'Hamnet' is moving but too cautious

Chloé Zhao's film about Shakespeare and his wife is a tasteful but tentative study in grief

- Uday Bhatia

I heard it about 15 minutes into the film, when Agnes tells the village tutor whom she likes, and who's crazy for her, that she can read landscapes on his hand.

"You saw a landscape?" he asks with a smile. "Mm hmm," she replies. Later on, the tutor tells Agnes, whom he's now married and has three children with, that he's acquiring a house in Stratford for them. To this also she says, "Mm hmm."

Hamnet wants Shakespeare as a hook to hang its tragic story on. It wants a few details of his life. It wants a smattering of the plays. But it wants nothing to do with the language. I don't know if they said "mm hmm" in 16th century England; for all I know they said "uh oh" and "uh uh". But it feels inadequate. It's a strange impulse, to want to make a film about someone who changed the way people speak, yet have barely any of that speech coursing through it.

Hamnet is adapted by director Chloé Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from the latter's novel of the same name, which imagined William Shakespeare (not identified by name in the book, and only once in the film) and his wife, Agnes, devastated by the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Soon after, he begins to write Hamlet. O'Farrell’s original alternating timelines have been made linear by Zhao; we proceed from courtship to blissful home life to tragedy to catharsis. More crucially, O'Farrell’s rich language has been sanded down into something functional and unintimidating to modern ears, a lot of okays and yeahs and constructions one might use today.

Perhaps Zhao felt that poetry would come in the way of tragedy.