For those of us who love the works of William Shakespeare, his reputation is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, there are abundant fellow travelers along the lifelong road of understanding his plays, and you rarely have to justify your passion for him, even to our anti-human tech overlords. And yet, it can be nearly impossible to see his plays clearly underneath the thick crust of received wisdom that covers them, and his work has become synonymous with the most deadly quality for art: prestige. In Shakespeare films, which have existed since the beginning of the medium, we can trace two traditions that reckon with prestige. The first—let’s call it the Olivierian tradition, after Sir Laurence—is impressive, elegant, and bloodless. Olivier’s Hamlet, which won Best Picture in 1949, is a tasteful but inert series of poses, constructed out of conventional notions of what makes for “good” Shakespeare. It feels as invested in impressing us as it is in exploring an essential truth about the human condition. The other line—let’s call it the Wellesian line, after Orson—is far less dutiful to the Bard and thus paradoxically far closer to what makes his plays great. Welles’ Shakespeare films (the best is Chimes at Midnight, his Falstaff-centric take on Henry IV) are as chaotic, bawdy, and alive as Welles himself.
As Shakespeare is prestige incarnate, films of his plays and life are often in the awards mix. Twenty-seven years ago, Shakespeare in Love transformed how Oscars are won and covered by the press, when it played spoiler to Saving Private Ryan’s seemingly inevitable Best Picture win. This year, history may repeat itself as Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film about the domestic life of William and Agnes Shakespeare and their radically different responses to the death of their son, appears to be the film standing between One Battle After Another and the industry’s highest honor, especially after it was the only other film to win Best Picture at Sunday’s Golden Globes.
There are many similarities to be found between the events of 1999 and today. Both competitions set a thrilling epic by one of the country’s most beloved auteurs against a small movie telling a fictionalized story about an incident in the life of William Shakespeare. Saving Private Ryan and One Battle After Another both combine breathtaking technical mastery with small human moments, run a little over two hours, 40 minutes, and begin with a bravura management of chaos only to place their characters on a shaggy-dog chase in search of a living symbol of the American character. Shakespeare in Love and Hamnet, meanwhile, are independent films released abroad by major studios. They are lower budget, are far more intimate, and, in just over two hours, tell moving love stories that dramatize the impact of Shakespeare’s personal life on his work. One important difference remains, however: Shakespeare in Love, despite routinely making lists of the worst Best Picture winners, deserved the top prize in 1999. It belongs firmly to the Wellesian tradition, using the tools of popular entertainment to sneak in profundity and beauty. Hamnet, on the other hand, is Olivier through and through: beautiful, respectable, and terminally dull.
Shakespeare in Love’s postaward reputation has less to do with the film itself—it was a critical darling and a popular success, after all—and more to do with how it scooped Saving Private Ryan on Oscar night. As Michael Schulman documented both in Slate and in his delightful book Oscar Wars, the fight between Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan—one that pitted Miramax and Harvey Weinstein against DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg—was not only the ugliest Oscar campaign in history; it also created the modern Oscar apparatus that results in articles like this one.* At first, Saving Private Ryan’s win was foreordained. Everyone raved about it. It was a massive hit, making nearly half a billion dollars. Veterans said they could finally explain their war experience to their families. Spielberg was one of the few directors who had squared the circle between art and commerce. Its opening set piece, a 20-minute eruption of violence dramatizing the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, is one of the most startling, hair-raising pieces of filmmaking of the ’90s. Shakespeare in Love, meanwhile, was a midbudget rom-com about the Bard (Joseph Fiennes) falling in love with a noblewoman named Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) who has cross-dressed as a man in order to join his theater company.
All this changed when Weinstein decided to go all out in his quest for the Oscar. What transpired was something like a precursor to the Bush-vs.-Gore election of 2000. Weinstein would do whatever it took to win. Miramax flooded Los Angeles with ads in print and on the radio. Their phone trees left no stone unturned when it came to votes, even allegedly going so far as to suggest filling in people’s ballots for them to make sure they voted correctly. Weinstein organized a screening in Palm Springs just so that Red Buttons—a Borscht Belt comedian and academy voter in his 80s—could see the film. Most notoriously, Miramax negatively campaigned, planting stories about how Saving Private Ryan’s first 20 minutes were the only good thing about it. This was against the rules, but the competition was such potential ratings gold that the academy refused to rein Miramax in. Meanwhile, Spielberg played Al Gore to Weinstein’s Karl Rove, caring so deeply about institutions and their norms that he refused to even let others go negative on his behalf. On Oscar night, Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture, while Spielberg won Best Director. Press stories about the rival campaigns were so juicy that a new cottage industry of Oscar reporting was born, alongside a new era of aggressive (and expensive) campaigning for the prize.
