Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Kurzel’s Macbeth

Posted on by

I dare do all that may become a man.
Who dares do more, is none.

Does the world need another movie of Macbeth?

Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ has been filmed over 20 times. Most recently in a BBC version with Patrick Stewart (2010) and Geoffrey Wright’s Melbourne gangland interpretation with Sam Worthington (2006). Most notably in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and  Polanski’s 1971 film, with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in the title roles. In 2015, we have a new interpretation by Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, The Turning) starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Shot in Scotland with an Australian director and Irish-German and French leads, this new version is billed – naturally – as a new American movie.

Many of the films have followed stage productions, keeping a focus on the two main characters as they descend into a hell of their own making, much as contending armies are described in the opening of the play, ‘As two spent swimmers that do cling together, And choke their art.’ Other characters, the settings, and landscapes are there essentially as a backdrop to the horror of the Macbeths’ self-destruction, taking so many others with them.

Kurzel’s Macbeth, though, is a spectacle in the best sense of the word. The bleakly-beautiful landscapes and settings (not to mention an impressive cast), all work together together as a fluid unity which complements the text. It feels more Scandinavian than Scottish at times (a reminder that much of the country was a Viking colony in the Middle Ages), Each frame is like a carefully assembled canvas, with close-ups of faces, mountains, lakes, and washes of colour and motion. This painterly aspect of the film reminds me of Symbolist artists such as Rops, Moreau, or Redon, where the stylised landscape similarly ‘orchestrates’ the emotions of the human drama portrayed. It’s no coincidence that Kurzel worked in set design (for Bell Shakespeare among other companies) before turning to directing; the film’s art direction is superb.

This Macbeth was born of a conversation between Kurzel and Fassbender, so it is ironic that the leading man’s portrayal of the tragic hero of the play is the weakest part of the film. The actor brings his familiar professionalism and intensity to the performance. Fassbender has spoken in interviews of imagining Macbeth as a soldier traumatised by the savage losses in his life – including a dead child whose funeral is seen at the start of the film. He attempts to fill this loss with yet more savagery, murdering Duncan to achieve the ‘safety’ of becoming king himself. All the actor’s intensity seems turned inward however. Macbeth so often seems to be talking to himself rather than for the audience’s benefit. Shakespeare always requires a little flamboyance (however subtly done) to bring out the colour and poetry and majesty of the lines, yet Fassbender seems to deliberately avoid this in his performance. To see how he plays the famous ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech, and then compare with how Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan do the same is an education.

Macbeth belongs to Marion Cotillard, however. She moves convincingly from a sexual temptress – taunting her husband to show he is a man by killing his king – to a weeping mad creature, horrified at the monster she has created. She is an extraordinary actress.

The film is worth seeing for her performance alone, but so much more too.

macbeth_1280

WILL.I.AM SHAKESPEARE (BORN 1964)

Posted on by

What if Shakespeare had been born on 23 April 1964 not 1564?

What sort of person would he be today? What would we think of our Gen X genius? I wondered this recently at a production of King Lear, reminded yet again of how vividly and immediately Mr Shakespeare speaks to us about our own lives, even after 400 years.

I love and work with words every day, yet confess they rarely move me emotionally the way a song or a movie can. Words have a quieter music. Shakespeare is the exception. There are some speeches in the plays which always move me close to tears. It is a truism to say that he remains an extraordinary artist of genius, yet how would we view him as a contemporary in 2012?

Shakespeare was a creature of his time, of course, when English crystalised into the lithe and robust language we know today, but can anyone doubt that his genius would have expressed itself in other ways too?

I imagine him as a teenager in a ’70s suburban bedroom, listening to Bowie or the Velvet Underground, writing songs that would astonish the world a few years later. Hitting his twenties, he would form a band because that was what you did. He grew the funky goatee beard that became his trademark. Despite the band’s top ten album, their music was hard to define. Punk? Hip-hop? Jazz? Classical crossover? It was their songwriter and singer who got all the attention anyway, and he soon drifted into acting. There was a famed performance at the Donmar, then Will moved swiftly into directing himself. He was a man in a hurry.

Will made an arthouse movie that became a cult. People in anoraks could recite whole scenes from it. He made a Hollywood movie and won the first of several Oscars. Each film was utterly different apart from the astonishing dialogue that made you want to rewind and watch scenes over and over. What’s your favourite WS movie? became a popular topic for magazine articles. He disappeared for a year. It turned out he’d been living incognito in Berlin, writing a novel. He gave it away as an ebook from his website. There were a hundred thousand downloads in the first week. The following year he was directing a Bond movie for the fun of it.

And what about his personal life? There were rumours about his sexuality. There were rumours about affairs with actresses and models. Some of these people he had actually met. Then the Murdoch press hacked his gmail account and published a series of explicit, lyrical emails to ‘my dark lady’ in Chicago. She was never traced.

In later life Will retreated to his house in the country, a few km from his friend Sting’s estate. He was labelled ‘eccentric’ and ‘reclusive’ simply for refusing interviews with the tabloid media. He emerged once to put on a strange, spare play that disturbed its audiences. Critics were divided, but in the years that followed it spawned dozens of imitations, starting a whole new movement in the theatre. And then there was silence.

Who is the real WS? journalists asked. It was a question he sometimes asked himself, then shrugged his shoulders.