'Hamnet' review: Jessie Buckley is the witch wife of Paul Mescal's Shakespeare

William Shakespeare would not be captivated by this domestic drama about his home life in Stratford-upon-Avon. Where is the action? The ingenuity? The word game?

The skill of the great playwright is difficult to match. Instead, “Hamnet,” directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), uses our curiosity about the Bard to weave a sodden tale of love and pain with enough tears to flood the River Thames. Co-written by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell, this tonally faithful adaptation of O'Farrell's florid 2020 novel of the same name stars Paul Mescal as Will, the name he uses here, and Jessie Buckley as his wife, Agnes, pronounced Ahn-Yeahalthough the real person was more commonly called Anne Hathaway. The 16th century penchant for treating Agnes/Anne and Hamnet/Hamlet as interchangeable versions of the same name is part of the plot and must be endured.

The story unfolds during the years when Will launched his career in London, missed the deathbed of one of his children, and channeled his guilt and grief into the theater's most prestigious ghost story. Most of the time, though, we're stuck at home with Agnes, who spends half the movie crying.

“There are many different ways to cry,” wrote O'Farrell, whose book lists several variations. (The novel is packed with descriptors and rarely uses a word when a paragraph will suffice.) Buckley's wet, wild performance shows us each of them: “the sudden shedding of tears, the deep sobs, the silent, endless leaking of water from the eyes,” plus a few others I'll call the vomiting meow, the furious crunching, and the choking laughter. “Hamnet” is my least favorite of Buckley's featured roles. (I loved “The lost daughter”), but its humidity has experts betting that it will finally win its Academy Award.

Real Christopher Marlowe aside, William Shakespeare was a real person who, historical records agree, married a pregnant woman eight years his senior and had three children: Susanna, the eldest, and twins Judith and Hamnet. (They are played, respectively, by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe.) Almost everything that has been written about the family is conjecture derived from the fragments of information that exist, such as Shakespeare's will that leaves his wife nothing but “his second best bed.”

Previous fictions have cast Agnes as a cradle thief, a shrew, or the Bard's secret co-writer. Zhao's script goes further: this Agnes is a witch. Not only in the slanderous sense, as in that of a difficult woman (although she is that too). Buckley's Agnes is truly magical. You can predict someone's fate by squeezing their hand, the party trick Christopher Walken pulled in “The Dead Zone.” Sometimes he makes mistakes, sometimes he fights fate with everything he has, but his faith in his foresight is rarely shaken. Her husband, who would later include witches, sorcerers and fortune tellers in “Macbeth,” “The Tempest” and “Julius Caesar,” is burdened by her psychic gifts. He complains that it's hard to open up to someone who can already “guess your secrets at a glance.”

Her ability to see through time and space has made Agnes transparent as well. Joy, confusion, fascination and despair take over his entire face instantly, turning Buckley's performance into an acting exercise of rawness and present. (The crooked smile that signifies his unadorned reality is exhausting.) The plot has no underground levels either, relying solely on its primal display of sweat, hormones and angst. This period piece almost seems to believe that Agnes is inventing every emotion.

Will, a tutor, gets caught up teaching Latin the first time he sees his bride-to-be frolicking in the grass with a hawk on her arm. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal frames the scene in a glass panel so that Agnes's reflection ripples across Will's longing face, contrasting the earthly sorceress with the indoor bookworm. These weirdos have little in common besides their defiance of village norms and their families' mutual disapproval. “I'd rather you go to sea than marry this girl,” hisses Will's mother, Mary (Emily Watson). (Its gradual thaw is truly moving.)

Meanwhile, Agnes' most supportive brother, a farmer named Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), can't understand what Will has to offer. “Why marry a pale-faced scholar?” ask. “What's the use?”

His flirting (especially Mescal's goofy, happy, slutty smile) makes Shakespeare easily relatable. Maybe his Ye Olde Tinder profile said, “Aspiring playwright seeks older woman, preferred pagan.” Sometimes, in “Hamnet,” 1582, the year of their marriage, it could pass for a millennium earlier, a rustic era in which neither of them has anything more urgent to do than snog under the trees. Later, their partnership feels more contemporary: a frustrated writer leaving the bottle behind while his wife supports but doesn't understand his work.

That the greatest playwright of the last 500 years is married to someone who completely lacks curiosity about his art is, in itself, a tragedy. There is a scene in which one wonders not only if Agnes has never seen one of his plays, but if she even knows what a play is. is. Our credulity would be strained if Mescal's Shakespeare were the skilled conversationalist his first biographer John Aubrey described as “very good company, with a very agile and pleasant Witt.” But this stuttering and rather boring guy doesn't give the impression of being a genius. He must keep everything for his pen.

This is not Mescal's fault. The book's version of him is more or less the same, perhaps because O'Farrell doesn't reveal that this fictional, grieving character is Shakespeare until the last page. (Although the title is a gimmicky clue). At least Zhao adds scenes that show him working on his material. The children prance around the yard quoting “Macbeth” a decade before he puts it on stage, and Mescal gets to recite a soliloquy from “Hamlet” as a small treat. I enjoyed the understated tension of Will returning home from London with a hip haircut and an earring.

The texture of the film is impressive. Żal's camera rotates around his house, absorbing it as if it were a documentary. Every time the movie comes out, he and Zhao make you feel the mystical power of the earth and leaves. The forest resonates with so much energy that it seems to live next to a highway. To make things feel authentic, co-editors Affonso Gonçalves and Zhao keep in errors that other filmmakers might consider mistakes, like a bug bombarding one of the actor's eyelashes. The spell of “Hamnet” naturalism is rarely broken, save for a couple of nice flourishes, such as a shadow puppet depiction of the plague and a shot of the underworld seen through a black lace curtain, a literalization of going beyond the veil.

Meanwhile, the talented Max Richter's score is made up of soft little piano tinkles and one major, if beautiful, mistake: a climactic drop from his 2004 masterpiece, “On the Nature of Daylight.” That moving theme is one of the most beautiful compositions of the modern era, so good at making audiences sigh that it has already been used two dozen times, including in “Arrival,” “The Handmaid's Tale,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us.” As soon as those violins play here, you are taken out of the 16th century and feel less moved than blatantly manipulated.

The sweetest note of “Hamnet” is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the real Hamnet. The script depends on our immediate devotion to the boy and he rises to the challenge. Unlike most child actors (and unlike their on-screen parents), he never overdoes his big scenes. His stoicism is heartbreaking. Also fantastic is his real-life older brother, Noah Jupe, as Hamlet on stage in the play-within-a-movie. In rehearsal, this young actor looks awful. Zhao asks him to smell it so Mescal can say the lines again, louder. But on the night of the play's opening, it causes a sensation.

Shakespeare did not invent “Hamlet” out of thin air. He adapted it from a Norse story that had been around for centuries, and God knows if he was inspired more by his own son or another successful version of “Hamlet” that played in London a decade earlier. In our century, it has been reworked for the screen more than 50 times and everyone from Ethan Hawke and Danny Devito to Shelley Long has said so.

However, I would have loved to see the elder Jupe do it all again for this lively Globe Theater audience, the first to find out how Shakespeare's version will end. As this Hamlet collapses, the audience reaches out to the fallen prince. The actor draws strength from the earthly and they, in turn, find comfort in their pain. That stunning image alone captures everything this film has struggled to say (or sob) about the catharsis of art.