BEFORE: Let's get right into the second half of Movie Year 18 - sorry, no halftime break here. I know that's very important to sports but this is not sports, except when it's about sports. It's Father's Day weekend and I got here right on time with my films, you should be able to easily figure out what I picked for the Father's Day film. But this is a great lead-in that's also very father-centric, from what I hear.
Emily Watson carries over from "The Legend of Ochi".
THE PLOT: In late 16-century England, Agnes, a healer sensitive to the world around her, builds a home with William, a local tutor and aspiring playwright. As their lives fracture, they are tested by distance, silence and grief.
AFTER: Sure, this is a solid Father's Day weekend film, but how much of this is truth? We live in a world that still debates who William Shakespeare really was, or if he was ever real at all, or just another playwright writing under another name. Part of the problem was that there was such bad record-keeping back in the 1600's, it's almost like they didn't know how to keep a database or a proper phone directory or an e-mail contact list at all. And was he Shakespeare or Shake-Spear or Shaqspere or some other person at the end of the day? Similarly, we are told here that "Hamnet" and "Hamlet" are essentially the same name. Really? Are they? Same goes for Anne and Agnes, because I learned that Billy Shakes was married to one Anne Hathaway, only, umm, not the one that's famous and living now. Duh. Where the official records are concerned, it seems that if somebody could get half of the letters in someone's name right, that legally counted, it was close enough.
There's a record of someone taking down a deposit for the marriage of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey", and well, close enough, I guess? There's another document that says the guy who wrote all those plays was engaged to "Anne Whateley", so either Shakespeare had two families or nobody back then was that concerned about proper spelling. These days if you even get somebody's pronouns wrong, you're in for an earful, imagine how Briitni or Sophya or Tiphaniee is going to completely LOSE IT if you spell their name wrong on their coffee cup. Right?
Still, I'm taking all of these events portrayed here with a grain of salt, because, well, nobody really knows. Did Shakespeare truly love his wife, or was it a marriage of convenience? Did he marry her just because he got her pregnant? And what does a guy who wrote all those sonnets really know about love, anyway? In his will he left her his "second-best bed", and I really want to know who got the first-best one. Something could be rotten in the state of Denmark, just saying. What happened here is that someone noticed the similarity between "Hamlet" the play title and "Hamnet", the name of Shakespeare's son, and kind of reverse-engineered a story behind the story, thinking of possible real-life events that could have helped inspire the story of the tortured Danish prince, Hamlet. In this scenario, maybe Shakespeare saw himself as the late King, who appeared to Hamlet as a ghost in order to offer him advice and tell him that his uncle, who is now his stepfather, plotted to murder him. Yeah, people believed in ghosts back then, they also believed that there was an angel of death who would fly over people's houses and randomly select people to die, because they just didn't have the science that would explain things like the plague and other transmitted diseases. Shocker, there's no angel of death, I think most people have dispensed with that, but plenty of people still believe in ghosts - so progress is slow.
Maybe we can agree that Shakespeare was working some personal stuff out through his plays, like he maybe wasn't the bestest father, he lived mostly in London while working on his plays, and his wife and kids lived in Stratford. This film (based on a speculative novel) would have you believe that his wife Agnes (or Anne) was some kind of forest-dweller/healer, and could not stand to live in a city situation. Or the kids had some kind of COPD or other mild disease and needed to live near open air, or perhaps that's just what their mother wanted for them. See how it's all a bit unclear? We can't really understand why people did what they did 400 years ago because it was a different time and people believed different things.
Some people back then had maybe never seen a play before, and they didn't know you weren't supposed to talk to or touch the actors on the stage. Late in this film we see Agnes attend an early staging of "Hamlet" and she's very rude, she screams at the actors because it's her reality up on the stage, that's her husband as Hamlet's father's ghost and the young man playing Hamlet looks a lot like what her son would look like, had he grown up. Oops, spoiler alert, but hey, one out of every three children died back then from various diseases that they didn't even know how to prevent. So if you made it to adulthood in the 1600's, you kind of beat the odds, and if you were very lucky, you might make it to the old age of 40. Shakespeare made it to age 52, which was something, maybe he lived longer because he and his wife lived separately - if they had lived together his life could have been shorter and only FELT twice as long.
I'm reminded of that early audience that saw a film of a train and they all thought they were about to get hit by a train, they didn't understand what images on a movie theater screen were. Well, that's what Shakespeare was up against, he had to keep reminding the audience that all the world's a stage, and that these actors on the stage were just shadows of life, and if they have offended, "think but this, and all is mended, / that you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear." In other words, nothing is real, and if you don't like the play, please bugger off, because you probably were sleeping through it anyway. Note that Shakespeare even had to tell people to applaud at the end of "The Tempest", "But release me from these bands / With the help of your good hands." Way to kiss up to the audience, right? People were all kind of dumb that way.
We also learn here the problem with trying to foretell the future - Agnes has a vision of two children sitting by her own deathbed, but then is surprised when she gives birth to fraternal twins, making her total number of children three. Uh-oh, now part of her does NOT want her vision to come true, because that means one of her kids will die early. Well, it was common. But she kept reading Hamnet's palm and predicting a great and long future for him, so, well, there goes THAT method of prophecy, too. She also had no idea that her husband would become such a famous playwright, but I guess nobody saw that coming, not even William himself. And she said Hamnet could join his father's theater company when he grew up, and well, he kind of did, but not in the literal sense, just as a character in the most famous play of all time.
I guess the moral here is to just keep on living, and doing what you do, because you never know when that book, play, film or podcast you've been working on is going to really hit. And if it doesn't, well at least you gave it your best shot. Also, don't let anybody tell you who you can and can't marry, and what kind of life you need to have together - that's up to you and your partner, it's not up to anybody else to define or pigeon-hole. Also, your life is going to be part comedy and part tragedy probably, so you've got to learn to be ready for both. You might win an Oscar for your work, or you may just watch someone else in the film you were in win one, while you get overlooked. It happens.
I did work at a screening of this film, and there was a Q&A after with most of the cast, including Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and Emily Watson. For some reason I don't seem to have a photo of that event, I wonder why.
Directed by Chloe Zhao (director of "Eternals" and "Nomadland")
Also starring Jessie Buckley (last seen in "Women Talking"), Paul Mescal (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Jacobi Jupe (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), Olivia Lynes, Justine Mitchell (last seen in "Imagine Me & You"), David Wilmot (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Bodhi Rai Breathnach, Freya Hannan-Mills, James Skinner, Elliot Baxter (last seen in "1917"), Dainton Anderson, Louisa Harland (last seen in "Lost in London"), Noah Jupe (last seen in "No Sudden Move"), Raphael Goold, Shaun Mason (last seen in "Death Defying Acts"), Matthew Tennyson, El Simons, Clay Milner Russell, Sam Woolf, Hera Gibson, Jack Shalloo (also last seen in "1917"), Javier Marzan (last seen in "Paddington"), Zac Wishart, James Lintern, Eva Wishart, Effie Linnen, Laura Guest, John Mackay (last seen in "Living"), Albert Mccormick, Faith Delaney (last seen in "Here"), Smylie Bradwell,
RATING: 6 out of 10 hard-boiled eggs
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