primal feminine impulse that reaches back to ancient witches and then forward through the songs of Sandy Denny and the women of cinematic folk horror. The Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal, Oscar-nominated<\/a> for Ida<\/a> and Cold War<\/a>, allows the Welsh locations to soak their lacustrine dampness through every inviting frame.<\/p>\n Will, who will spend much of the film in smelly London, is more a figure of early modernity: practical, contained, undemonstrative. One can hardly imagine better casting than Mescal. The two are East Midlands yin and yang. Buckley\u2019s face has a muscular dexterity that can practically turn itself upside down. Mescal\u2019s steadiness, at its best, asks more questions than it answers.<\/p>\n The couple\u2019s families are not happy with the union, but the two marry, nonetheless, and Agnes gives birth first to Susanna and then to twins, Judith and Hamnet. As Will tastes success in the English capital, the bubonic plague \u2013 O\u2019Farrell\u2019s admired novel was, appropriately, published in the pandemic year \u2013 oozes its way towards Stratford and eventually gathers poor Hamnet to the fathers.<\/p>\n