Producers: Andrea Cornwell, Leah Clarke and Adam Ackland   Director: Dylan Southern    Screenplay: Dylan Southern   Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Boxall, Henry Boxall, Eric Lampaert, Vinette Robinson, Sam Spruell, Leo Bill, Lesley Molony, Garry Cooper, Claire Cartwright and David Thewlis   Distributor: Briarcliff Entertainment

Grade: C

Dylan Southern has attempted a difficult task in adapting Max Porter’s 2015 debut novel “Grief is the Thing with Feathers,” a highly literary composite of poetry and prose, for the screen.  Though Enda Walsh’s one-man stage version, which premiered in Dublin in 2018 and was repeated in London and New York the following year with Cillian Murphy, was very favorably received, cinema is quite a different medium, and Porter’s verbal somersaults and Walsh’s theatricality have given way to a literalism that renders what was powerful on the page and, from the critical reaction, the boards faintly ridiculous.  Some significant plot tweaks further undermine the impact.  The result is an ambitious effort, but one that falls short of what the makers obviously hoped to achieve.

One of the changes Southern has made involves jettisoning explicit mention of Ted Hughes, the British poet whose 1970 poetry collection “Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow” was the obsession of the protagonist in the novel, who was writing a book about him.  Here Dad (Benedict Cumberbatch) is an artist, not a writer, and he’s working on illustrations for a graphic novel prominently featuring a crow when his wife (Claire Cartwright) suddenly dies, leaving him not only a widower but a single parent to two boisterous young boys (brothers Richard Boxall and Henry Boxall). Their mother appears only in occasional flashbacks.

In the first of the four chapters, called after him, Dad is obviously devastated by his loss, and despite attempts to help from his late wife’s best friend Amanda (Vinette Robinson), his brother Paul (Sam Spruell) and a therapist (Leo Bill), his depression deepens, and he finds it difficult to deal with his rambunctious sons.  Then the crow enters, initially as a bird that peers in from the window and then crashes into the glass.  When Dad goes outside to investigate, the bird enters through the open door and takes up residence inside.

And the crow morphs into a huge, towering presence, played by Eric Lampaert in a scraggly feathered outfit and voiced in guttural tones by David Thewlis.  The creature is a metaphor for the grief Dad is suffering, or to speak in psychological terms a projection of his inner turmoil, but also a menacing figure that berates Dad for his inadequacies and seems to possess him when he rages at the children rather than comforting them or engages in cawing in frenzied, contorted quasi-dance.  In this second chapter, “Boys,” the youngsters remark on how Dad has split into two different people.

But as is suggested in the third chapter “Crow,” the creature, real or hallucinatory, is actually a force for healing through tough treatment, particularly when it takes a physically protective stance against a truly malignant force that appears in the final section of the piece, the “Demon,” i.e. despair, which attempts first to weasel its way into the house and then enters by force.

Though Southern attempts to provide occasional breaks from the claustrophobic feel of the film—an occasional exterior scene outside the messy household, a visit to the late wife’s parents (Lesley Malony and Garry Cooper)—even here the atmosphere is suffocating, a tone accentuated by the boxy Academy format in which the film is shot by cinematographer Ben Fordesman, the cramped production design of Susie Davies and the gloomy lighting.  And although Fordesman and editor George Cragg try to give the Crow a frightening effect through sharp cutting and changing perspectives, the figure never loses the look of a tall man lumbering about in the ungainly costume designed by Conor O’Sullivan and realized by Sophie O’Neill.  A moody score by Zebedee C. Budworth and complementary sound design supervised by Joakim Sundström aren’t enough to compensate.

Cumberbatch’s commitment nearly does, however.  His performance, to be sure, is often set to an eleven on a scale of one to ten in emotional terms, but there’s no question that he enlivens the material.  While this isn’t a one-man effort as Murphy’s was on stage, it comes close, since none of the other humans make much of an impression, not even the Boxall brothers, though they’re certainly engaging enough.  After Cumberbatch, however, it’s Thewlis, with his growling delivery, that you’re most likely to remember.

A story about the grief that follows from a terrible personal loss can’t help but carry a degree of power, but turning it into a kind of parable by embodying the grief in a hectoring creature like crow doesn’t work—at least not on the screen, where the literal portrayal of the symbol is more likely to amuse than enlighten or shock.  Perhaps a more experimental approach would have been a better choice.   

Producers: Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes   Director: Chloé Zhao   Screenplay: Chloė Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell   Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Joe Alwyn, Emily Watson, Jacobi Jupe, David Wilmot, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Olivia Lynes, Noah Jupe, Justine Mitchell, Freta Hannan-Mills, Dainton Anderson and Elliot Baxter   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

A sixteenth-century soap opera with pretensions, this adaptation by director Chloé Zhao and co-writer Maggie O’Farrell of the latter’s 2020 novel (apparently ignoring the 2023 play based on the book by Lolita Chakrabarti, which was mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company) uses historical characters to tell a tale of the cathartic power of artistic creativity in coming to terms with painful personal loss.  “Hamnet” is heavy-handed, dirge-like and manipulative, in the end generating fewer sniffles than shakes of the head.

The titular figure is the son of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (or, more commonly, Anne), who died in 1596 at age eleven after being infected during one of the periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague.  In O’Farrell’s highly imaginative (i.e., fictionalized) account, William tried to come to terms with the loss by writing (and acting in) “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” the names perhaps being interchangeable at the time, while Agnes’ pain was alleviated somewhat by attending the premiere of the play at London’s Globe Theatre.

