[COLUMN] Hamnet Is Not Just About Grief, But About the Performance of Grief | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which is in theatres now. It also contains some spoilers for the cast of the first performance run of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the early 17th century, so be warned about that. More seriously, if you’re looking for a quick review, Hamnet is very clever and very well-made, but I did find it - as I tend to find Zhao’s films - more academic than affecting. It’s doing something very deliberate and very thoughtful, and Jesse Buckley is great in the lead role, but that cleverness did keep me a bit at arm’s length, emotionally. Still, while it’s not among the best films of the year for me, I liked it a lot. 

Much of the discourse around Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet has come to focus on whether the film is “emotionally manipulative.”

This feels like a somewhat facile debate on a number of levels. Most obviously, every successful movie is “emotionally manipulative.” Roger Ebert talked about the idea of cinema as “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts”, and that power derives from being able to make the audience feel some intended emotion through the skillful combination of sound and imagery. The audience is not feeling for real people, but emotionally responding to performance and construction.

It is only a problem when the audience feels that emotional manipulation, when there is a level of abstraction to the emotional response, when the viewer feels the intent to create a particular feeling rather than feeling the specific emotion itself. This is an important distinction, because it is not the act of manipulation that is the problem, it is the misapplication of that particular sleight of hand. However, even that adds an extra layer of complication to parsing a movie.

After all, in order to determine whether it is a problem that a particular work feels emotionally manipulative, the viewer must parse intent. What was the film in question trying to get the audience to feel? In order to determine that the film didn’t hit its mark, it must be possible to clearly identify the intended target and figure out the distance between what it aspired to and what it accomplished. This is perhaps where the argument over Hamnet misses the point.

On the surface, Hamnet is very clearly a film that wants the audience to feel sad. Adapted from the novel of the same name, it offers a fictionalized account of the writing of the play Hamlet. It focuses on the death of young Hamnet Shakespeare (Jacobi Jupe), the son of Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William (Paul Mescal). The loss of a child is one of the most primal tragedies that a person could experience. As Jay Neugeboren pointed out, there is no word to communicate such loss in English.

Naturally, a film dealing with this sort of plot wades into some fairly heavy emotional territory. Hamnet is in part a study of two people, particularly Agnes, trying to navigate the impossibility of that grief. If that were all that Hamnet were about, it would be a fairly standard “weepy” or “three hanky movie”, a recent entry in the long history of Hollywood movies designed to elicit a strong emotional response from audiences by putting its central characters through trauma.

There is perhaps a broader debate about how rare these movies have become over the past decade or so, although the recent wave of Colleen Hoover adaptations seems to be bringing the genre back to multiplexes. In this era of knowing and winking irony, sincerity and earnestness have perhaps become passé. It is hard to make a movie that leans so heavily into these sorts of emotions in an era where audiences have been conditioned to respond cynically. However, this is a debate for another time.  

After all, this story of parental loss is not the entirety of Hamnet. This is not just a story about the death of the young Shakespeare child. It is also a story about the creation of Hamlet, which is often cited as the best play ever written. It is about how those two events are interlinked, how the death of Hamnet informed and shaped the play that would become Hamlet. It is about the transformation of personal feeling into public spectacle. It is, in a very literal sense, about emotional manipulation.

Zhao is a very interesting filmmaker, in large part because her work very deliberately places itself at something of an emotional remove from her subjects. Her style is heavily influenced by documentaries, often adopting a naturalistic approach that blends fiction and reality. In The Rider, she cast rodeo rider Brady Jandreau in a story that mirrored his own life. In Nomadland, Zhao populated the cast with real nomads, people living the life at the center of the film. The subject and the art become intertwined in Zhao’s films, and the audience is often asked to navigate that intersection in how they engage with the work.

Zhao’s films are largely observational. They don’t tend to judge their subjects. One of the bigger issues with Nomadland is Zhao’s very matter-of-fact collaboration with Amazon, with the filmmaker taking a great deal of care to reserve moral judgment on one of the most exploitative corporations of the planet. On the other hand, part of what makes Eternals so interesting – and perhaps even challenging – is that it’s the rare superhero movie that doesn’t seem entirely convinced that the world as it exists is worth saving.

It makes sense that a lot of the debate over Hamnet has focused on the death of the eponymous child. The film arrives in the midst of a series of movies – including Lynn Ramsay’s Die My Love and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – dealing with somewhat more complicated maternal emotions than have generally been explored in mainstream cinema. It makes sense to think about Hamnet in those terms, as the story of a grieving mother.

