I guess they didn’t talk about it at home; they were too busy enthusiastically tossing their children in the air.
The reason people sobbed so hard over “Hamnet” is that Agnes, who is not recognizable as an actual human, is a Mother Archetype who activated much of the audience at a primal level. That is how the film is intended to operate, and it succeeds. Almost all of us have a Mother Wound beneath the conscious awareness where our imperfect, complex human mothers reside, and this is where the Perfect Mother lives within us.
The movie presents an Agnes who embodies the Perfect Mother. She is all womb and no brain, slack-jawed, dumber than even the peasants and commoners who swarm to see Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and all instinct (but not enough actual instinct to take the infant who has sputtered back to life in her arms and clear her mouth, shift her position to open the airways, or in any other way do what any midwife or healer of the time would have known to do). Agnes exists only to birth, love and heal her children. ONLY.
Agnes is married to a successful playwright but apparently alone in the audience is completely unaware of the conventions of the theatre. Agnes has her own mother wound, and that is all she is made of. She sleeps in the trees. She swyves with Master Tutor upon first or second meeting. She has babies in the forest. Tree shots. Trees!! More trees, and blackout. Agnes throws her children around in the air and hugs them and tells them she loves them and will never leave them. Agnes howls and screams more than she speaks. Agnes punches the Father who is absent. Agnes is shown actually eating, something very few female characters do in movies. Agnes grieves. Agnes reaches out to heal the wounded Puer figure on the stage. The rest is silence.
People who adored this movie didn’t so much enjoy it as succumb to its manipulations. And again, that’s okay. This is how art often works. Just don’t tell me it’s a great film. The depiction of Will was an embarrassment and I feel for Paul Mescal being given a scene where he actually says TO BE OR NOT TO BE while contemplating jumping from a bridge. My god, this is bad writing. If this wins Best Picture over “Sinners” I will take to my bed for the rest of my life.