Chloé Zhao's 'Hamnet' Is Only Interested in Tears and Tragedy

There's this cliché you've probably seen in God knows how many movies where the protagonist has a dead wife, and he often envisions her in the most heavenly form. She's either laughing under white linen sheets or whispering sweet "I love you's" while staring directly at the camera. These shots are presented through a loose first-person perspective. She's less of an actual person and more of this angelic, dreamlike idea of a person that motivates the main character to get them where they need to be emotionally in the story. It's a tired trope to the extent that it becomes ripe fodder for parody. If the feature-length version of this sounds appealing, then "Hamnet" will be right up your alley. It certainly wasn't up mine. From Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao ("Nomadland") comes a nuclear-grade period weepie in which its thinly written characters are solely defined by their tragedy. It wouldn't surprise me if packs of "Hamnet"-branded tissues came with your ticket in the coming weeks because it's the kind of movie that will be marketed, lauded and campaigned for awards consideration based on how much it will make you cry. It doesn't surprise me. Hollywood melodramas are a time-honored tradition, after all. But part of what I found so off-putting about "Hamnet" is how it doesn't earn those tears, it forces you to expel them like a leaking faucet through its interminably long 126-minute running time. For those who are unfamiliar, "Hamnet" is an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical fiction novel of the same name about a familial misfortune that supposedly inspires William Shakespeare to write "Hamlet." The film, co-written by O'Farrell and Zhao, posits the bard as an irresponsible thespian named Will (Paul Mescal), who falls for a woman of the woods named Agnes (Jessie Buckley). Agnes is linked to nature, as best demonstrated in the film's first scene while curled in the fetal position against a tree. It's the first of many grotesquely pronounced visual metaphors. But for as much as she loves the greenery, she can't deny her infatuation, albeit an underdeveloped one, with Will. Together, Agnes and Will have three children, but only one of them really matters, that of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). An opening title card clues the audience in on the fact that this name and Hamlet were interchangeable in the 16th and 17th centuries just in case you couldn't make the connection. The 11-year-old Hamnet is presented as the perfect child: whimsical, imaginative and selfless. It's how both Zhao and his screen parents view him, so as to lionize the kid before his big scene. It's an issue that extends to not just the centerpiece tragic figure, but Agnes and Will themselves. I think Buckley is a great actress, but here she's simplified to that of a tortured mother with the wails of a thousand suns. "Hamnet" lives and breathes on her ability to cry whenever tragedy befalls Agnes. Łukasz Żal's soft focus lens, which is often cold and distant, becomes "Nightcrawler" levels of gazing at the first sight of tears, and the guttural screams that go with them. This isn't to say that this isn't an accurate representation of how it feels to lose a child, so much as the emotional honesty behind it rings false. It's an incredibly manipulative film, not to mention a tedious one, that isn't human enough to make any meaningful observations about art as a catharsis to grief. Mescal is equally underwritten, not to mention he's saddled with one of the most embarrassing scenes of the year in a dockside realization that made my eyes roll in the back of my head. "Hamnet" unintentionally evokes the likes of "Walk Hard" and even the most memorable scene in "My Girl" to the detriment of what Zhao is trying to accomplish here. An effective drama requires emotional balance, which is difficult when every comically telegraphed omen trips over the other to make your heart sink. Any kind of happy moment associated with Hamnet is accompanied by an ominous black void that keeps threatening to show up. Like Buckley and Mescal, I think Jupe is doing the best he can with the material he's given and shows potential that a better screenplay will undoubtedly give him one day. "Hamnet" has but one narrative trick up its sleeve, and even then, it's one that the film hopes you didn't see continually slipping out. It's all so cloying and overwrought that the film's big denouement sank like a stone. I know I'll be in the minority, as indicated by the audible tears in the back of the press screening. This only baffled me even more because I like to think I can be easily persuaded to shed a tear or two, yet this did very little to move me. I can't help but reflect on an episode of "The Jack Benny Show" that my father loved to show me during my childhood where Dan Duryea plays a tough guy in a trench coat, who ultimately gets shot by the titular comedian. He winces and holds his hand next to his side while he keeps telling his partner that he's dying. After so much flailing around the hamburger joint, Dennis Day says "Well, fall down, you big ham(net)." That about sums it up. "Hamnet" is now playing in theaters nationwide.