Sporting one of the finest profiles since Brando, he is immensely watchable, as always. Yet he brings a distracting physicality to the role as satisfying Hollywood notions of what a hero must be.
Buckley delivers the more interesting take. Her sensual and witchy Agnes gives birth in a her spiritual home of the forest where she is previously seen foraging for medicinal herbs while accompanied by her hawk. It is a performance that powerfully conveys the sheer strength of character it takes to be an independent woman who is not the Queen in Elizabethan England.
Chinese-born Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao lovingly photographs the green and pleasant land. Often the verdant canopy of Agnes’s forest fills the screen. You can almost smell the fertile earth into which the trees greedily sink their roots.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and William Shakespeare[Missing Credit]
However, the dialogue is less convincing. Although the director shares a screenwriting credit with O’Farrell, Zhao has admitted to a limited understanding of Shakespeare’s language. This caused waves but shouldn’t have as there is not much of Shakespeare’s language in the film.
However, a disconnect emerges between the way people talk to each other in Zhao and O’Farrell’s screenplay and the language of Shakespeare in his plays.
This becomes increasingly jarring as the film’s plot turns to the first-ever production of Hamlet. I’m not arguing that everyone should be thou-ing and forsooth-ing. But “Don’t shush me!”, which is how Agnes scolds William during a husband-and-wife row, just feels wrong.
Producers Steven Spielberg and especially Sam Mendes, who has directed enough Shakespeare on stage to know better, might have closed this gap by suggesting the screenplay adopt a kind of middle ground between modern and Elizabethan English similar to the way Arthur Miller created a version of American English for The Crucible (set in the late 17th century) that was accessible to modern audiences yet sounded convincingly archaic.
Still, the film’s climax – as an audience gathers for the first performance of Hamlet – is stunning. The show is watched by Buckley’s sceptical Agnes whose grief is slowly lifted, not only by the play but by seeing a version of her son on stage. An unmissable, emotionally poleaxing moment of cinematic theatre.
Hamnet
Cert: 12A
