*This article contains major spoilers for Hamnet*
When you’ve done a good job, there’s no need to overdo it. This is a lesson that Hamnet would have done well to learn. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel has rightly been tagged as this awards season’s weepie of choice, but it has over-egged the recipe. A film about the death of William Shakespeare’s young son is bound to invite an emotional response, but it goes to extreme lengths to ensure that response. Hamnet is a three-hanky weepie, but when the sound of a familiar leitmotif begins creeping in at a critical juncture, it threatens to undermine every attempt up to that point to get the audience blubbing.
Hamnet boasts a solid three-act structure, a life-death-resurrection triad that sees the burgeoning Shakespeare family (headed by Paul Mescal’s Will and Jessie Buckley’s Agnes) come together, produce adorable children, before one of them (Jacobi Jupe’s Hamnet) succumbs to the plague in the second act. This central portion of the film is a heartrending portrayal of parental grief. Even if you’ve never experienced the death of a child (and one would hope you never will), Zhao and her cast sell the emotion with clarity and honesty. The camera’s Demme-like focus on Buckley’s face as it crumbles in agony silences all else around it. Hamnet is about the sublimation of grief through the creative process. As Agnes and Will mourn their little son, Will sets about creating a work named for him. Speculation on the influence of Shakespeare’s son on the creation of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark runs rife to this day, but the theme of mourning through artistic creation is powerful enough on its own terms.
Much of Hamnet’s production is defined by being unobtrusive, with a colour scheme that accentuates natural lighting, and period-accurate but desaturated costumes and sets. Zhao’s direction is typically lo-fi, which can either draw attention to itself (Nomadland) or accentuate the intimacy of the story (In that regard, Hamnet is closer to Zhao’s earlier films The Rider and Songs My Brothers Taught Me). The film maintains that understated style until its final moments. Among the retiring elements of Hamnet’s production is the score by Max Richter. The German-born British composer brings rising vocals and a distinct lower orchestral timbre that will be familiar to fans of his ambient works Voices and its follow-up Voices 2. The score doesn’t draw attention to itself, underlining the emotions rather than dictating them. For the vast majority of Hamnet’s runtime, Zhao and Richter deploy the music with relative stealth, letting the onscreen events speak for themselves. That is, until its grand finale.
Hamnet culminates in the premiere of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London. Unaware of the play’s plot machinations, Agnes stands in the front row and is confronted by a cherubic onstage Hamlet, made up to resemble her dead son. As she reaches for the actor’s hand, a recognisable piece of music comes on the soundtrack. Strings rise and fall, and eyes begin to roll as Richter’s signature piece, ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, makes its umpteenth appearance in a piece of media. The piece comes from Richter’s 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, a beautiful but strident piece of protest against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. The whole album is steeped in sadness and regret, and a number of pieces have been used in films since the album’s release. The first notable use of ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ was in the 2006 Will Ferrell dramedy Stranger Than Fiction, and was subsequently used in a number of films and TV shows, from Shutter Island, to The Handmaid’s Tale, to The Last Of Us. Its most notable use is in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival; the piece bookends the film, leaving an audience in no doubt that it’s supposed to find the film moving. The poetic use of a single repeated chord progression gives the music a timelessness, but directors have begun to use its emotive simplicity to bludgeon the audience’s tear ducts. It’s a stirring piece, but its ubiquity has rendered it less of an invitation to weep, and more of a cheat code to easy emotionality. When those first strings rise, it’s an order to the viewer to get ready to cry, whether the film or TV programme has earned it or not. Zhao’s use of it feels particularly manipulative when the film has earned its tears long before the ending.
The appearance of ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ in Hamnet is especially galling in the context of the Academy Award nominations. Among the film’s eight Oscar noms, Richter receives his overdue first nomination (He could have received nods for The Congress or Perfect Sense before this). Yet, when thinking of Hamnet’s score, ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ overwhelms the rest of the music. It is not an original piece of music for the film, but it is now inescapably tied to it. No other piece from this score is as memorable, a fact reinforced by its use in other media. When one considers the fluctuating rules of the Academy on how much of a score needs to be original to qualify for nominations, the inclusion of Hamnet goes beyond random and into cynicism. Many a fine score has been denied recognition due to an overabundance of pre-existing music. Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano was excluded for this reason, as was Jonny Greenwood’s music for There Will Be Blood. In a surfeit of irony, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for Arrival was not nominated because of the film’s use of ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’. It would be churlish to blame Richter for this; he’s just delivering the music his directors want. However, the use of his pre-existing music in Hamnet exposes a double standard, one that awards bodies allow to vary according to no set whim or pattern. When scores like Kangding Ray’s pulsating beats for Sirāt or Daniel Lopatin’s electronic contrast to the ‘50s world of Marty Supreme could have provided surprises, Hamnet is a safe choice that bends too many rules.
