Macbeth | Little White Lies

Mac­beth

01 Oct 2015 / Released: 02 Oct 2015

A man wearing a crown and ornate robe in a dimly lit, elaborate interior.
A man wearing a crown and ornate robe in a dimly lit, elaborate interior.
4

Anticipation.

The original had a decent enough writer.

4

Enjoyment.

Reinvented dynastic tragedy shows true grit.

4

In Retrospect.

The performances are astonishingly intense, their sound and fury signifying everything.

A vital reimag­in­ing of ʻThe Scot­tish Play’ with stel­lar turns from Michael Fass­ben­der and Mar­i­on Cotillard.

Next time you catch your­self lament­ing mod­ern cinema’s unhealthy obses­sion with remakes and sequels, spare a thought for William Shake­speare, who reimag­ined’ almost all his scripts from pre-exist­ing sources, and fol­lowed one king’s tale with anoth­er, even sub-divid­ing them into parts to ʻcash in’ on their suc­cess. And those plays were not just per­formed once, but have been restaged, rein­vent­ed, even rewrit­ten to suit dif­fer­ent audi­ences at dif­fer­ent times.

Take the Scot­tish play, most famous­ly turned to film by Orson Welles in 1948 and by Roman Polan­s­ki in 1971. Justin Kurzel may at first seem improb­a­ble as direc­tor of this lat­est iter­a­tion, giv­en that his 2011 fea­ture debut, Snow­town, was a work of grit­ty con­tem­po­rary nat­u­ral­ism, ripped straight from the head­lines and set in sub­ur­ban Ade­laide. Yet both works, as it hap­pens, con­cern blood beget­ting more blood, as one act of mur­der leads to more, draw­ing every­one into its hor­rif­ic orbit. And despite some stylised colour-fil­ter­ing of the win­try High­land­capes, Kurzel’s Mac­beth is misty, mud­dy, bloody, earthy affair – shot by Snowtown’s Adam Arkanaw part­ly in hand­held close-ups that allow lines more com­mon­ly bel­lowed to be inti­mate­ly whis­pered, and the tor­tured faces of Michael Fass­ben­der (as Mac­beth) and his Lady (Mar­i­on Cotil­lard) to come into har­row­ing focus.

Kurzel’s added nuances rein­vest Shake­speare with unex­pect­ed mean­ing. Open­ing with the deaths of Macbeth’s two (new­ly invent­ed) chil­dren adds a psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion to Macbeth’s sub­se­quent resent­ment of oth­er nobles’ blood­lines, and makes Lady Macbeth’s impre­ca­tion of the spir­its to, Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall,” res­onate with bit­ter grief. The deci­sion to realise a cru­cial bat­tle that in Shakespeare’s play Ban­quo had mere­ly described shows vivid­ly the vio­lence and vis­cera in which Macbeth’s trau­ma­tised char­ac­ter is forged. Lady Macbeth’s per­suad­ing of her hes­i­tant hus­band to com­mit regi­cide is often staged as a seduc­tion, but Kurzel has her actu­al­ly mas­tur­bat­ing Mac­beth while lay­ing out her design for mur­der, so that the words that mark Macbeth’s resolve (“I am set­tled”) come, in their post-cli­mac­tic posi­tion, with a new dou­ble sig­nif­i­cance, utter­ly con­found­ing sex and death, while remind­ing us of that famous dagger’s essen­tial­ly phal­lic nature.

The dag­ger, in Kurzel’s ver­sion, is not imag­ined by Mac­beth to be float­ing before him, but is shown there for real, held by the embod­ied ghost of Macbeth’s war torn son. Indeed, Kurzel grounds all the play’s super­nat­ur­al ele­ments in the mate­r­i­al world. The witchy sis­ters may be ʻweird’, not least because they turn up in the mid­dle of nowhere – or of pitched bat­tles – but they are also flesh and blood, as are the ghosts (not just of Ban­quo, but of many a fall­en sol­dier), haunt­ing the film’s world as much as Macbeth’s mind with their uncan­ny pres­ence. This phys­i­cal­i­ty, along with the inten­si­ty of the per­for­mances, recasts Shakespeare’s spook­i­est dra­ma as a real­ist trip into PTSD. No mat­ter if Mac­beth remakes what was already writ­ten – after all, it always has been con­cerned with the pre­scribed nature of destiny.

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