By all accounts, Emma Hamilton was quite an interesting
person. A daughter of a blacksmith who died when she was two, she was a girl of
the 1700s who had limited options. So she pushed past these limitations by
pushing aside convention. At the start of That
Hamilton Woman, the audience is teased with her history, a history
presented so colorfully and cheerfully that we think it must be a tall tale or
outlandish gossip. In reality, it barely touched on the truth. This whole movie
barely touches on the truth. But it does a good job of providing
the audience a sense of the deep, unrelenting love between two people whose
combined remarkable talents were drawn upon by their country, and feel the
sorrow of the tragedy that befalls even the most common of people. While the movie
may not accurately reflect what actually happened, viewers can empathize with its
dramatization as well as they can empathize with the secret lives unknown to
history.
