Look, I’m not one of those people who brags about their ignorance like it’s some badge of working class authenticity. I’m mostly a smart guy, and would love to be smarter. But I’m honestly admitting here that I’m not all that qualified for the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve enjoyed some of the adaptations, mostly the more stylistically adventurous ones like TITUS or ROMEO + JULIET or even THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. But the language (beautiful as it may be) is a real obstacle for me. I always struggle with following what anyone is talking about, and you mostly gotta know what they’re talking about to know what’s happening.

Even the ones I can get a grip on I barely retain memory of afterwards. Sometimes I can’t even remember if it’s Macbeth or Hamlet that has the Ghost Dad. I really have to go into my brain and do the following math: oh yeah, in THE NORTHMAN his name is Amleth, so that’s inspired by the same story that Hamlet is inspired by, so Hamlet is the one where his uncle killed his dad. And that was also the one that STRANGE BREW was riffing on and that had the Ghost Dad. Okay, got it. I know all about Hamlet.

My point is that I am not the target audience for HAMNET, the highly acclaimed new movie from Oscar winning director Chloé Zhao (NOMADLAND, THE ETERNALS), based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, screenplay by Zhao and O’Farrell. It’s a piece of historical fiction that asks the question “Isn’t it interesting that Shakespeare had a son who died who was named Hamnet and then he wrote a play called Hamlet?” Unfortunately for much of the movie my answer was “I mean, no, it’s not really that interesting.”

This could be called SHAKESPEARE ORIGINS: SHAKESPEARE’S WIFE AND KIDS, because it’s mostly from their perspective. It opens with young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, THE LOST DAUGHTER) working as a Latin tutor when his interest is caught by a woman (Jessie Buckley, JUDY, MEN) he spots through the window. She has a hawk friend who lands on her arm, so I can see why he’s intrigued, but he really just walks out on his students to go attempt to make out with her in the barn, and we hear later that he never came back. Even after she turned him down. Had to go take a cold shower, maybe.

Her name is Agnes, she’s the adopted daughter of the family William works for to repay the debts of his stern father (David Wilmot, ’71), and she’s locally infamous as the “daughter of a forest witch,” which just means she’s good with herbs. I suppose she also believes she can have prophetic visions when she pokes her weird thumb into your hand, but I don’t know. Lots of people believe lots of strange things.

When she thumbs William she sees herself having a daughter who dies, so when they fuck and she gets pregnant and they get married and she has twins and the girl seems stillborn at first it really fucks her up. Hold on, let me back up a minute. They have a first daughter before the twins, and when she goes into contractions she runs off into the woods by herself, holds onto a tree and writhes, there’s a time jump and she’s holding a baby (no cord, but plenty of goo). It made me think about that there must’ve been plenty of times in human history when women did have to just figure out how to give birth on their own. Must’ve been scary. Anyway, she chooses to be alone that time, but pretty soon her husband will leave her alone just like he did those kids in the opening scene. The man is a deserter.

At this point William is a nobody, but he likes to write. He hates his dad  and his mom (Emily Watson, THE LEGEND OF OCHI) terrorizes his wife, but that’s not unusual. There’s a scene where he gets frustrated with writing and throws a tantrum, banging on the table. (I don’t remember ever doing that over writing, so in this one area I’m a better writer than Shakespeare.) When the babies become kids (Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Susanna, Olivia Lynes as Judith, Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet) he has some good times watching them dress up and act out his scenarios. But Agnes begins to worry that he’s gonna go crazy out here failing, so she comes up with a plan for him to move to London, where the industry is, and get things rolling until the family can come join him.

I was impressed by her supportive sacrifice, but then the story becomes more typical neglected-wife-of-a-genius business. I do like that Zhao withholds from us any experience of Shakespeare in London. We only see him when he’s home, we know what his job is and that he’s out there doing it, but don’t see it for a while, just like his family. But the husband’s-always-working-he’s-not-around-and-I-resent-it stuff is generic enough that the movie started to lose me, put me at a distance so that what is clearly the gutwrenching portion of the movie for the people who like it felt like calculated cinematic sadism to me. You will believe a child can die.

Obviously Buckley is great at this, and also obviously it will hit many parents harder than it hit me. What I did like was the motif of the twins switching places – first as a joke for their dad, now the one prophesied to die does not, and wonders if the other tricked Death and died in her place, as he said he wanted to do when she contracted the plague. That’s interesting, maybe even Shakespearean? Ask somebody else.

As you might guess the movie does culminate in a performance of Macbeth Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, with the contrived circumstance that William is such a terrible husband dark and moody artist that he just runs away from his wife before grieving and hides that he’s doing a play named almost the same thing as their dead son, with himself portraying a ghost. She finds out, attends the play secret shopper style, and sees an actor (Noah Jupe, A QUIET PLACE, NO SUDDEN MOVE) being called Hamlet and with his hair dyed blond like her dead son Hamnet. And if she checked Wikipedia like I did she must know that the actor playing the actor playing Hamlet is the older brother of the actor who played Hamnet. So they look similar.

I like when Agnes is on the floor at the play flipping out about what she sees. They say those groundlings are low class, but they’re the first to shush her. Agnes has her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn, THE FAVOURITE, THE BRUTALIST) with her and he looks like he’s experiencing a mixture of horror from his sister causing a disruption and from his fucking brother-in-law creating this situation in the first place. What the fuck, William. What the fuck.

HAMNET is a notorious weepy, I heard lots of snot, but there were some dry eyes in the house and two of them were mine. Still, there are some scenes even I found effective, and I like this ending, which reminded me of MIDSOMMAR in a certain way but didn’t have me as rapt. That’s on me – I know I don’t have enough understanding of what Hamlet is actually about vs. what she’s interpreting it as being about and how this recontextualizes traditional readings of the play. So there’s a revelatory experience happening here for plenty of people who know more about it than me.

Before seeing this I heard that one person I know called it one of the best movies he’d ever seen, and another (Matt Lynch) called it “dog shit.” I have a guess which scene earned it the latter description: the one where Shakespeare contemplates suicide and freestyles part of the “To be or not to be” speech famous from Hamlet and LAST ACTION HERO. We don’t see him say “Oh shit, that’s good, I gotta write that down!”, but I still found it laughable.

“William. William. It’s Marvin – your cousin, Marvin Shakespeare. You know that suicide speech you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!”

I do not dispute that this is a good movie, but in my opinion it’s not as good as some of the other Amblin Entertainment productions. Yes, Spielberg produced it and it has the E.T. flying over the moon logo and everything. For now on when people use “Amblin movies” as shorthand for “movies like GREMLINS and GOONIES” I will assume they also mean movies like HAMNET.

Not to be a centrist, because fuck centrists, but I found HAMNET to be right in the center between “best movie I’ve seen” and “dog shit.” It’s a well made movie with a pretty cool hawk, a nice touch involving a spooky cave, and good acting – it’s just not for me. I can appreciate it, but not to the level intended.

But oh shit, what if Robert Eggers had a son named The Northmal and then he made THE NORTHMAN? Now that would be interesting.