Beastly Reviews: Macbeth
This arty film attempts to reinvent a 400-year-old play.
My name is Alexander Cheves, but lovers call me Beastly. I write about sex for magazines.
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Justin Kurzil's grim, gorgeous Macbeth — an art movie among the holiday crowd — brings Shakespeare's tragedy to the big screen in a new and thrilling way.
Macbeth gives the done-so-many-times play all the violence and grit it deserves and places the difficult iambic pentameter in a creepy, misty atmosphere. I think it is probably best seen if you are a little familiar with Macbeth, the play. I've read it. I've done literary analysis of it. But that's because I'm a literature student, and most movie-goers aren't me.
The opening battle sequence feels like a Woodkid music video. When the three witches appear, they are creepy in a Ryan Murphy-ish way: off-kilter and odd but not scary. Standing in a row, staring blankly at the camera, they are a toned-down version of the traditional "three witches" archetype, one we are all familiar with — three hags cackling around a cauldron — and feel nicely modern.
But why Shakespeare? Why Macbeth? Why this, again? Beyond its grim look, the film's only commentary, really, is on itself. It's a big risk, a big ask of modern audiences, and a bit too arty. Watching it, I'm aware this film is made for a certain crowd, people who want to see Macbeth on the big screen. People like me. And maybe that's who this film is for. But is that enough?
It just takes itself a little seriously. It is so out-of-place as to appear awkward. One goes to the cinema and sees the current movie posters lit in their displays, "coming soon" and "now playing", and among them is a play that was first written in 1606.
There is the valid question of whether or not these old plays should be put on the screen at all. Shakespeare wrote plays for stage, typically theatres in the round, which required a different kind of acting than is needed in modern cinema. I'm just not convinced it works. I felt the same about Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo and Juliet, another Shakespeare movie that sustains itself solely on stylistic novelty.
Most audiences will just be lost. And the effect of that — making a movie that will confuse most viewers — is not erudite or intellectual, it's actually a little off-putting. The language of Shakespeare was made in and for a different world, when English, even that spoken by the common man, was different. For those who study and appreciate theater, Shakespeare is timeless, but I don't know if cinema is where we want to appreciate this stuff. It wants to live in an old playhouse, and wants to be seen live. I want to see Shakespeare on a stage.
Macbeth is lush but cumbersome, gorgeous yet trudging, and that's largely due to the fact that it is, simply, Shakespeare. Watching the film is a sort of intellectual commitment, something viewers will feel smart for having done, regardless if they actually enjoyed it.
Fassbender got beefed up for the role, so this King Macbeth is super hot. In the film, he descends into madness in Fassbender style, half-lidded, intense and cold-looking, drenched in sweat. Marion Cotillard has proved her ability to do sinister characters well in past films and does it again with her ice-blooded, wan-looking Lady Macbeth.
But in a play about transformation — and yes, this is teetering into literary analysis — they change very little. Macbeth is stern, taciturn, and grim at the beginning and stern, taciturn, and grim by the end. We're just to understand he's crazy now. Cotillard is plagued by the same issue, but that's more true to her character: Lady Macbeth is always crazy, the bad apple that first proposes killing King Duncan and starting the couple's dark descent. They are both grim and intense. One gets the sense they did not really know what to do.
Macbeth is so heavyhanded, so packaged, but since it is, actually, deeply constrained by its source material, it never really gives us space to ask the larger questions that its source material provokes. Does Macbeth turn evil as a result of his greed, or is he a pawn in a grander prophecy? Is he responsible for his actions? Live plays do not have the ability to comment on themselves, but film does, and in a film, modern audiences want more than the basic elements of script and set. In other words, we want more than a play: we want a perspective. That is, in a way, the problem with Angels In America and all movies and TV shows that are just filmed plays: they don't feel like movies or TV shows, not without all the editing and subtle commentary that goes into moviemaking. This is why I feel plays and films don't really work as the same thing, in the same medium.
But alas, I forget myself. These are the ramblings of a literature student, the sort of person who goes to see Macbeth on the big screen. And I sure did.
Love, Beastly
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