Macbeth (2015) REVISIT

This Macbeth film adaptation came out in the height of the popularity of Game of Thrones and it shows. Very reminiscent of the popular TV show, director Kurzel's take on the Scottish Play is bloody, medieval, and emotional. His film is visually spectacular and rich with pathos through the casting of truly strong leads with Fassbender and Cotillard. While the text is somewhat truncated, I enjoyed this film for capturing the spirit of Macbeth and adding some interesting interpretations.

First there is the visuals. The film is bathed in reds (covered in blood? out damn spot?) and is gritty and grimy. The Scottish nobles live in the medieval squalor we picture in these sorts of streaming TV show epics. There is a groundedness which comes from this aesthetic with earthy art direction only punctuated with the menacing red I mentioned. This is the story of a heinous crime against state and and against humanity and against nature so the bloody feel is appropriate. It sometimes saturates the screen with too much smoke and slow mo but it still remains a visually stunning film.

For the story, Kurzel sticks to the basics of the plot, allowing a lot of time for battle scenes which are quite enjoyable and well filmed while still getting the story and the point of Macbeth across. The film pushes right to the line of gratuitousess in the violence but doesn't cross it. One of the tricks to adapting Shakespeare is finding the right places to cut text. I felt this screenplay did a good job of keeping the talking to the essentials without losing a lot of what makes this play so popular. The famous speeches and lines are there. The plot and motivations are clear. Allowing the film's visual story telling to do its job. You feel it all. I appreciated the balance he strikes here.

But he also brings in something interesting I hadn't seen before in a Macbeth production. He creates a back story of the Macbeths loosing a young child and this motivation propels them through the film. The child's ghost appears to them at important moments as the child which could have been. It is a powerful tool well used here to give them more motivations behind their plotting. This allows Cotillard to truly shine by giving a rather restrained and quiet performance as Lady Macbeth, focusing on her reaction to loss, unlike the more common showier takes on her. I really enjoyed watching her and the richness she brings to the villainous character. She makes us empathize in ways I haven't before with this character. Fassbender plays off this. Often Macbeth himself can be played as a victim of his wife's deviousness but here he is a doting, loving husband trying to do the right thing just being convinced that what is right is actually something terrible. He has his own agency in the choices he makes and is motivated by conflicting drivers. It all comes together in a truly interesting way and both actors are up to the task.

The film's use of the supernatural is mostly downplayed and suggested, which is probably my preferred way of doing Macbeth. Still, the witches here, so vastly different from Polanski's shock and awe version, are interesting as they are given a rather natural and benign feeling. They don't appear to agents of evil or even just chaos. They remain more a force of nature. They appear to be just present, observing, without the malevolent air they are often presented with.

So overall I really enjoy this film. It is tight and interesting and provides the space to two truly wonderful performances to inhabit this space and this play.

Macbeth
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, David Thewlis, Paddy Considine, Elizabeth Debicki, Sean Harris, Jack Reynor
Director: Justin Kurzel
Writers: William Shakespeare, Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, Todd Louiso