Ay, there’s more than a few rubs in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet

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Hamnet

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Written by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell

Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Jacobi Jupe

Classification PG; 126 minutes

Opens in select theatres Nov. 28

Cast as William Shakespeare’s wife, Jessie Buckley does not appear as a woman to whom one might offer something second-best. She is fiery, demanding and uncompromising, the molten core of Chloé Zhao’s Shakespeare biopic Hamnet. Her all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.

Notoriously, Shakespeare left Anne Hathaway (or Agnes in this rendition, as she was sometimes called) his second-best bed in his will. Recent scholarship suggests this was a gesture of intimacy, willing her the marital bed as opposed to the fancy guest bed, but it has gone down in history as a slight.

Hathaway was older than Shakespeare and pregnant at the time of the marriage, and by the height of his career he had largely abandoned his family in Stratford for his theatre in London. Male literary historians have speculated that it was a shotgun wedding, a resentful marriage and ultimately an estranged relationship.

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, on which the film is based, is a feminist revisionist version, speculating on a true love severely tested by Shakespeare’s blossoming career and the death of Hamnet, the couple’s only son – whose name, in Elizabethan spelling, was interchangeable with that of his father’s most famous character.

This is Zhao’s first significant feature since the Oscar-winning Nomadland – the least said about Marvel’s Eternals the better – and the early scenes of the film are engrossing. Shakespeare, the son of a local glover who owes the Hathaway farming family money, is hired to tutor the younger brothers to pay off his father’s debts.

He falls for their sister, a wild child and falconer, more comfortable with the plants and creatures of the forest than in her stepmother’s house. (Today, we’d call her a psychic and naturopath.) She is a passionate match for the young dreamer for whom the stories in his head are increasingly as real as life around him.

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As Mescal deepens that sense of an artist haunted by his characters and driven toward London, the place where he can make them real, Buckley takes the domestic story in equally dramatic directions as Agnes gives birth to one daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and then twins Judith and Hamnet (Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe). The children’s performances are strong, even when asked to do such cringe-making scenes as one where they play the three witches of Macbeth.

When 11-year-old Hamnet dies of the plague while Shakespeare is away in London – no spoiler there; there’s plenty of narrative and psychological surprises left in the deathbed scene – the film enters difficult territory. To call it tear-jerking is probably unfair, but what follows cannot be excused simply because an audience will crave any emotional resolution that will help them recover from scenes of a child’s death.

Now, Hamnet trots out some cheap literary psychology. Shakespeare, devastated by the loss of his son, contemplates throwing himself into the Thames. “To be … or not to be … ” Seriously. He sits by the river muttering the most famous soliloquy in the English language as though composing it in his head. If Zhao wanted to pull that off, she would have to find a way to strip those words of their fame, a feat she can’t achieve because the plot is so obviously building toward the play.

It’s performed in a recreation of the Globe playhouse, with Agnes, vociferously uncomprehending of theatre’s artifice, demanding to know why a person with the name of her dead son is appearing on stage, as though a resurrection were taking place.

The production – and we are treated to several scenes – is not very good, which historical accuracy probably demands. With minimal rehearsal time and limited stage furniture, Shakespearean theatre would no doubt have seemed raw and improvised by contemporary standards.

But that doesn’t save us from suffering through these passages as Zhao ties her themes up with a big bow. Grief is channelled into art; Hamnet is dead, but Hamlet will live forever. It’s all too pat and too weepy, in a film that betrays its actors’ fine performances.