However, as tends to be the way that she approaches her films, Zhao takes a step back. The film is about grief, but it is about the processing and the conversion of grief. A large part of the film unfolds after the loss of Hamnet, exploring the different ways that Agnes and Will process the loss of their child. Agnes wants to wallow in her grief, to be consumed by it, refusing to let it go. She wants to live in the house where her son died, and cannot imagine literally or figuratively moving on.

Will seeks to transform that pain into something greater. The film’s climax finds Agnes travelling to London to visit Will. She wanders into the Globe Theatre in the middle of a performance of Hamlet. At first, she is horrified. She finds it grotesque that the actors would speak her dead son’s name. She observes that – in this first production – her husband has cast himself as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a literal substitution for his lost son and one rooted in stories told about the play’s history.

It is a very effective – and very affecting – sequence as Agnes watches her own grief transformed into public spectacle, performed as an immortal work of art. She gets to watch her own grief and loss played out among a crowd of strangers. In the shared space of the theatre, Will guides his audience through his own feelings of pain, a pain so great that it cannot be put into words, but which can through the medium of theatre be shared.

Tellingly, Hamnet does not show what happens after the performance. It does not explore how Agnes reacted to having her great trauma turned into public performance. It does not have Will argue for the validation of expressing his own loss. The moment of catharsis in Hamnet is not exclusive to either Will nor Agnes, nor is it shared between them. Certainly, Hamnet is about their loss, but it is also about something extrapolated from their loss. It cuts to black on Agnes’ response to the play’s emotional climax, not on any personal resolution between husband and wife.

Hamnet might be a movie about motherhood, but it is also part of “the new cinema of grief”, the wave of recent films and television shows from Pluribus to Life of Chuck to Bring Her Back. These are stories about characters navigating unimaginable loss in surreal circumstances. These are often stories that while not overtly about the pandemic are clearly informed by it. Pluribus recently had its lead, Carol (Rhea Seehorn), exploring freezer trucks packed with dead bodies.

It doesn’t really take that much to connect Hamnet back to the pandemic. The novel was published in 2020, but its tale of plague and isolation was described as “prescient.” A staged version was the first play to be performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon when it reopened following the pandemic. The cause of Hamnet’s death is a viral infection, described by the characters simply as “pestilence.”

Many of these studies of grief explore the paradox of individuals trying to mourn in a world that refuses to allow this. 28 Years Later is essentially about how nobody around young Spike (Alfie Williams) is willing to talk to the child about the inevitability of death and the necessity of grief. In Pluribus, Carol tries to mourn the loss of her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) in the middle of the apocalypse, while literally everybody around her tries to convince her that everything is fine.

In Hamnet, Agnes grows frustrated that she is not allowed to process her grief in her own way. “The world will not simply stand still, Agnes,” Will warns her. The world moves on. The globe keeps turning. Much like with the influenza pandemic that swept the planet in the wake of the First World War, it can feel like the pandemic is already being erased from public memory with a palpable reluctance to talk about it. There are very few official monuments to the loss, many privately maintained by families of those lost.

Hamnet makes an interesting companion piece to 28 Years Later. Both are essentially stories about the construction of monuments to unimaginable grief, to those lost to plague and pestilence. In 28 Years Later, Doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) constructs a monument out of human remains – a “bone temple” – to mourn those lost to the spread of a deadly virus. In Hamnet, the play Hamlet serves a similar purpose, providing a forum for a public outpouring of grief.

Will’s rendition of Hamlet speaks to Agnes, but presumably also to the hundreds and possibly thousands of people carrying similar grief. Hamlet was first performed some time around 1600, less than a decade after a plague had killed over 15,000 people in London, what would have been around 7.5% of the city’s population of 200,000 in 1603. It seems unlikely that Agnes was the only person in that theatre navigating similar feelings of loss and experiencing a similar feeling of catharsis.

As such, Hamnet is less about the direct experience of grief than it is about the importance of the performance of communal grief. As such, it makes sense that the film’s emotional core exists at a remove. It is an example of art’s power to emotionally manipulate its audience, but it is also about art’s power to emotionally manipulate its audience. As such, it feels like it is part of the film’s intention and purpose to provoke that debate about whether it is “emotionally manipulative.”

There is, of course, a broader debate to be had about the emotional effectiveness of such an approach, about whether making a movie that is about the performance of grief imposes a distance between audience and film that undermines the drama itself. However, to give credit where it is due, Hamnet is not doing any of this carelessly or thoughtlessly. It is inviting the audience to think about not just grief, but the performance of grief. It understands that the play is the thing.