The idea that “Hamlet” might have had some therapeutic benefit for the playwright and his wife is not beyond the realm of plausibility, but it’s played to the hilt here in Zhao’s swooning, artsy telling, and other aspects of O’Farrell’s construct are even more speculative.  The result is a film that it’s easy to dismiss as little more than a mawkish period melodrama.  As far as recent movies about Shakespeare go, it’s less insulting than Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous” (2011), which questioned his authorship of his plays, and about on a level with Kenneth Branagh’s “All Is True” (2018), about his retirement.  If that’s praise, it’s of a backhanded kind.

The film spends its first half-hour spinning a fable about Will and Agnes’ marriage, the one element having some evidence to support it being that Agnes was pregnant before the ceremony.  Otherwise, the story is totally made up.  Here Agnes (Jessie Buckley), about whose early life almost nothing is actually known, is thought of by the locals as something of a witch, communing with forest spirits and having the gift, or curse, of premonition.  Her father and mother (from whom she supposedly inherited her abilities) are dead, and her snooty stepmother Joan (Justice Mitchell) treats her as if she were an uncouth Cinderella.

She catches the eye of Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), who’s been hired as a Latin tutor to Agnes’ stepbrothers, and while she initially resists his advances, he wins her over by telling her the story pf Orpheus and Eurydice. Soon they’re deeply involved, and she’s with child.  Though Joan’s hostile to the match and Will’s father John (David Wilmot), a leatherworker who considers him an overeducated loser, isn’t terribly pleased about it either, his mother Mary (Emily Watson) knows that the pregnancy demands the union, and Agnes’ brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) is supportive of her choice.

Agnes soon presents her husband with a daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and the couple enjoy a mostly happy life blessed two years later by the arrival of twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes), though Agnes is terrified by a misperception, or precognition, that the boy is stillborn. Determined to pursue his writing, Will departs for long periods to London, where his career flourishes.  The children miss him during the absences but relish his visits home, with the cherubic Hamnet his special favorite: they practice fencing with sticks, presumably the equivalent of American boys playing with cap pistols in the fifties.

But in 1596 Judith falls ill with plague, and though she survives, her brother, who shares a room with her, is infected as well, and does not.  Agnes is devastated, and blames Will for not returning from London in time to see the boy before his death.  When, still angry, she’s informed by Bartholomew that Will’s written a tragedy bearing Hamnet’s name, they travel there for the opening.

O’Farrell focuses on two scenes in “Hamlet” to support the notion of the play, which on the surface has little to do with the death of Hamnet, as personally consolatory.  One is the encounter between Hamlet and the ghost of his dead father (Act I, Scene 4), who in the film is played by a sobbing Mescal.  O’Farrell bypasses the major element of their conversation—the ghost’s call for revenge against his murderer Claudius—instead focusing on the mention of the bond between father and son and the ghost’s repeated “Adieu,” which Agnes, until then loudly complaining about the plot, realizes is Will’s tearful goodbye to their boy.  The second is the duel between Hamlet and Laertes in Act V, Scene 2, ending with the prince’s death and final words, “The rest is silence.” The sequence reminds Agnes of the playful fencing Hamnet enjoyed with his father, and she takes Hamlet’s memorable last line as a dramatic farewell from their son to her and Will. 

This is a tenuous basis for reading the play as an act of domestic reconciliation between the dead and the living, but since O’Farrell concentrates solely on these two moments, some viewers may find it convincing.  And Zhao has made a clever choice in casting as the young actor playing Hamlet Jacobi Jupe’s older brother Noah, who naturally resembles the boy we remember.  Zhao also stretches out the concluding sequence to inordinate length, ending it with Agnes, who’s pushed her way to the front of the crowd, literally touching the dying Hamlet’s extended hand.  Many will be moved by this; others will find it the final proof that the film is an exercise in unabashed sentimentality.

Indeed, Zhao’s approach to the material is throughout excessive.  Working closely with cinematographer Lukasz Zal and her co-editor Affonso Gonçalves, she utilizes the production design (Fiona Crombie) and costumes (Malgosia Turzanska) to give the picture an authentic period look (down to a recreation of the Globe), but the swirling camerawork and in-your-face emphasis at crucial moments (like the birthing scene of the twins) is, to put it charitably, unsubtle.  Max Richter’s score, with a few unfortunate modern intrusions, accentuates the visual effect.      

As to the cast, Buckley will undoubtedly be showered with praise, but to these eyes her performance is largely overstated, though to be sure the oppressive closeups Zhao favors do not help.  Mescal brings some pleasant sensitivity to Will in the first act, but he too is overly histrionic in the last.  Alwyn by contrast is pallid and recessive, but Watson is a tower of maternal strength, particularly when Agnes is most in need of Mary’s help, and one couldn’t ask for a more angelic-looking little boy than the younger Jupe, though once again the close-ups of his rather blank face are decidedly manipulative.  As to his brother Noah, he’s a solid actor, but at present Hamlet seems beyond his grasp. Of course, the schmaltzy treatment of the play’s final scene would have tested the talent of an Olivier.

“Hamnet” is intended to be a powerful commentary on grief elevated by its connection to the man almost universally hailed as the greatest of English writers, but in fact it’s just a high-toned tearjerker.