All the bad blood Weinstein spilled on the way to his win has unfairly tarnished Shakespeare in Love. But the film is hardly Crash or Green Book. It’s an expertly made confection with an endless supply of quotable lines (courtesy of Tom Stoppard) and a romance worth swooning over. Instead of presenting a museum diorama of London, as so many period films do, Shakespeare in Love highlights a city spattered with mud and manure. The film reinvents the Hollywood satire by re-setting it in the early modern era, borrowing many of Shakespeare’s best devices along the way, and contains the best performance of Fiennes’ career, alongside a scene-stealing Judi Dench, whose turn as a late-in-life Queen Elizabeth is so unforgettable that she won an Oscar despite being on-screen for only six minutes. It’s easy to hate on Paltrow, but as her recent performance in Marty Supreme shows, she really does have the goods.And although he’s a narcissistic, serial sexual abuser, Weinstein wasn’t wrong that Saving Private Ryan deflates after its D-Day sequence. For all of its disturbing violence, Spielberg’s film has an ingratiating streak about the nobility of the American soldier that has aged very poorly. The less said about its ending, the better.
This year, Hamnet is our new Shakespearean Oscar villain. Although Shakespeare in Love’s villainous reputation accrued to it due to its path to victory, Hamnet was tipped as a villain before it was even released, thanks in part to an extremely prescient piece by Vulture’s Joe Reid. Co-screenwriter and director Zhao has already won Best Picture and Best Director, for the gorgeous Nomadland, and one gets the sense that people resent Hamnet less because of anything Zhao or Focus Features may have done than because this year is Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn. Everyone appears to love PTA, whose filmography is stacked with big swings that connect a shocking amount of the time. He’s also already lost the Oscar for Best Picture thrice. There Will Be Blood lost to No Country for Old Men, a tough break in a great movie year when it was the Coen brothers who looked overdue. Licorice Pizza lost to CODA, but the former film is such an odd lark that it’s a wonder it was nominated in the first place. Most puzzlingly, Phantom Thread was bested by The Shape of Water, a movie in which Sally Hawkins fucks a fish. One Battle After Another is neither my favorite Anderson film nor my favorite film of the year, but it’s the perfect movie for the academy to recognize. OBAA is Anderson at his most expansive and entertaining. It is the film in which he has most successfully married his Big Statement and Stoner Comedy impulses, two great tastes that should not go great together. It’s stuffed with superb performances, good jokes, a thrilling chase scene or two, career-best work from Benicio del Toro, and a startling newcomer performance by Chase Infiniti. While its political acumen has been vastly overstated, it’s an expertly made action comedy that resonates deeply with our current moment.
Hamnet, meanwhile, is a stately prestige picture, replete with magic-hour pillow shots and delicate silences to signal its importance. It is a textbook version of what the critic Manny Farber called white elephant art. To Farber, white elephant art was that which announced its aspirations to be treated as a masterpiece, “heavily inlaid with ravishing technique” to such an extent that no life can exist within it. In its quest to show off its “prizeworthy creativity,” the white elephant work betrays “the need of the director and writer to overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it’s watching: to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion.” Hamnet’s white elephantness is so thorough that one almost does not need to see it to have seen it. One could simply read reviews of it to know exactly what they were going to get: Diet Malick cinematography, a brilliantly unruly performance from Jessie Buckley, and the theme of grief gonging the audience into submission again and again.
Hamnet changes many details and events in Shakespeare’s life to tell its story, but it is in its prestigeiness that it truly does Shakespeare dirty. It does not really matter, for example, that Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s business partner and muse, was the actor who played Hamlet, not a boy who resembled Shakespeare’s dead son. Nor does it matter that Burbage was in his 30s, rather than a teenager, at the time he played the role. Nor does it matter that in the play, Hamlet is described as being 30 years old (and fat).It doesn’t even matter that in the film, Hamlet is an expression of Shakespeare’s love for his wife, even though the title character is such a misogynist he could be a manosphere influencer today, horrified at the idea that middle-aged women might enjoy sex and declaring, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” in his very first soliloquy. Hamnet is a work of fiction, and it is allowed to take liberties with what we know of the historical record.
