It’s nothing short of tragic that for all of Shakespeare’s brilliant work and his incalculable impact on worldwide culture, we know precious little about him personally. Not that it’s anyone’s fault — Shakespeare was alive before “biography” was a word in the English language. At the time, there was no assumption that anyone would care about the life and times of anyone outside the royal family.

Sure, we have records of births and deaths and marriages from back then. We have tax records. We’ve got educated guesses about the initial publications and performances. But otherwise, we have no firm or reliable data to shed a light on Shakespeare’s life history or personality. The best we’ve got are Shakespeare’s own sonnets and the writings of his contemporaries, all of which are so flowery, artistic, and open to interpretation that they’re hardly reliable. Case in point: There are some who argue that Shakespeare may have been gay or bisexual, with no stronger evidence than certain highly specific interpretations of a few Shakespeare sonnets.

And of course there are some that argue Shakespeare never actually wrote his plays, in open defiance of all documented evidence we have to the contrary, but we’re not going there.

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare has been dramatized in all manner of ways, speculating on his inner life and creative process to varying degrees of accuracy. The most famous example is easily Shakespeare in Love, so laughably inaccurate that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the subject would find it preposterous. With all of that said, there are two recurring factors that keep cropping up.

First of all, “Hamlet” was first staged between 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet died in 1596 at age 11. And John Shakespeare — Will’s father — died in 1601. Sure, given the play’s striking resemblance to the ancient Old Norse tale of Amleth (recently adapted by Robert Eggers into The Northman), the timing is likely a coincidence. I might add that “Hamnet”/”Hamlet” (variations of the same name, not unlike “Tony”/”Anthony”) was a common name at the time. In fact, Shakespeare’s twins were likely named after Hamlet and Judith Sadler, his neighbors at the time. (Those same neighbors named their own son “William”.)

All the same, “Hamlet” puts such a heavy emphasis on death, mourning, and father/son relationships. The timing makes for a deeply personal story too compelling to ignore.

The second recurring factor is Shakespeare’s wife, known to popular culture as Anne Hathaway. Not surprisingly, we know even less about her than we do about Shakespeare. We know that she married the 18-year-old Shakespeare in 1582, when she was 26 years old and two months pregnant with their first child. Aside from that; the births, deaths, and marriages of her other two children; and Shakespeare’s famous last request that she be given his second-best bed; there is virtually no written record or correspondence of any kind with regard to Shakespeare’s wife. We don’t even know for a certainty what she looked like.

Unfortunately, in the absence of any reliable data on the subject, recent depictions of Anne Hathaway have been deeply unflattering. Many dramatizations have implied that Shakespeare was stuck in an unhappy marriage, naturally depicting Hathaway as the villainous aggressor. (Again, Shakespeare in Love.) At worst (as in Bill Cain’s excellent play “Equivocation”), Hathaway is actively depicted or referred to as an immoral and insatiable slut.

So here we are with “Hamnet”, a novel of historical fiction written by Maggie O’Farrell in 2020. O’Farrell went on to co-write and co-produce Hamnet, the film adaptation exec-produced by no less than Sam Mendes and Steven freaking Spielberg. But of course the central name here is Chloe Zhao, the white-hot Oscar winner who stepped in to direct, co-write, and exec produce. (Yes, we as a society have come to the collective agreement that Eternals never happened, or at least that it shouldn’t be held against any of the filmmakers responsible.)

Mercifully, the film takes a markedly different approach to Shakespeare’s wife, here named “Agnes” and played by Jessie Buckley. In this depiction, Agnes is essentially a pagan, making her a social outcast with deep-seated loathing of Christian dogma. Thus Agnes has a deep emotional connection with nature, which in turn means that Zhao gets to show off her specialty in nature photography. I might add that Agnes is a talented apothecary, with knowledge of plants and flowers that cleverly ties in with a certain scene from “Hamlet”.

