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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Someone big in UK publishing once told me that every year in high-end fiction, there is what he called “the book”. It is usually good, but not always. Nonetheless, the book is the one novel everyone you know will suddenly be reading, as long as everyone you know is from the British middle class.
Hamnet, adapted from a very good novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is now to be “the film”. It is currently still only second favourite to win the Best Picture Oscar. (The frontrunner is One Battle After Another.) But this is the movie you will hear discussed at dinner. Opinions will be shared about director Chloé Zhao, whose Nomadland did win the top Oscar in 2021; about filmic portraits of William Shakespeare, of which this is one; and perhaps about the fine line between a moving meditation on the loss of a child, and a slick weepie released into awards season.
The Oscar odds do favour Jessie Buckley, who gives a no-holds-barred performance as Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife. Agnes, yes, not the customary Anne. (O’Farrell, who co-wrote the script with Zhao, cites the archival record.) In a movie where names mean a lot, that fits the reappraisal of a heroine unkindly treated by traditional histories. The title character is her son, one of three children. (Hamnet and Hamlet, we learn, were once used interchangeably.) And Shakespeare is just William, played by Paul Mescal.
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We join their romance early, a star-cross’d tryst between a callow Latin tutor and a fiery loner with a gift for herbal remedies. Zhao risks a whiff of spoof with a sex scene set amid potatoes. And yet the portrait of young love is well-drawn. Close up, nonconformist Agnes and her vaguely goofy sweetheart make an excellent match. In modern parlance, they see each other — and we see it happen.
They also seem oddly modern themselves. Squint and they might be artsy millennials. Jarring as that sounds, it makes an important point, that our ancestors were often much like us, only trapped in difficult circumstances. The perilous labour that delivers the couple’s oldest child, Susanna, reminds us that for much of history, parenting was largely a matter of trying to stop your kids from dying.
The film’s later scenes include a first performance of ‘Hamlet’ at the Globe theatre in London
Yet the Shakespeares endure. The family expands again with twins, Judith and Hamnet, who become remarkably sweet 11-year-olds. Until now, his father’s career has been kept off camera, thus preventing it taking over the story. But London finally enters. Plague doctors haunt the alleys around the Globe.
And death comes for Hamnet. The film proceeds in a fog of grief. Agnes is primally wounded. “Where do they go?” the film asks of lost boys like hers.
Yet for all the awful gravity in that question, the movie has a strangely smooth surface. The same prettifying impulse behind the potato scene now frames despair. Early on, Buckley and Mescal make convincing lovers. As bereaved parents, Zhao makes them look like actors. And the Shakespeare of it all comes crashing in, leading to a climax that may have you sobbing, or leave you with the uneasy sense that this Hamnet was never a child at all, but merely a device.
In the end, the film that takes his name becomes a polished hymn to great art. In great art itself, though, life is rarely so neat — and death never this tidy.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from January 9 and in US cinemas now