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| Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard |
Directors have a tendency to re-invent the wheel
when filming Shakespeare by coming up with elaborate new takes on the material.
They’ll do it in modern dress, or do it in the actual location, or if you’re really
unlucky do it in modern dress, switch it to New York, and have Ethan Hawke offer
his usual sub-par emo performance. It’s almost as if they don’t trust themselves
to be judged by the material and indulge in smoke and mirrors instead.
Shakespeare himself told us ‘The play’s the thing’
which is why it is something of a disappointment that Justin Kurzel treads a
well-worn path in largely ignoring the text in favour of some lavish but
essentially redundant visuals in his version of Macbeth.
In cinema action defines character. Pretty much
everything you need to know about Macbeth is that he is willing to kill the
king to advance his own cause, and his wife is sufficiently driven to support
him in his task. You might also add that perhaps it is a reluctance to
disappoint Lady M that encourages him to finally screw his courage to the
sticking place and do the deed.
Kurzel however offers up the Scottish play for the
hard of thinking. We begin with the funeral of a dead Macbeth child which leads
us to suggest that their actions are motivated by grief. I heard Kurzel in a
radio interview talking about a couple he knew who had lost a child and became
high achievers as a consequence of throwing themselves into their work to assuage
their grief. For the Macbeths this is regicide as therapy, rather than action born
of vaulting ambition.
This kind of heavy handed emotional signposting is
mirrored in much of the visuals which are impressive but mostly pointless. We don’t need to see the Battle of Ellon which
opens the play and generally happens off-stage. All we need to know is that
Macbeth has won against the odds and done the king a huge service. Here we see
the battle in full bullet-time, music video porn, complete with great gouts of
high-definition blood splashing across the screen.
It’s well enough done if you like that sort of
thing but in fact it serves to hold up the action; unlike the play, very little happens at the
start of the film of any import and Kurzel takes a long time to get going.
There isn’t even the justification of these visuals opening out the text
because much of the subsequent action takes place in appropriately
claustrophobic settings.
It looks good mind you. Never was a heath so
blasted as the one Kurzel presents us with here and there are so many smoke
pots belching away that even Ridley Scott might find it a little excessive.
The shining light in the film is Michael Fassbender
in the title role. Despite sounding disconcertingly like Andy Murray at times,
this is compelling stuff. The murder is the pivotal moment in his performance
and there is a genuine sense of liberation for Macbeth as he seizes power.
Paddy Considine is fine as the ill-fated Banquo, as is Sean Harris as MacDuff.
And having carped over Kurzel mucking about with
the text in places he deserves credit for leaving in Banquo’s son Fleance, a
crucial character who is often missed out of screen adaptations of this play. Perhaps he was hoping for a sequel.
The one disappointment for me is Marion Cotillard
as Lady Macbeth. I get the sense that performing Shakespeare in her second
language has encouraged such care over diction and dialogue that there is an
absence of performance. This Lady Macbeth is curiously colourless as a result
and her traditional drive is missing.
There are some fine moments in the film but overall
for me it lacked passion and power and any sense of nuance or subtlety. As such
you wonder what is the point of another screen Macbeth?
To borrow from the Bard perhaps if it were done, when
it was done, then it were well it were done better.
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