Love's labour lost
dir: Chloe Zhao
2025
What a mixed bag.
I was excited to see this, or at least the critical acclaim was off the charts and awards seemed to be pouring from the heavens, and now that I’ve seen it, part of me thinks critics have been trained like Pavlovian dogs to start slavering at the sound of Academy Awards chatter, or almost anything to do with Shakespeare.
Jessie Buckley is a great actor, or at least has been some times in other movies. I don’t think this is a great performance, here, at all. It’s so actorly, so contrived in certain spaces, so distracting in its efforts, it quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder why the actor in question made the decisions she made, and why the director and everyone else went along with it.
Paul Mescal is possibly an okay actor who I’ve enjoyed watching in other things. I did not enjoy or appreciate many if not most of his scenes here. They’re so mannered and contrived and distracting in the effort involved. It quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder what bad choices the actor was making, and left me wondering why the director and everyone else went along with it.
Emily Watson has been a great actor for decades, and does masterful work here, as a somewhat disapproving but ultimately supportive mother-in-law to the main family. And what a family it is.
A woman, Agnes, (Jessie Buckley) awakes from a nap in the hollow of a log open to the elements, to the sky. It just happens to be beneath a large tree, next to a deep hole in the ground. She wakes, and calls her hawk from the branch it rests on, and it alights on her glove and eats the scraps of meat she has ready for it.
Nature. It’s great, isn’t it? We get the sense she is a deeply witchy woman, of the forest, of the Earth itself.
As she returns to a rural property, a bored tutor (Paul Mescal) to some young lads learning Latin spies her out the window, and approaches her. This is not an Elizabethan meet-cute: it’s an awkward intro to two characters who are almost always awkward with each other except during a sex scene that will only happen ages from now. There is much space in between.
They eventually become a couple, over the objections of both families, but since she’s pregnant, eh, whatcha gonna do? The father is currently a glover’s son, subject to abuse, but he somehow has a plan to write something, maybe a sonnet or two, maybe a play. Is there money in that?
When she feels it is time to give birth, she returns to that nature hollow we saw her wake up from, and she proudly, ferociously screams that child, her first daughter, into this world. When her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and the glover’s son turn up, mother and daughter are fine, all fine, they almost don’t need no help whatsoever.
Shakespeare’s first daughter, Susanna, is unleashed upon the world.
He seems delighted, but this is the 1500s, so dads aren’t much chop even if they mean well.
We are blessed with a scene where the baby cries, and a drunk and frustrated Bard sits at a desk pretending to write, acting like, I hesitate to use the word, because I know it’s considered an ableist slur, forgive me, but he acts like an absolute spastic. His wife urges him to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream, but no, he has more overacting to do, painful overacting at that.
Just as the glover’s son starts thinking that Stratford is no place to make his fortune as the greatest playwright in English history, and that he must spend more time in London, his wife is knocked up again, because these people have never heard of contraception, even though they’re no longer Catholics.
This birth does not go like the first. The forest witch’s daughter, being Agnes, is convinced that she is only to give birth to two children before she herself dies, yet she has twins, Hamnet and Judith come forth after very difficult births. Buckley really seems to enjoy these birth scenes, there’s a lot of primal maternal screaming going on. And yet what of her prophecy?
That’s messed up her plans a bit.
Like in the novel, the majority of her existence and her family life is defined by the glover’s son’s absence rather than his presence at home and hearth. The kids grow, at least, as does her resentment towards the absent father.
Like every father, everything he does, he tells himself, he’s doing for the family’s wellbeing and standing in the community, not for his own aggrandisement. And yet what does that matter if he’s not there for the moments that matter, like births and, I’m very sorry to say, deaths?
Judith takes ill, at a time when the black plague is stalking the country lanes and alleyways of the realm, and it seems she is not long for this world. Agnes, though, fights with the same tenacity she showed at her children’s births. She refuses to let her go, and has the forest witch skills to keep the grim spectre of death away for a while longer.