What is galling instead is the dull, simplistic quality of the end results. If we accept that Hamlet is a play about grief, one that also encodes Shakespeare’s private pain at the death of his son, Hamnet, then it’s also worth taking our cues from how Shakespeare did it. It wasn’t through a staid procession of sad, longing looks and images of giant trees. Hamlet is instead a story about a prince who feigns madness to investigate and expose a crime, one that has ghosts, and double crosses, and poisoning, and mistaken identity, and suicide, and clowns, and a rousing sword duel. Hamlet contains so many different tones and plot devices that an attack by a pirate ship is relegated to offstage action. It is so wildly entertaining that one can watch high school students do it and be enthralled.
According to an interview with the New York Times, author and co-screenwriter Maggie O’Farrell wrote the novel Hamnet in part as a response to the mythology around Shakespeare’s private life and his relationship with Agnes. “There’s just always been one narrative told about her, which is that he hated her, that they had to get married, that he ran away to London to get away from her. There’s not a shred of evidence for any of that.” O’Farrell is correct about this, and creating a fictional rejoinder, imagining the interrelationship between an extraordinary person and their ordinary domestic life, is a noble goal. But the film subjugates it to its overall agenda of forcing us into unearned emotional catharsis. It only truly comes to life in moments of female agony—the agony of childbirth, and of losing a child, and of watching your marriage crumble—and thus comes to feel almost exploitative in its use of Buckley’s bottomless strength and wildness.
This Olivierian quest for prestige also wrecks its final set piece, in which Buckley’s Agnes secretly travels to London to see the play of her husband’s he named after their dead son. Despite having been married to a producer-actor-playwright for nearly 20 years, she knows nothing about how theater works, or what it is, or how to behave when watching it. Agnes is so furious at how her husband has vampirized her life and pain that she vibrates with anger. Legend has it that Shakespeare played the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father, thus inverting his mourning of his son into a play in which he, the father, is mourned. In Shakespeare’s text, the lead-up to Hamlet and the Ghost’s meeting is like something out of a horror film. The dead king appears in full armor, walking the battlements of his castle, then vanishes, night after night. Horatio, Hamlet’s close friend, asks him to come to the night watch to see if the Ghost will speak to him. The scenes that follow are hot-blooded, filled with oaths and curses, rage and terror. The Ghost promises that were he allowed to describe his afterlife to his son, “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.” The story he tells is of a gruesome murder—it’s where we get the phrase murder most foul—at the hands of his brother, an “incestuous, adulterous beast” who has “won to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.” After he charges Hamlet to avenge his murder, he then relates a final request: “Remember me.”
It is in response to this that we get one of the play’s most stirring expressions of grief, a sentiment that would be particularly apt for the character of Will Shakespeare in Hamnet. Even if you are not well versed in Shakespeare, it’s hard to read these lines aloud without feeling something stir in your soul:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
In the scene as dramatized in Hamnet, we get instead a morose Paul Mescal, his face painted white, moping around with a teenager who looks like his son. All nuance, all variety, all breadth of human experience is evacuated from the text, because that is what prestige-oriented art does to its material in pursuit of “quality.”
Agnes changes her mind about Hamlet when its leading man delivers the “To be, or not to be” speech, maybe the most famous passage in the English language other than the Ten Commandments. In this moment, Agnes’ grief meets her husband’s, and, finally recognizing how his art has transformed her life into something great, she reaches out to the actor playing her son; in a sort of “I am Spartacus” or “O Captain! My Captain!” moment, the audience follows suit. The members of the audience sitting in the movie theater, meanwhile, sob in response. Or at least most of them did, as my wife and I sat in Cobble Hill Cinemas, stone-faced. “To be, or not to be” is a soliloquy not about grief or mourning. It is about suicide, justice both on Earth and in heaven, and whether it is worth dying to resist the inequities of the world. There are many passages about grief in Hamlet, but the film is so unwilling to risk the audience having to think that it will not use them.
Underscoring the recitation, meanwhile, is Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a piece that has already been used to coax tears in Arrival, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Last of Us, Shutter Island, and Disney’s heroic-dog movie Togo.
As the credits rolled, I was left mostly puzzled: puzzled at how a talented director could trust us so little that she had to resort to such clichés, and puzzled by the film’s glowing reception. Shakespeare, after all, knew better than the people who have brought him to life on-screen. As Hamlet himself tells the players, “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action … for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end … is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” The mirror Hamnet holds up is not to any truth about the human condition but to our clichéd ideas of what makes for a worthy movie.
Correction, Jan. 12, 2026: This article originally misspelled Michael Schulman’s last name.