Early this afternoon Howard Hawks and I saw Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet together at the AMC Lincoln Square. It’s a slow, grim sit, all right…yes, it’s fair to call most of it “rural, less-than-hygienic Elizabethan misery porn”…but lo and behold the Globe Theatre performance finale turns on the feeling.
I actually began to melt, to be honest, and I sensed that hard-nosed Hawks was in a similar emotional place. When a powerful scene gets to you there’s no mistaking the effect. Your eyes slightly water, your throat tightens.
Especially when Jessie Buckley’s Agnes and several other serf-level patrons (i.e., huddled in the orchestra pit) offer gestures of compassion to a dying on-stage Hamlet (Noah Jupe). Yes, Zhao is looking to jerk our emotional chains, but it works. Jupe sells it and Buckley grand-slams it.
Buckley has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag…period, no contest, done.
But Lordy, what a glum, boring, miserable, mostly unsanitary, toil-and-trouble life everyone lived in 15th Century Stratford. Did anyone ever take hot baths? You can almost smell the body odor. I respect the grimy, sweaty, greasy-haired realism that Zhao was determined to convey, but my God…did the serfs have any kind of soap back then?
Friendo #1: “Buckley absolutely deserves the Oscar. Her name is already engraved. The Globe climax is far and away the best ending out of any movie this year. But does a great ending make a great movie?”
HE reply: “Honestly? I think the misery stuff is overbaked. It’s such a grim, grimey and anguished slog before that Globe theatre finale.”
Hawks to HE, Friendo #1: “It doesn’t have three great scenes and no bad ones. It has one great finale while Sentimental Value has at least three great scenes, if not four or five.”
Friendo #2: “The Globe theatre Hamlet sequence is beyond preposterous, but if you close your eyes and pretend that you know nothing about Hamlet, yes, it works in a rather fake but well-staged ‘Will showed his love and grief through his art!” Pavlovian tearjerker way.
“And yes, the Best Actress Oscar race is over.”
