Hamnet (The Movie)

 

In times past, I often ended the year reviewing the movies I had seen and rating them. I go to the movies so much less now that reviewing and rating no longer has much point. My final film of the year does, however, inspire some comment.

Hamnet is a historically-based drama, based on a novel about William Shakespreare's. marriage, the death of his son Hamnet, and the consequent composition of the play Hamlet. Shakespeare's family were real, although his actual wife was Anne, while in the movie she is named Agnes.

The film is somewhat slow-going at the start. Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker, is Latin tutor for some local boys and falls in love with a local girl named Agnes, who is reputed to be the daughter of a forest witch. (She does spend a lot of time in the forest, with her hawk, and knows a lot about herbs. There is the suggestion that Agnes may practice some form of natural religion or folk practices representing surviving pagan ideas and traditions within  Christian Europe. I have no idea whether anything like this was the case with Shakespeare's actual wife.) Over the objections of their families, the two marry and have a daughter, followed by twins, a son and a daughter. 

Shakespeare is frustrated and moves to London, where, of course, he eventually becomes involved in the theater. In Stratford, the twins contract plague. The daughter survives, but the son, Hamnet, who had aspired to join his father's theater company, dies. His parents plunge into grief, but Shakespeare quickly returns to work in London, leaving Agnes angry, their relationship somewhat strained. She and her brother travel to London's Globe Theater to attend the performance of Hamlet, the dramatic product of its author's fatherly grief. The famous revenge-tragedy is presented in the film as a play about family mourning and loss and the challenge (and ultimate impossibility) of setting things right again. 

As the play (in which the author himself appears as the ghost of Hamlet's father) unfolds and reaches its tragic ending, Agnes identifies her son with the actor playing the dying Hamlet. She hauntingly extends her hands to reach out to the actor, a gesture the audience then joins in with her, fully making the play a common collective tribute to her lost son.

The movie may have seemed somewhat slow-going at the start, but it picks up in intensity, and its ending is genuinely beautiful.