The early afternoon audience was fewer than a dozen at the showing of the latest movie version of Macbeth at Robinson’s Movieworld.
I wondered who among them were Lit teachers and students, or hapless innocents who had blundered into the theater, having heard, perhaps, of Shakespeare and were curious or had nothing better to do on a Monday afternoon.
While there were three or four walkouts in the middle of the show, the remaining handful stayed till the end, although I was bemused to hear an audible grumble: “Haay…ka hinay pud ani oy!” and silently applauded the speaker’s courageous patience to stay through the end.
Acclaimed director Justin Kurzel’s modern cinematic take on the timeless tragedy, while visually stunning and superbly acted, could, for ordinary movie goers unfamiliar with Shakespeare, be most puzzling and an ordeal to watch with its slow, measured pacing.
Eschewing the familiar theatrical conventions associated with the play’s production, it’s a fresh treatment of it.
Even with subtitles, the English of the 16th-17th c. is foreign-sounding, the plot hard to follow. I could have done without the subtitles which are a distraction but are needed for the general audience, although they may have served to confuse more than help them.
But not for those who’ve studied Shakespeare’s play. And yet it’s this familiarity that could work against the viewer, as explained later.
As adaptations go, Kurzel’s Macbeth becomes a new imaginative creation, independent in itself, to be seen, understood, and judged on its own terms.
While based on the Bard’s play, it is a different Macbeth with its modern cinematic treatment and interpretations.
The first innovation is the introduction at the beginning of the movie of the burial scene of the Macbeths’ child which isn’t in the original.
The viewer immediately senses that this must be important in Kurzel’s interpretation of the play where children figure prominently in the movie’s psychology and plot.
Even the three witches have a witch-child along with them, another Kurzel innovation. And in the scene where the Macbeths welcome King Duncan to their castle, several children are shown milling about and playing.
When they sing for the King, Lady Macbeth stands with them but is not with them, strangely detached from their singing.
And towards the movie’s end in Marion Cotillard’s most powerful scene where, bereft of mind and heart, she sits by herself in a bare hut, we see in the close-up tears flood her eyes and flow as she stares at a baby seated opposite her.
One isn’t sure if it’s an actual child or an apparition of her clouded mind, but it’s a strong symbolic reminder of what motivated the couple to act as they did.
In the original play, while Duncan, Banquo, the MacDuffs, and Siward have sons, the Macbeths have no children.
Might this fact not play a part in Macbeth’s motivation– spurred on by his wife, on top of their joint ambition–for murdering King Duncan?
Having no heir, unlike the others, in whom he can hope for glorious things to come, he must seize the moment and the opportunity by himself to achieve his highest ambition.
And thus his grievous deed going against his heroic and noble nature violates the natural order of things, the right behavior: observance of the sanctity of life, fidelity, kinship, fealty, loyalty, love– bringing on the inevitable darkness that will rule the land.
Kurzel’s adaptation is determinedly dark and brooding in mood where one doesn’t see the sun (it leaves out the problematic “knocking at the gate” scene which most readers think exists for comic relief right after the King is murdered).
It showcases a most impressive cinematic view of battlefields and hand-to-hand combat where blood spurts abundantly (which happens offstage in Shakespeare); thick, swirling fog infused with a reddish haze symbolic of the play’s bloody nature dominates the screen, making palpable the Scottish cold, the grime and deep gashes of battle.
The movie is a cinematic feast of violence and darkness.
Multi-awarded Michael Fassbender and Marion Cottilard are superb in their lead roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
Cold and calculating, is Lady M. basically evil? Or is she just doing her duty as a wife who must spur her husband, made irresolute by his own doubts and fears, to action? (Macbeth’s problem, like Hamlet’s, is a lack of will to act on his desires.
There is no space here to discuss the moralities of Macbeth the play and the complex nature of its main characters. Suffice it to say that Lady M., challenging her husband’s machismo, eggs him on to a deed that can only set into motion more deaths and destruction until their own deaths bring rightness to their land again.
In the final battle between Macbeth’s army and the avenging armies of those he had wronged, another Kurzel innovation is in “bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane” by burning Birnam forest so its ash and cinders fall onto Macbeth’s Dunsinane Castle.)
Set at the same time period as Shakespeare’s original with the same characters, plot and language, why would my close knowledge of the original not result in my feeling more emotionally engaged by Kurzel’s adaptation?
Why? Call me old-fashioned but the fact is, I missed hearing Shakespeare’s language.
Of course films are meant to be seen more than heard perhaps, although of course sight and sound (especially dialogue) should complement each other.
This adaptation is based on one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, so understandably I would want to hear his poetry roll out and ring from the actors’ tongues.
Although Kurzel retains many of the play’s memorable lines, in general the style or manner of their delivery–too matter of fact as everyday contemporary speech–didn’t do it for me.
“Shakespeare” is a heightened sense of speech, energized language, dramatic; even the witches’ pronouncements ring with a sense of drama.
I don’t mean that they must be rendered necessarily as always declamatory, but a strong sense of poetry should pervade the telling of the tale which actor and listener cannot miss.
I have a problem with adaptations that retain the original language but present the Bard’s lines as common, ordinary-sounding everyday speech. Why retain the original language and not do justice to its poetic sound and sense?
That’s why other Macbeth adaptations like Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood set in Japan’s feudal period with Japanese feudal lords as characters using Japanese (with English subtitles) are more emotionally engaging for me.
Kurzel’s version is cinematically impressive, as is the superb acting, but it falls short of a truly satisfactory movie experience for me.
Note: Except for the general preview of the movie (Philippine Star, Jan. 11, 2016), I have not read any review of the Kurzel film, although I should Google it now and find out how far off I may be.
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The author taught English Literature at Silliman University and in the USA before she retired.
