On a good friend’s recommendation I saw Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” recently, in a theater, I’m happy to say. It’s worth your time, for sure.
To be clear, I’ll never write a review, not here in any event and very likely not ever in the future. I’ve written reviews before, but if a review isn’t willing to assess quality, it’s no good. It’s like playing D&D where nobody’s character can get killed. For pushing 10 years now I’ve had a “no negativity in public” policy, and it means that on the internet I deal with things I can reference positively. So, never a review. Assume that anything I talk about is worth your time, as “Hamnet” definitely is.
I always have time for a work of art that is about art, and among other things that’s what “Hamnet” is. Very specifically, it’s about tragedy and catharsis. Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dies. Each more or less grieves separately. The film at root is about Agnes, and Jessie Buckley deserves the praise she’s received. But the character of Shakespeare is both well-written and performed, by Paul Mescal. Shakespeare’s process of grief and its transformation results in his famous play, and the film culminates in a performance Agnes attends.
Agnes arrives in deep grief and anger, and very correctly the film offers her no resolution. Real life doesn’t resolve. What the film does is show, very concretely, how art transforms, rather than resolves. While there are definitely levels of grief and trauma in life, everyone has their measure of both. This is what we see in the picture above: onstage, Hamlet dies. Agnes, by this time engulfed by the performance, extends her hands to the actor. Quickly, others in the audience do the same. Everyone brings their own experience to the work and in the process is transformed. Nothing resolves.
Like I mentioned above, I always have time for art about art, and what the film does exceptionally well is demonstrate — demonstrate, rather than tell — that art is a function of human life, and specifically of human relationships. As the film, and I imagine the novel as well, shows it, Shakespeare for very understandable reasons isn’t able to express his grief in precise sentences so that Agnes clearly understands everything he feels. Over some unimaginably long time, people have found that the various arts express things that need expression but which otherwise would remain unexpressed. E.P. Thompson wrote that class is not a thing, but a relationship, and I’d say the same of art. There needs to be human beings on either end of the relationship.
As an aside, I think I worry less about A.I. art than a lot of people, because I’m absolutely certain that it’s not art if a machine made it, and because art is a basic human function, people will continue to need it. A.I. can give us art-flavored products, but not art. Hopefully I’m right about this.