by Brendan FoleyF
Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015), new on Blu, is less an attempt to adapt Shakespeare’s play as it is an effort to translate the actual feel and atmosphere that Macbeth conjures among an audience. Kurzel’s stunning eye for compositions establishes a hypnotic visual landscape and sense of otherworldly doom and despair. This is a broken world, a world bent on madness and destruction even before a drop of kingly blood is shed.
Kurzel’s efforts produce one of the most ravishing visual experiences of The Bard’s works yet, but his choices also warp Macbeth’s meaning and purpose. In stripping Shakespeare’s text to the bone (Macbeth, already one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies, if not the shortest, has been cut down to a two-hour movie, and big swaths of that running time are taken up by silence. I’d hazard that maybe half of Shakespeare’s verse made it into the final film, if that) Kurzel has created a Macbeth that is an entirely different animal from what viewers may be used to, for better or ill.
For those of you with shit high school English departments, Macbeth is the tragedy of Macbeth, a loyal Scottish lord whom we meet just as he has finished putting down a rebellion against Duncan, King of Scotland. No sooner has Macbeth put his sword to the man who tried to usurp the king then he is approached by The Weird Sisters, a trio of witches that prophesize that Macbeth shall one day be king. Urged on by his wife, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth murders Duncan and assumes the throne. But guilt, fear, and the machinations of the supernatural drive the couple to madness and more and more acts of cruelty until the remains of Scottish nobility and nature itself rise up to remove Macbeth’s body from the throne and his head from his shoulders.
You will note that nowhere in that synopsis is there mention of dead children as motivating factors for the murderous couple, and yet Kurzel’s riff on the tale gives the Macbeths a pair of dead boys and uses this loss as the axis around which the entire film spins. The film opens with the Macbeths laying one son to the funeral pyre (prompting the first appearance of the witches) and shortly thereafter depicts in hallucinogenic fashion the death of his second boy in battle (prompting the second appearance of the witches). Kurzel’s Macbeth returns to the dead boys again and again, integrating them into iconic scenes where their presence wholly changes the meaning (when Macbeth has his ‘floating dagger’ hallucination, it is his dead son that holds it aloft; when Lady Macbeth does her ‘out, out damned spot’ bit, instead of sleepwalking she recites it to a vision of her younger child).
Macbeth is no longer the story of ambition’s destructive consequences, but a parable of how grief blinds and torments us. The Macbeths have lost a child to nature and a child to Duncan’s war, and so they plot to kill Duncan and usurp nature. Macbeth’s kingship is presented as the means by which the couple hope to make up for their lost boys, with Kurzel even going so far as to have the couple make love just before committing the crime (Lady Macbeth mocks her husband’s failing masculinity while he’s inside of her). And when Macbeth does kill Duncan, Kurzel shoots the act and aftermath like a warped form of childbirth, with Macbeth sawing through Duncan’s midsection in a hideous parody of a c-section.
Michael Fassbender, he of the unshakeable brogue, and Marion Cotillard make a fine Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but Kurzel (and the script by Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso) undercuts them a tad by having the Macbeths be wracked with grief and mania from the outset. Shakespeare presented Macbeth as a hearty and well-loved fellow who spirals into a tyrant’s reign of paranoia and madness. Fassbender’s Macbeth is a hollow, dead-eyed shell from the very first scene of the movie, stumbling through his story with bone-deep exhaustion. It’s haunting work, but it’s not as dynamic and compelling a Macbeth as Macbeth can produce (same goes for Cotillard. One of the weirder elements of Macbeth is that Lady Macbeth, surely one of the most fascinating and complex characters Shakespeare ever wrote, is so critical to the early action only to vanish throughout almost the entire second half of the play, save the ‘spot’ monologue. Kurzel’s stripped down approach keeps Cotillard in play for most of the running time, but like Fassbender she is given less room to inhabit Lady Macbeth’s downfall).
Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (the guy responsible for the one-take chase in True Detective season one) milk Scotland for all its otherworldly gloom and darkness, capturing brilliant vistas of shadow and shade. Along with the pounding score by Jed Kurzel, the images build a visual landscape akin to a waking nightmare. The film downplays the overtly supernatural and surreal moments, but Kurzel does not require spectral visions to portray a world warped beyond nature’s order. The final battle between Macbeth and the vengeful Macduff (Sean Harris) is played out beneath a red sun and floating embers, the apocalypse brought to medieval Scotland and let free.
Kurzel’s choices make for good academic conversations, but do they make for good drama? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with since finishing the movie. Between the giant chunks of missing text, and Kurzel directing his actors to mutter, mumble and whisper much of the dialogue, I have to imagine anyone who goes into the movie without preexisting knowledge of the story will simply be lost (you get so used to the silences that it almost seems perverse whenever you do get a sequence of sustained Shakespearean verse). People who do have a knowledge of Macbeth may find themselves frustrated by how loose Kurzel plays it.
Fassbender deserves all the credit in the world for how emotionally and physically drained he seems throughout, which, along with the all-consuming grime and cold of the locales, could not have been an easy shoot. But there’s nothing especially compelling about a man who seems crazy and broken from the first moments becoming more crazy and more broken.
Harris as Macduff, Paddy Considine as Banquo, Jack Reynor as Malcolm, David Thewlis as the doomed king, Duncan, all turn in strong work but all are ultimately secondary to the landscapes and the mood of the piece.
Even the witches are tempered down in this film, speaking their prophecies not with cackling mischief but with pointed, haunted sorrow.
Look, the best Macbeth film is probably always going to be Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. No one else has so perfectly cracked the integration of the paranormal and the supernatural, and no Macbeth’s downfall has been the equal of seeing Toshiro Mifune reduced from his iconic masculine cool to the frantic, screeching creature fleeing from an endless assault of arrows (Mifune’s performance of course being enhanced by Kurosawa opting to fire actual, lethal arrows at Mifune, hundreds upon hundreds of times. That rascal).
Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth does not pack the same punch, lacking the fevered heart that drives the best tellings of this story. But as a visual experience it is largely unparalleled, and Kurzel’s alterations to the text make this a Macbeth unlike any other, a tragedy that truly makes you feel for the mad king in his downfall.
Macbeth hit Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD, and On Demand on March 8th from The Weinstein Company