Film reviews: Hamnet | Giant

Hamnet (12A) ★★

Giant (15) ★★

After winning an Oscar for Nomadland, Chloe Zhao quickly came a cropper with Eternals, a failed comic book movie in which the acclaimed director struggled to adapt her style to the franchise filmmaking juggernaut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though it wasn’t really her fault that the wheels were already starting to come off the Marvel machine, you can see why her new film Hamnet is being hailed as something of a comeback. Featuring awards-tipped performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, and based on co-writer Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespeare-inspired literary bestseller of the same name, it seems, on the surface, like a more fitting follow-up to Nomadland. Get beyond the awards season hype, though, and it also feels like Zhao has simply traded one sensibility flattening format for another; the synthetic CGI of a superhero film here giving way to the artistically suffocating machinations of a respectable prestige period piece.

A fanciful bit of literary fiction revisionism, the film engineers a creation myth for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, extrapolating its origins from the death of his 11-year-old son Hamnet. The case for what one has to do with the other — beyond the stated coincidence that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were, historically, interchangeable — isn’t exactly persuasively made, at least not in the way this film renders it.

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Focused mostly on Shakespeare’s wife, here going by the name of Agnes and played by Buckley with free-spirited wildness, the film reclaims her as a feral, folkloric Earth Mother plagued with premonitions of impending catastrophes that Zhao attempts to root — via early flashbacks — in the trauma of Agnes’ own unresolved feelings regarding her mother’s premature death. It’s this wildness that bewitches Mescal’s Will, an aspiring poet forced to teach Latin to Agnes’s adopted siblings to alleviate his abusive father’s debts. Will isn’t good at talking to people, but he’s good at telling stories and ensorcels Agnes too — somewhat ominously — with the tale of Orpheus.

Before long they’re expecting a child of their own and begin a life together in Stratford: Will miserably working for his father’s glove-making business; Agnes realising he needs more from life and packing him off to London where his artistic ambitions can flourish uninterrupted. Though the film seems intent on interrogating the myth of artistic genius by boldly sidelining Shakespeare to spend more time with Agnes, its focus on her anguish over the subsequent birth and health of their twins Hamnet and Judith — and eventually her anger with Will when calamity strikes — is rife with clichés of its own, not least the opportunity for Buckley to deliver wrenching scenes of tastefully calibrated histrionics before the action hastily embraces Mescal’s Will again to show how he’s channeling his own grief into his work.

The latter effectively reduces Hamlet to a therapy session for grieving parents, one in which Will appears to extemporise the “To be or not to be” speech while contemplating suicide on the edge of the Thames. Later we witness him inventing method acting by channeling his guilt and grief, Brando-style, to play the ghost of Hamlet’s father during the play’s inaugural performance at the Globe.

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Witnessed by an emotionally wrung-out Agnes, this performance should be the emotional highpoint of the film, the moment where the floodgates open as the healing power of art — its ability to transcend time and space in inexplicable ways — works its magic on Agnes, whom we’re told early on “can see things others can’t”. But unlike Zhao’s earlier work on films like The Rider and Nomadland, everything feels heavy-handed and manipulative, like we’re being directed to have a particularl reaction, something summed up by the distracting decision to incorporate Max Richter’s most over-used piece of music, On the Nature of Daylight, into the film’s final moments. It’s a blatant plea to shed some tears, but it also brings to mind unflattering comparisons with Arrival, a far more successful film about a bereft mother suddenly set free from the prison of grief by a revelation about the nature of time. Like a glum spin on Shakespeare in Love, Hamnet, in the end, plays too much like primo Oscar bait.

Perhaps there’s a decent film to be made about 1990s British boxing phenomenon “Prince” Naseem Hamed. Sadly Giant isn’t it. Though blessed with star turns from rising Brit actor Amir El-Masry (who walks the walk and talks the talk as Hamed) and Pierce Brosnan (on twinkly form as Brendan Ingle, the Sheffield-based Irish trainer who mentored him from the age of seven), the film coasts by on the standard rise-and-fall structure of the sports movie. That’s too bad because there’s an intriguing story here in the souring relationship between a superstar athlete and the man who nurtured his talent, but writer/director Rowan Athale takes a pretty blunt approach to dramatising its complexities en route to securing Ingle’s legacy as the underdog trainer of the boxing world.

Both films in cinemas from 9 January

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