ZERO STARS/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel
directed by Chloé Zhao
by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young in late July, teats pendulous and bellies stretched like unrefrigerated yogurt capsules whose live colonies have boomed under torpid, incubated petri-dish conditions. Miserable. Suffering. Ridden with monologue and gesticulation. The term “to the rafters” doesn’t begin to cover it, given how the great abundance (embarrassment, superfluity, profusion, glut) of acting in Hamnet is directed at the very heavens themselves, forsooth, screeched in the key of rent flesh and ripped bodice to the bowed ears of weary Danish gods. What is a stage that is only proscenium? Hamnet is the answer now and going forward.
Hard to imagine how such a sloppy load might still be boring, yet here is that elusive cryptid, that miracle of incongruity: the blowhard who also sucks. Hard. No, not me this time–Hamnet, this wet fucking shipwreck of a movie, based on a novel I immediately read upon watching this cinematic spectacle to confirm it shouldn’t have been adapted for the screen possibly ever, much less by motherfucking Chloé Zhao, who introduced it at Telluride with an interminable guided meditation and hideously extended silences that felt calculated to be passive and hostile. She is the master of vague, mixed messaging. Something to do, maybe, with how she’s an indie visionary bankrolled by a Chinese billionaire who is, whoops, her dad. It’s suddenly less of a mystery as to why Hamnet is the perfect banquet if you’re a weird narcissist composing a recipe for secondhand mortification to victims snared in a captive setting.
For the blissful neophyte, Hamnet is a speculative biography of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Anne “Agnes” Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), written like Stephenie Meyer’s take on Wuthering Heights. Have I mentioned the performances? No matter, you probably heard them while they were shooting the film from wherever you are. In the world. In a bunker or a basement or that soundproof room where people go insane. This is not a bildungsroman of the Melancholy Bard, don’t misunderstand. No, Hamnet is about the eponymous son of Shakespeare, who died when he was 11 and maybe inspired Hamlet because that’s the dubious premise of the novel and movie. That part–the part that misreads the play, that misrepresents the chronology of kid-death-to-bibliography (Shakespeare wrote a bunch of comedies after Hamnet died, if indeed Shakespeare wrote all the plays he’s credited with writing) and suggests audiences at the Globe circa the seventeenth century were super-polite and shushed one another when they talked during the show–ain’t Zhao’s fault.
Zhao’s fault is keeping an entirely superfluous (extra, vestigial, obsolete) Shakespeare offspring, Susannah (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), from the book for no other reason than that she’s in the book. Her fault is encouraging her actors to shriek like banshees at the slightest provocation. This is the feature-length adaptation of The Lonely Island‘s “Jizz in My Pants.” There is no quiet moment ever for this family: Da expresses his love by inviting horsing-around and noisy ersatz performance as Ma brays emetically in bawdy approval. Buckley’s Agnes gives full-throated, vein-bloating, guttural and eruptive birth twice in the picture, once while flopping around like a trout in a faerie forest hollow, then again while pinned fast to a wooden birthing chair by her well-meaning, eternally creased-with-concern mother (Emily Watson) and their maid. Agnes, you see, is trying to claw her way back to the wilderness that sired her. Of course there’s a raging storm. “The river’s bust ‘er banks, Miss!” You can say that again, single-lined extra! Agnes is a “wood sprite”–a force of nature, a nymph, a creature of the waters and the wild Will tames with his slack-jawed yokel charm, five-o’clock-on-the-nose shadow, and Basset Hound eyes. It’s Zhao’s fault for the laggard pacing, the self-importance, the feckless, sterling-plated prestige. The self-serious theatre-kid preciousness of it all that mistakes jazz hands for actual jazz.
Maybe it’s because I’m sick of films that indulge and encourage the myth of the tortured male artist who must be coddled in his every idiosyncracy, even at the expense of his wife and children. Will needs to escape to London to be a writer, right? He must leave his wife and young kids behind. (If you’re keeping track, there are three: Susannah the cipher, plus twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Much Ado About Nothing (Olivia Lynes). Kidding, her name is Othello–I mean, Judith.) We know this, since he gets drunk when he can’t write because the baby’s crying and then does some full-volume bellowing that wakes the baby up. “Get thee to a nunnery!” cries Agnes, or words to that effect, which Will probably jots down and reproduces in The Tempest or some shit because this is that movie. Walketh Hardeth. And I’m sick of these poor kid actors not being protected from doing extended death rattles while pretending their bodies are riddled with bubonic plague. “Riddled” is an exaggeration–I noted just enough swelling to indicate illness but not enough to make the adorable moppets disturbing to look at. You know, like children dying of disease might.
So Hamnet dies in neon-lit agony for the exact length of an Oscar clip, Shakespeare writes Hamlet to mourn him, and Agnes journeys to the Globe for the first time to watch a play that happens to be sort of named after her dead son. What happens next is so shameless, I won’t tell you so as not to ruin the surprise. Note that the surprise is not of the “spoiler” kind but of the “leaving a dead mouse in the sandwich you stuck in the office cooler because someone keeps stealing your lunch” kind. I warned you. If you indulge anyway, you deserve the taste of expired rodent in your mouth. I will share that Mescal plays Shakespeare playing King Hamlet’s ghost in the play-within-a-play Hamlet (though not in the play-within-a-play scene from Hamlet), and there is an entire sequence where he rocks back and forth backstage while a notably bad performance of Hamlet transpires offscreen because it’s ACTING, MASTER THESPIAN! GENIUS! GENIUS! THANK YOU. Hamnet ostensibly offers catharsis and perhaps a rebuke to a culture of unobtrusiveness that frowns upon suddenly shrieking from weltschmerz in the produce section, though it’s ultimately just misery porn designed to exploit us where we’re most vulnerable, told in the shrill tones of air being tortured out of a balloon. While it is catharsis–an exorcism of repression, an expression of existential horror, all of those things–the audience isn’t experiencing it, but forced to witness it. Like a guided meditation, say, that only gratifies the yogi. What is art when it doesn’t communicate what the artist is experiencing, only that they are experiencing it and want you to bear witness? Selfish is one word. Insufferable is another.
