Cinecism: Hamnet is a Weepie Gone Wrong

Words: Maia Wyman

The films of my childhood were really fucking sad - little girls crying at the caskets of their friends; lions losing their fathers to stampedes; furry creatures flinging themselves into fiery cauldrons to save their friends. Tearjerkers for adults, like The Notebook and Marley and Me, were abundant as well. Yet in the past two or so decades the film vernacular, even that of the children’s film, became averse to tears. It’s got to the point that just recently I asked myself: where have all the weepies gone? 

So you can imagine how excited I was when Chloe Zhao promised to fertilize our barren film landscape with an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s notoriously sad book, Hamnet. Finally, someone was excavating the weepie. Yet as I watched the film, tears yanked out of me by a relentless set of plot contrivances, I thought… maybe best we leave it underground. 

In Hamnet, Zhao uses those tears to blur your vision, disarming you just enough that you fail to see how laughably empty her film really is. 

With dry eyes, you can see how much of this is bad fan fiction. We’re asked to fill in the blanks about Shakespeare and his family. What if Shakespeare was a devoted father? What if Hamnet is about his grief for his dead son? But Zhao is only partially interested in the answers. Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal who is out of his depths here, is a man who gets to experience, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “transcendence.” By virtue of gender he is able to dream, to break free of this proverbial provincial life and make art. Shakespeare also has multiple babies but gets to leave home whenever he needs, leaving his family behind. He spends very little time with his son, a couple scenes in fact, yet the film dedicates the majority of its final act to prolonged shots of the playwright whimpering in his room and clutching at the face of his boy-actor. Most punishing of all is when Shakespeare’s bereavement takes him to the edge of death, and Zhao has Mescal whisper-freestyle “to be or not to be” as a little wink to the “fans.” 

“A movie that makes you cry does not, necessarily, a good movie make.”

De Beauvoir would say that Shakespeare’s wife, on the other hand, suffers from immanence. Except Zhao (and her source material) enter the Wide Sargasso Sea tradition of elevating overlooked female characters and historical figures into powerful, complicated women. Thus, we get a reimagining of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway (here “Agnes”) as an all-knowing wood nymph whose dirty fingernails and undone hair belie that smug ahead-of-her-timeness characteristic of this tired genre. 

Yet, despite all the time spent with her, we don’t learn much of Agnes’ motivations beyond loving Shakespere (the believability of which is flimsy), and wanting to be a mom. In the vein of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Agnes is imbued with earthy magical powers. But unlike Circe’s hers’ are vague and useless to the course of the plot. She is also so singularly entrenched in being a mom that she knows almost nothing about her husband’s occupation. After all, motherhood is its own form of labour right? Well, I don’t know… the movie doesn’t expand on that either. Agnes’ total ignorance goes so far that she doesn’t even seem to understand how plays work. All builds to this final scene where Zhao has Agnes marching towards her husband’s stage, apparently unaware that a performance is taking place. She then refuses to wait for a single line of dialogue to be spoken by the actors before belting out her discontent that the play, which she has not read, does not recount her own personal tragedy verbatim. It makes no sense, but it’s emotional right? If Agnes has an inkling of understanding about her husband’s work she would not be able to reach out to the actor playing Hamlet and inspire the rest of the crowd to do so, and we would not get that cool shot of all the hands. If this moment didn’t happen then Max Richter would not get to insert his favourite song into the end credits. 

Unlike the other women of her genre, Agnes does not attempt to dream or transcend. She instead sinks her feet in the muddy undergrowth of her wood and stays there resolutely. Thus, Zhao renders her immanent, apparently by mistake.

Whatever themes become legible in Hamnet Zhao garbles with hackneyed capital T “tragedy.” We don’t have time to comprehend the thematic significance of the birth of Agnes’ twins because Zhao is throwing everything she’s got at us. The scene lurches from the sadness of Agnes having to give birth alone, to Agnes’ sadness about losing her own mother to childbirth, to the sadness of Agnes having to give birth twice in the same day, to the sadness of Agnes potentially losing a child. It’s relentless. 

Even Hamnet’s own death, the inciting moment of the plot that comes at the end of the second act, is contrived to be as Sad and Shocking as possible. Little is known to us of Shakespeare’s life (after all some people think he was a bunch of different guys), let alone his ill-fated eleven year old son. With that space to project O’Farrell and Zhao imagine that it was actually Hamnet’s sickly twin sister who was destined to die, but little Hamnet makes a deal with death to save her and in a Tragic twist of fate is the one to die instead. Devastating right? But why does a movie that purports to represent the very real and raw wound of grief, so stripped down that it does away with almost all historical detail, need to insert convenient mysticism into its inciting death. Surely the loss of a son is sad enough.  

Hamnet is a maudlin display, rich in affect but narratively, historically, and intellectually impoverished. I typically cringe at terms like “trauma porn,” but Hamnet does construct a bizarre emotional mechanics where you the audience do not really care about the characters on screen, affected Oscar-vying animatronics programmed to repeat the same motions (in Buckley’s case wistful blinks and primal screams, in Mescal’s teeth gnashing and stammering) for the course of the film. Yet you, the audience, find your eyes leaking against your will. A movie that makes you cry does not, necessarily, a good movie make. 

I spent the last several years wondering when I would get to cry at a new movie again, in earnest. The children’s movies my nieces and nephew watch belong to a post-Shrek landscape of self-referentiality and pop culture pastiche. The movies I watch, the non-blockbusters at least, are heavily stylized genre films or textureless nods to slow cinema. I spent months looking forward to Hamnet, but in the end felt shortchanged. Zhao and her team will likely win a slew of Oscars. But on the grounds of dishonesty, Hamnet is disqualified from my race. I continue to wait for my weepie.