(Side note: Speaking of which, I feel compelled to call out the scene in which Shakespeare’s kids act out the opening scene of “Macbeth”. That play didn’t get produced until 1606, years after this movie would’ve taken place.)

Most importantly, Agnes doesn’t like or trust “modern” society. She doesn’t want any of her family to be near the filth and pollution of a city like London, she wants to stay with the trees and animals in the idyllic rural countryside. This makes for a thematically powerful culture clash with Will’s family, and also with Will’s artistic ambitions that could only be achieved in London.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: What does any of this have to do with Hamnet (here played by Jacobi Jupe)? Honestly, not much. She doesn’t get the Christian luxury of believing that her son was prematurely taken to some better place as part of some divine plan, but that’s pretty much it.

No, the film makes a much bigger deal about how Agnes stayed behind to raise the kids in the countryside while Will (here immortalized by Paul Mescal) was off being an actor/playwright in London. Thus Will was nowhere to be found while Hamnet died a slow and painful death of the plague.

Yes, Will is clearly every bit as heartbroken about the loss of his son. Yes, it’s undeniably true that his being there wouldn’t have saved Hamnet or made his death any less painful for all involved. But Agnes has all this grief and pain and anger and it has to go somewhere, so she’s taking it out on Will.

Will, on the other hand, chooses to vent his grief through his art. Which unfortunately means that it takes place entirely in London, in total isolation from the rest of his family, and his wife and kids don’t find out until the play is all but finished. Bit of a missed opportunity there — as long as we’re making historical fiction here, why not show Agnes try and take a bit more artistic control over the depiction of her late son while the writing process is still underway? That could’ve made some compelling conflict.

Instead, we get the big climactic scene in which Will pours his grief into a harrowing onstage depiction of Hamlet’s ghostly father. And we get Agnes’ heartbreaking catharsis, watching all of London fall in love with her son onstage and share in her grief to watch him die. Though Agnes and Will mourn their son in their own unique ways, it’s Will’s more artistic method that ensures Hamnet — albeit a heavily stylized facsimile of him — will live forever.

(Side note: When “Hamlet” is finally produced in the third act, the part of Hamlet is played by Noah Jupe, Jacobi’s older brother. Fucking brilliant.

(Also, we don’t actually know who played the various roles when “Hamlet” was first produced. If you freeze-frame the playbill that’s seen in the movie, the names listed are the actual names of the actors playing those roles here in the movie. Neat little Easter egg there.)

All of this is the stuff that the film was made and marketed to provide. And it is powerful, deeply moving cinema. Here’s the problem: It’s pretty much entirely crammed into the last half-hour of the film.

The movie covers twenty years of history in two hours’ runtime. Hamnet isn’t even born until roughly 45 minutes in. He’s dead 30 minutes later. No doubt about it, the pacing in this movie is FUKT.

No joke, there’s ten or fifteen minutes of this film that could’ve been trimmed from the first act to make more room for the aftermath of Hamnet’s death and the characters’ differing methods of grief (i.e. the most interesting part of the movie and what we all came here to see).

Hamnet is a deeply frustrating film to watch and review. That third act is so incredibly good, it’s inexcusable that we didn’t get more of it throughout the runtime. Seriously, the namesake character isn’t even born until the movie is almost halfway over, what the fuck?!

Yes, I understand how the filmmakers could’ve taken such a keen interest in portraying the courtship and family life of William Shakespeare. Yes, a lot of it has bearing on the story that we came here to see. But there are huge swaths that have nothing to do with Hamnet or “Hamlet”, and all of it’s pretty much entirely the invention of the filmmakers (because, again, we have next to zero documented evidence to support any depiction of these people), so it’s tough to justify padding out the first half of this movie to such an extent.

Zhao and company cast their net too wide, and they made a film that lost its own purported focus. It’s still a movie worth seeing, don’t get me wrong. It’s beautifully photographed and superbly performed, to be sure. But it’s nowhere near the untouchable masterpiece that all the hype says it is.