Visually stunning with some fine performances.
Macbeth
Grade: B+
Director: Justin Kurzei (The Snowtown Murders)
Screenplay: Jacob Koskoff (The Marc Pease Experience), et al.
Cast: Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs), Marion Cotillard (Midnight in Paris)
Rating: R
Runtime: 113 min
by John DeSando
“They say blood will have blood.” Macbeth
Any production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth will ring with that bloody certainty, and contemporary ISIS-like dictatorships confirm that what begins with violence will end with it. Director Justin Kurzei has made a tragedy known by most high school students as real as any battle scene they have seen on YouTube.
Visually this Macbeth is dark and smoky outside so that villains like Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) emerge with hell or at least be comfortable with its worldly manifestations in fear and blood, red and grey. Equally stark are the interiors, dark and minimalist to convey hollow temporary power. Visually the film is a creative take that fully uses cinematographer Adam Arkapaw’s considerable talents.
As for the bard’s language, no one can improve on it, and Kurzei pares enough of it away to keep the essential speeches intact while lamentably to allow the visual to dominate. Fassbender is often in close up speaking quietly but with eerie nuance, such that I have a new appreciation for the character’s poetic and tragic nature, a companion appreciation to my two favorite interpretations by Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh. The way Fassbender slowly moans the iconic Tomorrow speech is as if I had not heard it before. His measured, low volume is just right for the melancholic doom of the sentiment.
While I admired Sarah Paulson’s wicked Mistress Epps in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, no facsimile can ever approach the insidious charm of Lady Macbeth. Marion Cotillard plays an effective power broker cum sexual temptress, a powerful combo for such an attractive and talented actress.
Notice Lady Macbeth’s sexual ministrations while Macbeth gives forth poetically. The irony of these two murderers making love while he rhapsodizes is a rich new take on an ancient Clinton motif, where Hillary could be thought of as a non-violent manipulator and Bill, well, a political and sexual Olympian.
Macbeth is a visually stunning work whose elimination of swaths of dialogue to fit the battlefield scenes bothers me a bit. Equally so, placing Lady Macbeth at scenes such as Lady Macduff (Elizabeth Debicki) and her children being burned at the stake takes too much license for creative license.
In the end, it’s the bard’s words that anchor any interpretation:
“Life's but a walking shadow. Honor. Love. Friends. But in there's death. Curses.” Macbeth
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
