#literary-adaptation

#literary-adaptation

Narrated by the wayward ghost of Mary Shelley, Gyllenhaal's loopy, overstuffed fable is maddeningly uneven and just plain mad, in both the furious and off-its-rocker sense. I liked it more than any movie I've also considered walking out of.

A movie about a visionary man whose genius made him one of the greatest figures in literature. William Shakespeare is played by Paul Mescal, an actor who leaves no demographic unravished by his outrageous levels of magnetism. And yet Hamnet is a film that sidelines both of these men to supporting roles. The film is about Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, long viewed as a dumpy, illiterate woman unworthy of attention abandoned by Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon when he swanned off to London.

A few days after Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" came out, a friend sent me an Onion headline about a bookseller frantically pulling classics off the shelf before Fennell enters the store. No beloved novel could be safe from the dangers of the director introducing anachronistic costumes, original songs by Charli XCX, selectively color-blind casting, and explicit B.D.S.M. scenes for its Byronic hero.

The film uses Austen as more of an entry point into a broader, comfortingly clever story about a 21st-century woman who navigates familiar emotional dilemmas.