Andrew here to talk about a Shakespeare adaptation
There’s a moment in the recent adaptation of Macbeth that’s legitimately surprising for audience, even those who have read the play. Towards the end of the film Marion Cotillard appears on screen for Lady Macbeth’s moment of reckoning – that iconic “Out damned spot!” speech. The scene unfolds, naturally, in a different fashion than it does in the play. The monologue, though, becomes especially striking when the camera draws back to reveal “who” she is speaking to. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but a few of the persons in the row behind me gasped at the cutaway. It’s meant to be a jolting moment in the film, and it is, although it’s also a baffling one. The moment has stuck with me since I’ve seen the film as I’ve tried to make sense of it within the film’s framework. And, the more I think on it, the more it emerges as emblematic of this adaptation.
Let it not be said that Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not without ambition and energy. This Macbeth is transposed to the cinema in language that’s distinctly visual. This is a Macbeth about movement and space and contact, and then the ensuing loss of that same contact. The language of the film is restlessness and mournful agitation from its first shot and the entire fair is slick and confident, but I go back and forth on how effective it is.
On a technical level, this is an arresting adaptation. I always think of Macbeth as a Gothic play before Gothic was a thing. The ultimate gloominess, the supernatural tension, the fatalistic themes. The sound and the camera capture that moodiness but almost too well? Is Macbeth an evil man on the path of least righteousness or an ambitious man felled by his desires? Kurzel's vision seems more in line with the former and dramatic license is essential in any literary adaptation. But Kurzel, so attached to the gloominess of the plains, and less so to his protagonist, shifts the tension in the story with this reading. This tale of sound and fury immediately loses dramatic tension when our titular "hero" and his wife seem beyond redemption from their first scene together. This is a Macbeth whose life seemed suffused with gloom and despair even before the Witches prophesy.
But, for a visually complex film, Kurzel's Macbeth is startlingly prosaic in its actual rumination on the film's themes. For a play that's all about the political, Macbeth's own engagement with that aspect of the drama is seriously lacking. Then, there's the actual dialogue... It's probably a whole other level of nerdiness to ponder on Iambic Pentameter in a 2015 film, but Macbeth is a play with significantly little prose - even for a Shakespeare. The rhythms of the language is a key to the complexity of the drama, but here all the actors opt for a Naturalistic delivery which complements the gloom but also seems odd and even amusing in key scenes. It's a good reminder why many adaptations tend to update the dialogue to actual prose. Shakespeare verse is tricky.
Fassbender is the only actor who emerges close to unscathed from the collective inability to master the Shakespearean cadence. I run hot and cold on him as an actor but he's especially vivid here in a performance that's just the right level of unhinged. I'm more mixed on TFE favourite Marion Cotillard who has key moments of excellence (the Banquet scene for example) but seems hampered both by an oddly flat reading of the role and the film's inability to decide what to decide what her role in Macbeth's descent is.
Taking all this into consideration, it is not surprising that Macbeth's strongest moments becomes the ones without words - unusual, as it may be, for a Shakespeare adaptation. The opening sequence is a gem but even more so is the final battle where Macbeth meets his fate. When the film loses its words and luxuriates in its moods and ambient sound it is at its most confident.
Kurzel clearly understands the language of cinema but I'm not so certain he's interested in examining the language of Shakespeare. And, Macbeth, for all its ostensible blood and gore is more Hamlet than Titus Andronicus. The words are as important as the spectacle. Kurzel delivers heartily on the mood, making me think what interesting, stylised things he might do with a silent Macbeth.
And still, still, I do not feel unkindly towards the entire affair. Just like my own inclination to be sympathetic towards Macbeth's self-destructive ambition it's hard to not be charmed by how ambitious Kurzel tries to make this film. When I came out of the theatre my flatmate, who I saw it with asked if I liked it. “Not really,” I had to admit. “But, I’m glad I saw it.” I’m not entirely sure he telegraphs clearly what it wants to say about Macbeth, sometimes I'm not even sure he knows what he wants to say (I'm uncertain how he considers Lady Macbeth within the fabric of the entire story, for example). There is much which gets lost in the (gorgeous) fog of Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography (Emmy winner for Top of the Lake, True Detective), but even if I do not consider this a great Macbeth, it is a sometimes alluring one.