'Hamnet' briefing

3 (out of 4)

            Ah, despite coming and going from Awards Bait to Marvel and back, the underrated, only slight gaff-y and goofy Eternals too was its own tragic love story catapulted by an early, awkward sex scene — when Hamnet goes for some Fault in Our Stars/50 Shades flavor right out the gate with lines like “Oh, are you the farmer girl?” and “Oh, why are you looking at me like that?” it’s like Holy Christ GET IT OVER WITH, and the film obliges. For Oscar Winner Chloe Zhao this is still way better than doing dumb, condescending docufiction or slumming it with supers — if last time was the MCU made for critical consideration, this time it's her mumblecoreish slice of life given a moody medieval makeover. Especially as Zhao enters the Best Director conversation once more, it’s hard not to think of Shakespeare in Love and how origin stories behind the Bard’s best can be bubbly, bright and banal, or you can set yourself up to cry your blessed eyes out, with Anonymous forgotten somewhere in between.

It’s Willie so the acting better be good, and my word is Jessie Buckley a sure-footed, uncompromising performer, Zhao almost making her into her own Joan of Arc Dreyer-style, that’s how much raw emotion is filtered by the means of silent cinema without even really showing off. Buckley is once again forced to reimagine and wade through all sorts of emotional and existential undoings, following I’m Thinking of Ending Things to Men to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s work via The Lost Daughter and next what looks like “The Bride!”. Dead kids of course = instant sympathy, emotion, drama, and if you even peripherally know about this movie, book or history, then you know Hamnet is going to come at you with a thousand knives and twist ‘em real good. The question was whether Zhao and her disquieting, gliding, meditative moods — all the shots of trees and shit, it’s like hey I know you want to be Terrence Malick BUT YOU’RE NOT! — would aid the weepie or make this wishy-washy Weinstein-flavor fare for the extra masochistic. So while Buckley is bearing all (specifically a few takes of her birthing pains or whatever one calls the opposite, that god awful moment of grief you know is coming) and blowing you away, Paul Mescal continues to be a wonderful actor that can’t help but wind up in the most potentially silly situations (the dude's about to play Paul McCartney). Aftersun feels like his standard, but at least in All of Us Strangers he’s allowed to be the tonic of life in an otherwise alienating affair, each emotionally risky career moves. But in Gladiator II he tried transmitting some possessed weight to gussied up blockbusters but it became the most boring version of his roman-faced brooding. One of this movie’s real goofs is his own suicidal rendition of Hamlet’s beyond iconic monologue, sorry are you riffing or are you just reciting your own stuff for fun or what? Plus I don’t need movies to tell me about Orpheus and Eurydice, why do we keep referencing the same shit, why not tell me about the story of Sisyphus? Plato’s the cave? Thanks for the college undergraduate citations. 

But after the train tracks lead from quick smut to consummation to the Gus Van Sant version of a Shakespeare semi-biopic, this movie lets tragedy consume its last hour, and if the cuteness or the devastation don’t have you by act two, I doubt many a viewer will withstand the way the movie recontextualizes Hamlet and offers what I believe to be one of the more cathartic, even therapeutic moments in recent film memory. See, I was skeptical seeing either perfect scores or total dismissals of Hamnet, and while I can say is if 20% of it isn’t doing it for me, the surpassing sum altogether is really remarkable, and if the rushing waterfall of explosive emotional revelations in the film’s final 25 minutes don’t move you to some sort of choked up place, hell… whatever it’s quite a litmus test of human empathy is all needs said. I defiantly presumed she couldn’t get me to feel so much through such lofty lithead pretensions and mapped manipulation but I’ll be damned. The tricky tightrope between treacle and transcendence is wobbled over aplenty but Chloe nonetheless sticks the landing, and her best film yet is so nourishing in the end. It’s the kind of misery porn that might make you say fuck it, bring the pain, it’s worth it, maybe even twice.