Fair and Foul: A Review of the 2015 Macbeth film - Entrepreneur Generations

One of my goals is for our students is to have them see whichever Shakespeare play we study in the fall/winter, before our IB Literary Discussions in mid-January. I want them to see that Shakespeare is a living and breathing part of our culture still, and that seeing it is how it should be experienced. All of our instruction of it is performance-driven, and the goal is to see actual professional actors engage in a performance, so ideally they can talk about the process, which students have done themselves in class. 

However, seeing a Shakespeare play live in Baltimore is a tougher task than it seems (at least in the fall); Baltimore's Shakespeare theater, The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, hasn't offered fall matinees of its productions so far, and neither Everyman Theater or Center Stage had Shakespeare on the docket this year. We had the option of Pericles at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington DC (a trip that costs our students nearly $40/each), which we briefly considered before we saw the awesome trailer for the new Macbeth movie starring Michael Fassbender, which was set to come out in 2015. While seeing a film of Shakespeare isn't the same as seeing live theater, sometimes we just have to compromise; plus, it looked so good. This made our curricular decision easy, as we would keep Macbeth in the curriculum and go see the film when it came out.

Macbeth at The Senator with IB Seniors on 12/21/15

Once we figured out when it was going to be released in the United States (December), I contacted The Charles, which I figured would be the Baltimore theater to get the movie. They were so great to work with, and later they called me and told me Macbeth was actually going to be shown at The Senator; the two theaters share the same management. I want to give some major props to both The Charles and The Senator for making this a very affordable field trip for students! They set up a 10 a.m. showing for us on the big screen and we couldn't have asked for a better location to see the movie. The Senator is a beautiful theater, and many of my students had never been to this gem of Baltimore.

So the field trip itself was a great experience, but I did find the actual film to be pretty uneven. The concept is so cool -- Macbeth adapted into a Game of Thrones-style thriller -- but it doesn't quite live up to its promise, despite a tremendous starring turn by Michael Fassender, some beautiful filming, and some interesting (some thought-provoking, some ill-conceived) choices.

Let me start with the larger issues. Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest play, a dynamic and quickly-paced tragedy with no filler. Yet, Justin Kurzel's direction of the script penned by Jacob Koskoff, Todd Luiso, and Michael Lesslie is slow, which is surprising since the film cuts a lot, from the "Something wicked this way comes" potion-making witches speech to the porter scene to Lady Macbeth's "the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures" speech. The film is very stylized and atmospheric, and sometimes it is trying so hard to be that, tat the story isn't propelled forward.

Secondly, Marion Cotillard's portrayal as Lady Macbeth as passive and weak cuts a lot of that character's impact. Performed almost exclusively in whispers, this Lady Macbeth convinces her husband to murder through sex rather than command, and lines about dashing her baby's brains out are rendered without force. It doesn't help that the filmmakers saddle Cotillard with the worst sleepwalking scene I have ever seen; the doctor and gentlewoman are cut, and Cotillard delivers the lines in close-up on her face, and while I don't want to give away who she is speaking to (it's an interesting choice), there's no focus on the hands or the spots whatsoever. I've liked Cotillard in every other film I've seen her in, and she certainly has an expressive face, but her anemic performance here convinced me she was miscast; it also rendered many Lady Macbeth scenes dull, which probably contributed to the film's slowness. How can you make the "unsex me here" speech dull? This film found a way.

Not liking the pacing or the portrayal of one of the major characters is enough to call this one uneven, but there were several choices I liked quite a bit.

First off, the filmmakers take a line later in the play about Lady Macbeth breastfeeding and expand it: the opening shot of the film is centered on the funeral of a dead toddler, the Macbeths' son. This turns the power-hungry Macbeths into a grieving couple makes us feel more sympathetic to their actions. Without changing anything in the script of the play, they make the numerous lines about children, babies, and milk all the more powerful with this backstory. It helps that the dead toddler appears in visions a few other times in the film. I found this a powerful and thought-provoking choice.

Another strength of the film was its cinematography. Filmed on location in Scotland and England, Kurzel shoots with a dark palette, which make the later vivid colored filtering (especially in the last scene) even more striking. There's a harsh beauty to both the camera work and the landscape, which Kurzel often fills with fog or fire, and it makes for a perfect backdrop to the story. 

The prolific fight scenes were also terrific, making the violence in Macbeth visceral from the beginning; reading the play, we hear of what a great fighter Macbeth is, but in the film, we see his fighting prowess -- with spurting blood, often shown in slow motion -- as well as his leadership on the battlefield. The death of their toddler, and the ferocious fight scenes, make it seem like the Macbeth who later murders Duncan and Banquo might be suffering from PTSD, and it adds some layers to the events later, without perverting Shakespeare’s script.

Another example of this occurs with the character of Lady Macduff, who we see a few times before she’s killed in Act IV. While she doesn’t have any earlier lines (from what I can tell, the filmmakers take very few liberties with any of Shakespeare's poetry other than cuts), there are moments when she and Lady Macbeth lock eyes early in the play and, even though we had not yet been introduced to who she is, those who know Macbeth should probably realize at that point that she is Macduff’s wife, an important foil for Lady Macbeth. The murder of her and her children is brutal, even harder to watch than Roman Polanski’s bloody and rape-filled adaptation in 1971 of the same scene; I won't give much away, but let's just say that Macbeth has a much more active role than just passively sending an executioner to get them.

The battle scenes are bloody, but the one that I wanted to be -- the Banquo’s Ghost scene -- wasn’t; it was curiously underplayed. Indeed, the whole magical aspect of the play is de-emphasized; the witches are mildly creepy, but it’s not clear that they really are supernatural at all. The cauldron scene is cut, and other than a cool little moment between a young girl who appears with the witches and Fleance, they don’t seem to meddle in Macbeth’s affairs much.

Michael Fassbender is very good in the title role, but sometimes he’s saddled with making his monologues narration, and it feels a little too “telling, not showing” at times towards the last half hour or so. But he’s superb during the battle scenes, and his chemistry with Cotillard is often palpable. Other than the battle scenes, my favorite moment was probably his “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, performed in this production with his dead wife in his arms; I also loved that the filmmakers played up the “Seyton”/”Satan” homonym that I tell my students about every year. That being said, I could hear by some of my students' laughter that they found several moments of Fassbender's descent into madness -- running around in circles in his room, wandering the hillside in his nightgown on a horse -- unintentionally humorous.

Other than Cotillard, I thought the cast was very strong (the only one I recognized was David Thewlis as Duncan), and look forward to watching sometime in the future with subtitles, because sometimes I lost some words within their thick (authentic sounding, not that I’m an expert) Scottish accents.

So, all in all, I found the adaptation uneven, but full of enough interesting choices to make it worth watching for any fan of Macbeth. It’s classroom appropriate for older students, though it does earn its R rating, probably for its excessive violence and one nudity-free (but graphic thrusting) sex scene.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/1S6DkJZ Fair and Foul: A Review of the 2015 Macbeth film - Entrepreneur Generations

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