In Review: ‘Hamnet,’ ‘The Secret Agent’

Hamnet
Dir. Chloe Zhao
126 min.

In terms of simple biographical facts, we know little about William Shakespeare and even less about his wife, who was born with the name Anne Hathaway. Maybe. Her father’s will listed her as “Agnes” and a wedding license exists between William Shakesepare and “Anne Whateley,” predating a document concerning the marriage of “William Shagspeare” and “Anne Hathwey” by one day. We also know that William, at 18, was younger than his wife by eight years and that the Shakespeares became parents six months after the wedding. All of this, and a few scant other details, like a will leaving Anne the playwright’s “second-best bed,” has left plenty of blanks for others to fill in, be they artists, scholars, or conspiracy theorists.

Most have, predictably, considered the matter from William’s point of view, barely taking Anne’s feelings into consideration. Did he hate his wife and flee their Stratford-Upon-Avon home to escape her? Did he really love the mysterious Anne Whateley (who was most likely a mere typographical error and not a person at all)? One of the great strengths of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, a virtue shared by this Chloe Zhao adaptation (which the director co-scripted with the author), is the way it turns this thinking on its head. This is a story of a family living in Stratford in the final decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. London is, for the most part, the place where the family’s husband goes to work.

After a while, that is: As Hamnet opens, William (Paul Mescal) is merely the son of a hot-tempered glover (David Wilmot) who picks up some extra funds as a Latin tutor. It’s while working in this capacity that he meets Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the oldest daughter of a nearby household. Agnes (not Anne) is something of an outcast in her own family, the only daughter of the patriarch’s first wife whose family calls the nearby woods home and quietly keeps to some old pagan practices. So, in her own way, does Agnes. She comes home as expected but prefers the company of trees and a loyal falcon. Yet despite their differences, and the wishes of their respective families, William and Agnes find themselves drawn together irresistibly, a connection that remains strong even after William’s literary ambitions draw him elsewhere.

There is more to the plot of Hamnet, which takes its name from the son the Shakespeares lost at the age of 11 and whose name bears an unmistakable resemblance to a death-haunted play his father wrote a few years later. But the power of Zhao’s film comes less from the tale than how it is told. Hamnet makes Zhao’s Marvel venture look like a blip on a filmography filled with beautiful, pitiless images depicting human existence as humbling and fragile when considered against the vastness of nature. With cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest), Zhao creates a Stratford that feels at times less like a place that’s tamed nature than intruded upon it. Agnes is something of a vestige of an older, more respectful way of seeing the world. When she gives birth for the first time, she takes to the woods, becoming just another creature going about the business of bringing life into the world.

Poetry has its place too, but it’s not one Agnes easily understands for much of the film. However supportive she might be of William’s ambitions and proud when news of his success makes its way back to her, she’s not someone who easily channels emotions into words. She feels them no less deeply, however. Maybe that’s why the usual adjectives barely seem adequate when discussing Buckley’s extraordinary performance. (And perhaps why the film’s sole clanging moment is one that relies primarily on some famous words while she remains off screen.) Buckley surprises at every turn, from the ferocity of Agnes’ passion for William in the early scenes to her almost unbearable expression of grief to a final stretch that’s best left undescribed. Mescal and the rest of the cast (which includes Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn) are excellent, but this is Buckley’s film. Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget. —Keith Phipps

Hamnet opens today in limited release. It expands wider on Dec. 12.

The Secret Agent
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
158 min.

The films of Kleber Mendonça Filho—Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, Bacurau, and now The Secret Agent, along with documentaries like Pictures of Ghosts—always start with an enveloping sense of place, most often the city of Recife, his hometown on Brazil’s northeastern coast. They feel foremost like a repository of Mendonça’s memories—of time periods, of neighborhoods, of highly specific characters and especially of needle drops and ambient noise on the soundtrack. His plotting tends toward the shaggy, but only because his interest seems linked more to situations, like the last holdout in a seaside apartment building marked for gentrification (Aquarius) or a rural backwater under assault by enemies unknown (Bacurau). However you feel about Mendonça’s work—and you should feel great about it, by and large—he makes sure you will remember vividly where each film is set. 

Arriving like an inadvertent Brazilian companion piece to One Battle After Another, Mendonça’s latest and most ambitious production, The Secret Agent, also follows a besieged leftist who’s hiding out among a network of political refugees at a time when the fascists are in charge. In a tense, surreal and beguiling opening sequence, Armando (Wagner Maura) pulls his canary-yellow VW Beetle into a rural parking lot and is startled to see a dead body splayed out about 20 feet in front of him, crudely blanketed in cardboard. The attendant explains, not too helpfully, that the man was a thief who’d been shot and he’s waiting for the authorities to take him away, but when the police do turn up, it’s Armando who draws their interest. They’re searching for some reason to arrest him and when they don’t find it, they shake him down for whatever he’s got, which in this case is a mostly empty pack of cigarettes. 

The year is 1977, when Brazil is still under military dictatorship, and Armando is trying to make his way to Recife, where he’s seeking cover from political persecution. (On the radio: Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.”) A tough, funny, aging radical named Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) has tucked other rebels and refugees like Armando into her apartment complex, and being in Recife will put him back in touch with his young son, who’s been living with Armando’s father-in-law. We learn via flashback that Armando is an academic whose work ran afoul of the state’s electric company and now a couple of hitmen have been contracted to wipe him out. He ostensibly has the protection of the local police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), but Euclides is a corrupt and arrogant oaf who’s currently embroiled in a strange incident involving a man’s leg that was found inside a tiger shark. With Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in theaters, the leg story becomes a tabloid sensation. 

For a movie where the hero is hunted by armed assassins, it’s surprising (though maybe not through Mendonça’s lens) that the most gripping sequences are past conversations between Armando and government adversaries over his academic work. The vague threats Armando receives are more insidious than the mortal ones that come later, and what stands out is the greed, arrogance, and stupidity of fascist officials, whose smug appetite for destruction must be sated, even as it leads to no productive ends. The Secret Agent has a warm affinity for communities like the one that adopts Armando—Dona’s apartment building echoes the lo-fi resistance of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another—but it doesn’t sugarcoat the immense loss that history can deliver. The past can be obliterated, through lost records or razed buildings or simply forgotten people and events, and political environments like the one depicted in The Secret Agent are more easily replicated in the future. (Out of yesterday’s ruling generals came today’s Jair Bolsonaro.) The best Mendonça can do is remember. — Scott Tobias

The Secret Agent opens in New York City today and expands from there.