Much ado about Hamnet

It's set to dominate Oscar nominations but is Chloé Zhao's award-winning tearjerker about the death of Shakespeare's son an emotionally overwrought piece of fiction?

- BY PETER SHERIDAN

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