It may sound reductive to apply the term “biopic” to Chloé Zhao’s new adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel inspired by the life of William Shakespeare. Still, even if Hamnet is particularly artfully executed, it’s swimming in the same waters as biographical prestige films from Shakespeare in Love to Deliver Me From Nowhere.
It’s also instructive as an example of how to successfully square the circle when telling a story about the life of an artist. Last year saw a spate of Oscar nominations (but no wins) for the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, while this year, the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere looks like a contender. The latter, directed by Scott Cooper, was the more successful film as a whole, but James Mangold’s base difficulty score was higher with the former.
Both of those films were insightful, but it’s Hamnet that provides the most satisfying answer to the question audiences come to these films with: what price does art exact, and is it worth it?
Hamnet establishes a grounded, believable family built on the relationship between Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley). When the playwright’s career starts to take off, requiring prolonged absences from home, Zhao grips viewers in the tension between Shakespeare’s love for his family and his commitment to an art that — we know, though he doesn’t — will transcend time.
In showing us how Shakespeare suffers for his art, Hamnet outdoes A Complete Unknown, with its opaque central figure that Mangold refuses to unpack. That reticence is understandable, but it leaves us unsure of what the emotional stakes are. We don’t know how Dylan really feels about the two women in his life, and aren’t shown any connection between those relationships and his art.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is more lucid in its portrait of a good man who’s — at that point in his life — a bad boyfriend. Springsteen’s more fundamental, and fraught, relationship with his father is drawn in a way that feels truthful, without demonizing a damaged man. The connection between that relationship and the album Springsteen is making (Nebraska) is amply clear; if anything, too clear.
Hamnet has the advantage of being about Hamlet, a work too towering to be reduced to any one aspect or interpretation. All Zhao needs to do is show us the emotional connection between that play and Shakespeare’s life — and she does so in the context of a devastating plague, turning the film into a reflection on art and collective grief.
As Agnes watches Hamlet, the film makes the case for art as a means of transfiguring an individual experience into one that is shared: not only among artist and audience, but between the artist and his loved ones. In that respect, it sets a bar that future filmmakers — even if their subjects aren’t so lofty, their source material so rich, their craft so impeccable — would do well to look to.
Images courtesy Focus Features
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