Much ado about Hamnet

Can a seven-Kleenex emotionally draining movie about Shakespeare's bereaved family four centuries ago sweep the top Oscars this year?

- BY PETER SHERIDAN

When the Academy Award nominations are announced on Thursday, the heart-wrenching British drama Hamnet is expected to challenge Leonardo DiCaprio's thriller One Battle After Another for dominance.Hamnet is proving the movie to beat. It captured the best drama award at the Golden Globes earlier this month, where its costar Jessie Buckley took best actress honours, and snared multiple nominations from every awards group.

Based on the bestselling 2020 novel by author Maggie O'Farrell, the film explores how a young William Shakespeare was so devastated by the death of 11-year-old son Hamnet from bubonic plague his marriage almost collapsed, and he poured his grief into writing his tragic masterpiece Hamlet. “It's not nothing to call a play and a tragic hero after your son - it speaks volumes,” O'Farrell said in a 2020 interview.

Gladiator II star Paul Mescal portrays the tortured Bard of Avon, and Buckley his wife Anne Hathaway not the star of Les Miserables, but an earlier Anne called Agnes in the film.

But will moviegoers appreciate that the film, co-written by O'Farrell and its Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, is not a historical documentary but rather a beautifully crafted work of literary fiction? Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are so timeless and ubiquitous, it is tempting to think that we understand all there is to know about him.

Yet, surprisingly for such a prolific writer, there is not one letter, diary or journal that survives to illuminate the dark shadows of his psyche.

Hollywood has done its share of myth-making to fill that gap, though.

Shakespeare in Love won the 1999 best picture Oscar imagining how a torrid affair with a wealthy merchant's daughter, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, inspired him to pen Romeo and Juliet. Kenneth Branagh's 2018 drama All Is True imagined Shakespeare's final years, while on the small screen Tim Curry starred in the 1978 ITV series Will Shakespeare.