![]() ![]() As a whole, Macbeth is a fantastic piece of film. For example, the battle sequences are brilliant and as hectic as they are, they pack a certain beauty and elegance. The direction from Justin Kurzel is fantastic and really gets your heart racing at times. Though the Shakespearean English being spoken through Scottish accents can prove to be a challenge at times, it is a challenge worth undertaking due to the brilliance of the film as a whole. This brilliance is accented by fantastic performances from Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Sean Harris. Sporting gorgeous cinematography, brilliant lighting, great staging, and fantastic costumes, Macbeth is technically brilliant. Macbeth is one of the year's most beautiful films. There is an operatic verve.Macbeth is one of the year's most beautiful films. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. ![]() And when he has to address Seyton, he pronounces it “Satan” to give his situation an even more diabolic ring. Later, the Macbeths’ “Queen is dead” scene is genuinely quite shocking and Fassbender brings his A-game to the resulting “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. Actually, her Frenchness is not a problem, she seems like a foreign Tudor bride who has time-travelled back to 11th-century Scotland. As she greets Duncan as the King arrives at their house (actually a kind of personalised encampment) she is a picture of demurely sinister intent and for their intense disputes, while Macbeth appears to want to back out, Cotillard gives a whiplash-crack to her denunciation of cowardice. It is if he is brazening the thing out, challenging the milksop youth to fight him or flee, or possibly already withdrawing into his own psychotic and delusional world.įor her part, Cotillard is able to command her own space in the film, doing more with less. Fassbender’s Macbeth slumps next to Duncan’s blood-stained corpse and sneeringly speaks the line directly into the stunned face of Duncan’s rightful heir Malcolm, played by Jack Reynor, who has discovered the scene. Kurzel and Fassbender play it quite differently. Kurzel’s other interpretative flourish is the way he handles Macbeth’s speech after Duncan is murdered: “Had I but died an hour before this chance,/I had lived a blessed time …” Some productions show that Macbeth is of course play-acting for the court’s benefit, but also genuinely realising - to his own secret horror and guilt - that he does in fact believe what he is saying. The genuine Scots voices, coming from the mouths of minor characters, sound like a documentary-realist interjection from another film. There are slo-mo battles, stylised blood-spouts and bellicose roaring, perhaps influenced by Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood - and some mangled Scottish accents from its Irish, French and English stars. The leery figure of the Porter is entirely removed: this is a deadly serious Macbeth, with fascinating moments and shrewd, sharp insights, though often the pace is conducted at a uniform drumbeat. The movie never entirely quits the battlefield (“heath” is replaced with “battlefield” in one early tinkering with the text) above which the air finally becomes blood red in a dusty fog of war - a Scots Outback, maybe. It is conceived in (and almost dwarfed by) a vast Scottish plain, like Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth. This is not the traditional stage Macbeth, crammed into claustrophobic interior spaces. S hakespeare’s tragedy and noir-thriller prototype Macbeth appears in a new screen version from Australian film-maker Justin Kurzel, famous for his brutal crime movie Snowtown - the story of how a warrior-nobleman is encouraged to commit regicide by his ruthlessly ambitious wife, who then descends into bewilderment and despair as her husband fanatically reinforces his position with an escalating series of pre-emptive murders. ![]()
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