There’s a long history of film versions of Shakespeare plays, including 8 versions of Macbeth, another coming next year and even a Japanese version by Kurosawa, Throne of Blood. This year’s adaptation was directed by Justin Kurzel, a director that I’m not familiar with, stars Micheal Fassbender as Macbeth, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth and Paddy Considine as Banquo. I refer to it as an adaptation because, like most film versions of plays by The Bard, it’s been pared down from the original. The difficulty of filming Shakespeare is that his plays are too wordy for a cinematic world where we expect movies to use minimal dialog and 5 word sentences. Macbeth, as a play, has about as many words as a brick has atoms. Shakespeare had an outrageous verbal facility; he must have added 75 pages to the English dictionary all by himself. He coined so many common expressions that entire web sites are dedicated to all of the contemporary expressions first found in Shakespeare. In the case of Macbeth, you might recognize the crack of doom, one fell swoop, a sorry sight, sound and fury, what’s done is done and many others. It’s hard to imagine Game of Thrones or The Lord of The Rings without Macbeth and Shakespeare.
In case you were asleep in English Literature, Macbeth is a dark, semi-historical play about a medieval warlord. He’s fierce, but not all that bright and is urged on by his ambitious wife to advance his career by murdering the King of a grim, dark, violent corner of the Scottish Highlands. Murder begets murder, however and it doesn’t end there. The end result of ruthless ambition is tragedy for most of the characters. The king is dead, long live the king, and so it goes, on and on. The stage is littered with bodies by the end of the story. There are witches, vague prophecies, betrayals, armies, stabbings and swords.
In my life I have seen Macbeth several times on stage, and I have seen a couple of the movie adaptations as well as many other staged plays by The Bard, so I’m used to the language, but it’s a challenge for many people who don’t have that experience. The task of the filmmaker is to manage to convey the verbose 400 year old language but not overwhelm the audience. Modern “translations” are a travesty in my opinion since half of the enjoyment of Shakespeare IS the language. In this case, the producers decided to stick with the original language and setting without serious historic revisions. Their condensed version keeps the movie within the usual 2 hour time limit for movies that don’t expect huge ticket sales but eliminates a lot of dialog, including all of the comic relief segments and snide remarks by servants. The result is a fairly unremitting tension and grimness that’s not over ‘till it’s over. The setting is minimal, mainly the cold, dreary, snowy, rainy highlands, and the interior of a cold, stony, hard castle and leaky wooden buildings.
Macbeth is currently sitting at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.4 on IMDB. In my opinion, it’s pretty good but somewhat aggravating. The cinematography is really close up and detailed, with actors spraying each other when they expound. Scenery is minimal and dreary, costumes are tattered and war-worn and nobody seems to have the likelihood of an enjoyable life, just a struggle until their inevitable violent death. I would have liked the movie a whole lot more but for the speech of the actors. Most of the movie is done in what I call “whisper-talk”, like Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, except with a huge dose of pro-wrestler steroid voice. Much of the male dialog is very difficult to comprehend, being composed grunts and whispers. Like it or not, one of the features of Shakespeare is just how articulate and profound these brutes are, not how they grunt and spit at each other. Because I am familiar with the story (it could have been done in mime for me), I didn’t lose the plot, but for the uninitiated, it would be a difficult movie and the glory of The Bard’s poetry would be lost. This brought it down by a star. The acting is visceral, strong, and physically excellent and the visuals really transport you to this place; you wonder why ANYBODY would fight for this.
I wish that Kurzel had made different choices for the speech. For centuries, actors have spent their careers working on perfect diction in order to perform Shakespeare. One of the first ever voice recordings was done by Thomas Edison, a recording of my avatar, Edwin Booth, performing a couple minutes of Othello in 1890. In spite of the miserable sound of this recording, you can get an idea how musical this actor’s voice must have sounded in person by checking out the numerous copies of this recording, searching for Edwin Booth and Othello.
All that is lost with these voice characterizations. Sometimes, all’s well that ends well (Shakespeare) and to most people in the working day world (Shakespeare again), the long and the short of it (The Bard), is that anything that gets butts in the seats, will help to keep these stories alive. My recommendation is to see it. Be sure to read the wiki version of the plot over a couple times before you go (if you’re not familiar already), enjoy the visceral acting and the amazing visuals and ignore the dialog.
