The Hamnet Review

Chloe Zhao's newest film is a limp work of historical misinterpretation

Many films about real people—biopics or otherwise—end with title cards. It’s a succinct way to get across some narrative information that takes place outside the space of the film’s story, especially when that information provides an ironic counterpoint to the ending of the film proper. Perhaps we’re told via text that the happy characters we’ve just sent off with a fade-to-black ended up meeting tragic ends, or perhaps it’s the reverse. Recent years have seen some terrible examples: Just this year Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere brought us the risible “Bruce Springsteen continued to struggle with depression, but never again without help or hope,” and The Imitation Game’s final moments memorably impress on us, concerning Alan Turing’s code-breaking inventions, that “today we call them computers.”

Hamnet gives us a new entrant to the Bad Title Card Hall of Shame, and in an innovative move it begins with it rather than ending. The film opens with text informing us that back in the 16th century, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were considered interchangeable. Uh oh, the film thinks we need an obvious connection to be made for us before the story even begins! It’s hard to give a film the benefit of the doubt when it makes clear right off the bat that it does not intend to do the same for you.

Let’s at least try, though. Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao, is a speculative historical fiction film about William Shakespeare and his family. Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died young. He went on to write a play called Hamlet which is, among other things, about a father and a son. This had led to some amount of hmm-ing and chin-scratching. And why shouldn’t it? Shakespeare’s plays are the most significant, enduring works of writing in the English language, yet the information we have about the circumstances of their creation necessitated a lot of inference and interpretation. It doesn’t take too large a leap to imagine that Hamnet may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when writing a play whose title character has almost the exact same name—sorry, the exact same name, thank you opening title card.

That Shakespeare was actually adapting a medieval legend about a Danish prince named Amleth is a Cracked.com gotcha which would be cheap to sincerely invoke. Hamnet is a work of historical imagination, and it would be unfair to get caught up in nitpicking about its accuracy. The film seems to want to distance itself from the real Shakespeare anyway; it spends a lot of time deliberately obfuscating his identity, to the extent that the subtitles (I saw an open caption screening) credit him only as “Tutor” and then “Husband” until the film’s final scene. This is not, we’re meant to understand, the real Shakespeare so much as it is a character inspired by him. In the novel on which the film is based, author Maggie O’Farrell stresses that the story is “based on my idle speculation.” That’s all well and good, but sadly Hamnet is perfectly capable of failing on its own merits.

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