‘Hamnet’ - Review
I wrote this in my notes app a couple months back:
I’ve gotten pretty good at holding it together. I wouldn’t say I’m really good at it just yet but it’s the skill I’ve been working on for the last few years. I might even say I’m proud of this (albeit unhealthy) ability to ignore anything that bothers me and keep everything tightly wound and functional. Someone dies and you feel it for a second and then you box it up because there’s work to do. Your cat dies and you’re sad for like a day but you can’t really sit with it because what’s the point, you know? Sitting with it doesn’t change anything. Why suffer twice? Just keep moving!
It hasn’t been the easiest few months. Beyond the usual “everything is messed” and the whole “if you are not indirectly complicit in the oppression and exploitation of others then you are probably the one who is being oppressed and exploited” state of the world, on a personal level my relationship with death has really evolved. But it’s just like any other year. I just kept going because that’s what you do. You compartmentalize and you tell yourself that you’ll deal with it later when things calm down, except things don’t calm down. Why take a day off of work, if the work will just be there waiting and piling on when I’m back.
If you ask someone wiser than me they’d probably tell you that I’m scared of what would happen if I actually stop. Like if I let myself feel the full weight of everything, I won’t be able to get back up. So I don’t. I stay composed and productive while keeping the persona intact. Or maybe they’ll tell you I’m scared of being a burden. And that if I let myself grieve I will be an inconvenience to the people I care about. Who knows? I’ll leave that to the people wiser than me. For now I am doing a great job of pretending nothing matters and holding it together.
That was before I watched Hamnet.
Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name follows Agnes and William Shakespeare as they handle the grief of losing their eleven year old son. Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, is an earthy woman who allows herself to feel everything intensely. She’s crumbling under the grief and not hiding it. Conversely, Will, played by Paul Mescal, keeps leaving. He goes to London to work on his plays because he doesn’t know what to do with his own sadness, so he just removes himself from it. You watch this marriage strain under the weight of loss because neither of them can reach the other.
Grief isn’t some abstract emotional concept here; it manifests physically. You see it in the way Agnes moves, in the way she can’t look at her other children without terror crossing her face. You see it in the way Will hunches over his writing, trying to transform his pain into something he can control. Zhao shoots with natural light to create long, patient takes that linger. There’s no cutting away when things get uncomfortable. The camera stays put. Somewhere in the middle of watching this, I realized my body had stopped trying to manage everything. I wasn’t thinking about what I needed to do after or how I was going to write about this. I was just there. That was a new feeling I think, or maybe one that I haven’t felt in a long time.
I don’t think I’ve let myself properly feel anything in months. I’ve acknowledged things, sure. I’ve had the appropriate emotional responses at the moment. Then I’ve immediately moved on because there’s always something else that needs my attention. It’s easier to stay in motion than to sit still with the fact that people I love are gone and I didn’t really give myself permission to be wrecked by that.
The film makes a great effort to put you in place. Zhao doesn’t rush anything. Scenes unfold slowly and you are there with Agnes and William as they try to figure out how to keep living. Watching it, I felt something in my body loosen. Not in a healing way, exactly. More like I’d been clenching something for so long that I forgot it was possible to unclench it. When I was watching Hamnet I never thought explicitly about myself. I was fully in their world, but I felt everything in mine.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about where I’ve been putting all of this. The answer is nowhere, really. Ultimately, I have been compressing it and swallowing it down, hoping it stays there. It probably doesn’t work like that, though. I think it just sits there instead, taking up space, and making everything feel just slightly off. I can still handle that though.
Near the end where Agnes has to confront what Will has done with their grief; how he’s turned the most private thing that ever happened to them into something public. She’s angry at first. Then something shifts. Art will never bring anything back, obviously. It doesn’t fix anything. It does give shape to the grief, though. It makes it something that can finally be looked at instead of just run from.
When I was watching Hamnet I wasn’t managing anything. I was just there. My body was there for two hours while I let it be there without trying to control what it was feeling or make it smaller or more manageable. That’s not something I do nor something I like doing. I’d much rather keep everything tightly held, constantly managing (after all my LinkedIn says that I am a manager and I wear that crown with earnestness), always in control. I’m scared that if I actually let myself feel the full weight of everything, I’ll fall apart and I won’t know how to put myself back together.
Hamnet was the first movie that caught me off guard in a while. It was the first time in months when I felt ready to completely let go and surrender to something. It was the first time where for two hours I was able to let my guard down and I wasn’t holding anything together. I was just watching someone else survive the worst thing that ever happened to them, and my body understood something my brain has been too busy to process. I’m still scared of actually dealing with everything I’ve been avoiding. I’m still going to probably go back to my usual mode of just staying composed and functional. But I was able to remember how it felt to stop.
That’s why I love the movies. Sometimes you need Hamnet to show you what you’ve been doing to yourself. You need to watch someone else fall apart so you can remember that holding everything in doesn’t actually protect you. It just makes you smaller. I didn’t know how badly I needed that until it happened.