Hamnet

I know I've been a real grinch this year, but it's hard to get excited about my favorite art form when stuff like this and One Battle After Another are the major award contenders. These two films stand as glaring on-ramp signs on either end of the hollow-movie-dressed-up-like-it-means-something highway, causing everyone to rush past the films that actually use narrative and characterization to create meaning. Chloé Zhao's shallow, vapid, bereft of all mystery adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's speculative historical fiction novel about the tragic loss of Anne Hathaway's/Agnes Shakespeare's young son is about as bad as Oscar-bait gets.

I will say that Hamnet’s star, Jessie Buckley, who was largely favored to win Best Actress even before this film was released, gives a wonderful performance. That should not come as a shock since this luminous actress has been the best thing in a string of bad movies, effortlessly elevating the likes of Beast, Men, Women Talking, and Wicked Little Letters. In fact, with the exception of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter, I haven't much cared for most of the entries in Buckley's filmography, though I always like her.

I can't say the same for Paul Mescal, who made a strong feature debut in the aforementioned The Lost Daughter, gave a powerfully complex and subtle performance as the barely-holding-it-together single dad in Charlotte Wells' semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama Aftersun, and is now well on his way to rivaling '90s-era Keanu Reeves as the It-boy actor so wofully miscast in movies that his mear presents can rob of movie of all credibility. In this case, unlike, say, the absurd Gladiator II, the fault lies far more with the screenplay than with the casting. Zhao chooses to depict William Shakespeare as a tongue-tied, socially awkward Gen-Z type, who can only express himself through his plays, sonnets, and stories of old.

This is not how the unnamed character is depicted in O'Farrell's novel, but I assume she agreed to this choice since she has a co-screenwriting credit. The lowpoint of all cinema this year, worse than anything in the unwatchable Mickey 17 or the unforgivable Death of a Unicorn, is when Mescal's grief-stricken playwright contemplates suicide, George Bailey-style on a bridge, and recites the "To Be or Not To Be" speech from his yet unwritten Hamlet. There are other bad scenes, but that's the one that earns this movie its one-star from me.