I have always been spooked by vampire films (Sinners) and I'm a 'fraidy cat when it comes to monsters (Frankenstein) and as I age I'm brittle in viewing violence (One Battle After Another.) I willingly concede that all three of these movies deserved honours at the Oscars and we have started into all of them but sighed and went elsewhere. We may return to them, or we may not.
We did go the cinema to see Hamnet and were pleased that Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for her moving role as Agnes Hathaway/Shakespeare. She is an actress with remarkable range, simply hilarious in Wicked Little Letters. In Hamnet she embodies a fiercely independent woman who discovers love, including the love for her children. I found her depiction of grief when she loses a child totally believable in a way that no words could describe.
Through my years in pastoral ministry I was witness and companion to grief hundreds of times and came to realize that it was unique to each person in its expression. Hamnet explores the way loss can shake relationships and even destroy them because the way it is manifested can be so different. I realized that some people moved forward with resilience and others were never over their mourning. There were and are no right or wrong responses.
There are critics of the film that suggest it is too slow moving -- this wasn't a Marvel flick! -- and that the story itself was implausible, although it is historically accurate that their boy died, probably of the plague. In the movie Shakespeare works through his profound grief at son Hamnet's death by writing a play called Hamlet which is about loss and the ghosts that haunt us. To me it is one of those stories that may not be factual but is true.
Well done, Jessie Buckley. Long may you grace our screens!
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