By Jacob Cordery
That was the most beautifully delicate film I have ever seen. I do not really know how to put into words how I feel about that film. The beginning was slow and I was afraid to eat my popcorn. It was so quiet, and I am quite loud. God bless the casting agent – Buckley and Mescal gave two of the best performances I have ever seen grace a screen. The rawness, the pain – I am sure I have never felt such pain. The cinematography alone was wonderful, the coupling of silent and perfectly still wide shots with shaky and personal and painful close-ups brought us into an England that doesn’t exist anymore. We saw the colours of Spring, we saw the black of death, and the red that exists in between those two things. The carefully crafted narrative, and the lack of focus on the work of Shakespeare, was phenomenal. We see him as absent, frustrating, and at times aggressive. We are with Agnes wholly until the play and then, like her, we are united once again – we see Shakespeare’s grief on stage. And we get to stare into the eyes of a mother losing her child once again. And suddenly everything I knew about Hamlet is unwritten, everything I thought I understood of the play, nay, the world, is undone. I once wrote in an essay that Hamlet is “a passive canvas on which the world around paints”. I think I still agree – but for a different reason. Hamlet is our grief, Hamnet is theirs. In the film the child chooses to give his life for his sister’s. The viewer is put in the position of death – we gaze at the boy, who gazes back at us – perhaps mirroring the idea that Hamlet is aware that he is merely playing a part in a play. Hamnet never got to live, but his parents refuse to believe he is gone, or in heaven. William wonders where he is: Anne sees only nothing. Death is presented as inevitable – Shakespeare’s mother lost three girls, and Anne has a vision of dying surrounded by two of her children. We know death must come, as we do in Hamlet, we just hope it will not. Regardless, death is projected onto Hamnet and Hamlet alike. We see the illness shake Hamnet, paralleled in Claudius’ writhing as he drinks his poison. We see Agnes’ pain, her shocking pain, watching her child die once more on stage. It is almost too much to bear. Shakespeare, who, as he states at the beginning of the film, struggles to put feelings into words, redeems himself for being the absentee father – or perhaps, he at least finds a way to show his wife his own grief, his own pain. I will be shocked and outraged if Jessie Buckley does not win an Oscar – she truly suspended my disbelief. Like in Hamlet, we hope that little sweet child who sacrifices himself will not die. We pray to a God we don’t believe in; we bury our head in popcorn; we cover our eyes with tears. But the boy dies and in his final moments, he is cradled: Hamnet by his mother, Hamlet by the audience, and we, in the cinema, are left alive, but alone. We almost feel envy, for one who is truly loved. I was waiting for Horatio’s famous last couple of lines, but we did not need to be told ‘Goodnight, my sweet prince’ for we saw the farewell. Some things are better felt than said.
Featured Image: Focus Features