Macbeth
2015: Justin Kurzel

This surely a contender the most atmospheric rendition of Macbeth ever made (and Macbeth has been given close atmospheric attention in the past). It is evocatively filmed in chiefly grey and blue tones, with highly impressionistic techniques (including stop-action or slow-motion battle scenes and the like). There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, I suppose, but every minute spent on the wordless visual exposition of the play is taken from its spare and intensely focused dialogue. When one has only a total one hour and fifty-three minutes, that’s a cost cannot be trivially overcome. Almost every scene is cut.

What remains is very much in the idiom of twenty-first century cinema. Soliloquies are rendered up as often as montages of inconsistent positions and postures, while the lines continue. The killing of Banquo is largely reflected in the stricken face of a very young Fleance, and is very effective.

The scenes are shot in Scotland, or something that looks a great deal like it (in fact, the Isle of Skye in Scotland, Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, England, Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England, and locations in Surrey.) The result is visually very persuasive for what it is. The acting is reasonably robust as well. Michael Fassbender brings a steely gravity to the problematic role of the honorable man who is deflected into a career of increasingly appalling treasons. The script presupposes what most producers of Macbeth have assumed as well — that Macbeth and his wife have had but lost children. Often that is taken quietly to undergird the representation of Lady Macbeth herself; here a wordless funeral scene at the beginning for the dead child makes explicit what many others have merely considered implicit.

Cotillard’s performance is worth the whole enterprise: she is an actress of extraordinary range, and here her delivery is most often quiet, measured, or even contemplative. A native speaker of French, she brings only the slightest hint of a non-English accent to the role; this is itself intriguing; more important, though, she clearly understands the English she is speaking better than most native English speakers do. She seldom rants or gives voice to extravagant expressions: most of her lines are given sotto voce, and the result is not merely more credible, but a situation in which the conspiracy is more obviously conspiratorial. Her unraveling as a character begins to manifest itself in the scene where Macbeth announces his intentions to slaughter Macduff’s house. She is positively undone when he kills them by burning them at the stake (which is rather hard to account for in the terms of the play, which fairly explicitly says that they are killed in a different way). The deviation from the script is hard enough to account for; even harder to comprehend is why Macbeth would resort to something so ostentatiously cruel, if he is still hoping to keep concealed his identity as their killer.

Fassbender’s diction doesn’t at all times suggest that he really understands what he’s saying. In the passage “No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red,” he pauses inexplicably between “green” and “one”, as if “one” were an attributive adjective to “red”, rather than part of “green one”. He delivers many of his more haunting self-reflective lines with a kind of wry laughter; there is also the sense that he and Lady Macbeth find violence in and of itself erotic. That’s mostly implicit, but it’s woven into the texture of their delivery of the dialogue. I don’t think this is in any way implicit in Shakespeare’s own text, but it’s also not impossibly or weirdly transgressive of what the text has to say.

The whole sequence in which the messenger briefly misinforms Macduff about the death of his family is elided; that’s perhaps explicable, since the purpose of this swerve in the narrative is at least somewhat obscure. The further (and longer) diversion in which Malcolm misinforms Macduff of his own crimes is also missing.

The assassination takes place in a sequence of tents in what is (apparently) a military camp, rather than a castle, which makes Lady Macbeth’s comment “What, in our house?” rather bizarre, if it were retained. That there would be “alarum bells” available for them to ring at this point would be somewhat dubious as well.

Duncan is played by David Thewlis, known to viewers of the Harry Potter movies as Remus Lupin. He’s played as neither an old doddering weak king nor as a very robust younger man.

The “dagger of the mind” scene is played rather oddly; the apparent ghost of a young man already dead in battle appears to proffer the dagger to Macbeth. While this is not supported by anything particular in the text, neither does it seem at odds with it either in tonality or sense, inasmuch as there are ghosts in the play (and we have practically to believe that they are real). The young man has appeared at the battle scene at the beginning of the play (without dialogue) and appears later in the second consultation of the Weird Sisters, and is given the line “Be bloody, bold, a resolute,” etc.

The banquet scene with Banquo is one of those that can plausibly be filimed in a variety of ways; this is plausible, and we do actually see Banquo present, bloodied. The complex multi-valued dialogue of the scene is, alas, brutally cut.

Lady Macbeth’s “mad scene” is delivered without any supporting action — no washing, scrubbing, or the like, or any gestures whatever — which seems (at least) peculiar. We are supposed to understand that she’s talking about cleaning her hands — an extended metaphor of cleaning and water runs throughout the play — but we are left without any hooks to attach that physical metaphor to. At the end, she’s apparently talking to some child, but it’s not clear who. She wanders off to see the Weird Sisters. Even stranger, her death is announced to Macbeth after he has been sitting with her. Is this something he should have been able to overlook? What’s the point of scrambling the sequence of events thus? It’s quite affecting and yet peculiarly irrelevant when Macbeth gives his speech of resignation while hanging over her body:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!“

There are a handful of other peculiar omissions or alterations, and one or two additions. I have less problem with having gratuitous ghosts on scene than I do with explicitly showing the murder of Duncan, which is deliberately left off-scene. It is interleaved with symbolic action of the horses running wild. The whole of the porter scene is omitted; Macbeth moves seamlessly from assassinating Duncan to informing Malcolm of it with bizarre and surreal serenity. After this (entirely irrationally), Lady Macbeth reproves Macbeth for bringing the daggers from the scene afterward. Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane not by being cut and carried by Malcolm’s and Macduff’s soldiers but by being set afire; its thck smoke blows over the castle, and (presumably) also conceals the number of the attacking soldiers.

There are also a handful of cinematic decisions that are at least puzzling. The final fight between Macbeth and Macduff is so slow and protracted as to be something more like a philosophical dialogue, or it might be if it weren’t short on words as well. Mostly the combatants stand glaring at each other as if in a particularly unpleasant business meeting. The film concludes with a kind of reflection on violence, though precisely what the message is remains somewhat unclear. A small boy with a sword runs into a red vista.

It’s wisely claimed to be “based on the play by William Shakespeare.” Surely it is only a somewhat irregular resemblance.

The film is rated “R” for its violence (which is not strictly necessary in Macbeth, as almost all the violence takes place offstage, and for “brief sexuality”, whatever that means). It probably is not the best choice for young audiences, nor is it really the best choice for anyone’s first exposure to this play, since it omits so much of the critical dialogue. It has its place in the range of Macbeth productions, however.

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