The central conceit of the novel proceeds from one major unappreciated fact: despite how irritated and bored people get when you start talking about Shakespeare or any of his plays, the astounding fact remains that very little is known about his actual life. This means you can make up anything, any old shit that occurs to you, and no-one can say that it’s implausible, because no-one knows that much past the basics, like that he had a wife, and he had three kids, and, alas, one of them died.
It seems like too much of a coincidence that he had a son, a darling little son called Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), and then he wrote a play called Hamlet, and that the two not be connected. This film, this story conjectures that he wrote Hamlet in honour of his son, who, through this telling, chose to take his sister’s place and trick Death itself into taking him instead, and to earn his wife’s forgiveness for not being there when Hamnet died. For her part, her grief is as powerful, as enraging as her children’s births were, and she is convinced that her poor son is trapped, alone, confused, unable to move on between the worlds. And thus Will’s apology, in the form of this play, allows him to pass, almost acts as an exorcism, and allows his wife to let her tiny son finally go.
I have… major problems with the film, major issues with some of the performances, especially of the leads, but none of that extends to the kids, or the way it’s filmed, directed, put together. I did roll my eyes so much that my skull hurts every time some famous line from the Bard appears in regular conversation, or when he recites parts of his own plays while standing on the banks of a river and wondering whether to Ophelia himself. That’s just – ugh – so trash. That’s like having Reese Witherspoon’s character in a Johnny Cash biopic say to Johnny Cash “You’re not Walking the Line”, or when she says “I feel like I’m in a burning Ring of Fire!” You expect that in a shitty biopic, not in a stately period piece, even one in which the characters respond to questions with “Yeah…” and “Hey!” occasionally.
Everyone else except Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal does excellent work convincing you that this story occurs in the long ago far away times of plague-ridden Elizabethan England. For some reason the two leads are exempt from that, doing what they can to distract us and remind us that, hey, you’re watching a movie, and these two are going to do as much Actoring as they physically fucking can.
All my complaints kind of, sort of, no, absolutely completely dissolved during that ending, however contrived it might have been. Oh my gods, despite some of the things Buckley does initially in that scene at the theatre, watching the debut of Will’s new play, Hamlet, oh my days, do they nail the ending. Holy fuck I am crying just writing about it. It is such a great ending.
There has been some criticism that the scene uses, is dependant upon, a piece of music that has been overused in movies and media over the last ten years or more. Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight has been used in Shutter Island, Arrival, Stranger than Fiction and in The Last of Us, and probably a bunch of commercials from life insurance to baby powder to haemorrhoid creams. Don’t care.
I don’t care, and I didn’t care when I was watching this film’s glorious, heart-rending ending. It’s such a sublime piece of music, it’s used so perfectly, it’s so suited to the moment, that I scoff at the complaint itself, and those that would make it, that thought only of whining during such a scene.
That complaint to me feels like someone yelling boorishly at you “Hey! You know this thing that’s beautiful and that will help you connect with what’s happening on screen, that has to do with love and grief and unimaginable loss? Well, ha! Experience it again, but also with this incredible piece of music playing, so that you feel for a few moments at least like love can conquer death, and like you’re not completely alone in an unfeeling, uncaring universe!! So there!!!”
This is, I know how precious this is going to sound, hard watching for a parent, or at least one who’s lost kids, hasn’t lots kids, or who actually lived with and / or loved their kids growing up: the prospect of watching something to do with a child dying is a MAJOR, devastating triggering event. I felt, at certain times, like running away from what was happening onscreen with poor Judith and Hamnet, and not only not returning to watch the rest, but to never watch anything every again. But I soldiered on, because I’m a trooper, but it’s not an easy watch, that’s for damn sure.
I appreciate what Chloe Zhao, as director, tries to achieve here with this flick, with its vision, with its depiction of life and death being connected in Nature through the mother herself, and Maggie O’Farrell doesn’t really have much to complain about, since she wrote the book, and she wrote the screenplay, rather than let someone else fuck it up.
But damn, that acting; much of it will not age well, forsooth. At least Gwyneth Paltrow’s not in the flick, I guess.
6 times films like these being overpraised should help a lot with complete amateurs getting over their imposter syndrome out of 10
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“To live with our hearts open. To shut it not in the dark but to turn it to the sun.” - Hamnet
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