• Lunatic Writer
  • Novels & Novellas
    • Big Ledge Front
    • Big Ledge Back >
      • Big Ledge Review
      • Big Ledge More Reviews
      • Chicken Thief
      • Heaven
    • Loose Ends >
      • Loose Ends Back >
        • Loose Ends Interview
        • Reviews
    • Lunatics >
      • Copernicus Images
    • The Draper Catalogue >
      • Reviews
    • Eta Carinae >
      • Reviews
    • All Saints Day
    • Eta Carinae
    • Echoes
    • Book Reviews
  • Short Fiction
    • Sweet Melancholy
    • More Short Fiction
  • Drama
    • Willful Pursuits
    • More Willful Pursuits
    • Sproule's Folly
    • Gravity
    • Audio Drama
    • All the World's a Stage
    • Theatre Reviews
  • Astro
  • Author's Blog
  • Comments & Contacts
  • Res Naturae
    • Valhalla Provincial Park >
      • Gwillim Lakes
    • Record Ridge
    • Skattebo
    • Rock Slide Lake
    • Kootenay National Park >
      • Juniper
      • Marble Canyon
      • Paint Pots
      • Cobb Lake
      • Redstreak
      • Stanley Glacier
    • Waterton Lakes National Park >
      • Bear's Hump
      • Red Rock Canyon
      • Bertha Lake
      • Wall Lake
      • Prince of Wales
    • Old Growth Forest
    • Ripple Ridge
  • Abroad
    • Jamaica >
      • Aerial Creatures
      • Land Creatures
      • Ocean & Beach
      • Miscellaneous
    • France >
      • Paris I
      • Le Sud
      • Paris II
    • Oregon >
      • Washington
      • Cannonbeach
      • North Coast
      • Portland & Corvallis
      • Central Coast
      • Ashland
      • Crater Lake
      • Mt. Rainier
    • Belize >
      • Birds of Belize
      • Daily Life
      • Water Scenes
    • Greece >
      • Athens
      • Hydra
      • Argolid
      • Crete
      • Santorini
      • Mykonos & Delos
      • Delphi
    • Canyon Country >
      • Red Rock Canyon
      • Valley of Fire
      • Zion NP
      • Bryce Canyon NP
      • Grand Canyon
      • Sedona
    • Cuba >
      • Varadero
      • Jeep Tour
      • Havana
    • Cozumel >
      • All-Inclusive
      • Island Tour
      • Tulum
      • About Town
    • UK & Ireland >
      • London >
        • Ealing
        • Tower of London
        • Westminster
        • British Museum & the Eye
        • Thames & Greenwich
        • Victoria & Albert Museum
      • Northwest >
        • Grasmere
        • Chester
        • Liverpool
      • Southeast >
        • North Marston
        • Oxford
        • Hughenden Manor
        • Brighton
      • IRELAND >
        • Dublin
        • Killarney & Dingle
        • Muckross
      • York
      • West Midlands >
        • Hereford
        • Shrewsbury
      • Wales
      • Southwest >
        • Bath
        • Cornwall
    • Arizona >
      • Phoenix
      • Biosphere
      • Tucson
      • Nogales
      • Tombstone
      • Chiricahua
      • Kitt Peak
      • Casa Grande
  • I See You
  Lunatic Writer

Movie Review:  How to Kill Macbeth

1/29/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Last night I viewed the movie, Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender in the title role. The scene where he emerges bare-chested from a frigid Scottish pond will likely be appealing to some but, all in all, the movie—critical reviews be damned—is pretty darn bad.
In the movie’s credits the producers are careful to stipulate that this is a movie “based” on Shakespeare’s play. I suppose this disclaimer makes the writers (multiple script writers, by the way—always a dangerous thing) feel that they may play fast and loose with Shakespeare’s original which they do. I can only say that, if he were still alive, Shakespeare would certainly sue.
 
Let me start on a positive note; the acting is not bad. Fassbender is a competent actor and Marion Cotillard who plays lady Macbeth is more than competent. Many lesser roles are carried off very professionally, Macduff, for example . . . but the writing! Bad, bad, bad!
​
Please don’t misunderstand, there have been film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays which I have liked very much. And I concede the medium of film demands some tinkering with the script. Scenes need to be shortened, visuals emphasized, long speeches parsed. Fine, no problem.
 
But with this adaptation almost every decision the director and writers make is bad one, sometimes incomprehensible. First, they decide they will lift whole pieces of dialogue and put them in parts of the play where they don’t belong. To save time, I suppose. Squeeze two scenes into one. Very avant-garde--not.

Picture
And the opportunities lost! The things left out! It boggles my mind. For example, when Macbeth hallucinates and sees a dagger before his eyes. No dagger. They leave that scene out. And in Lady Macbeth’s mad scene—“out, out damned spot”—that one, the camera does not once show the lady’s hands! There is no old porter either, the only comic relief in the play. “Knock, knock, knock! Who knocks at the door?” None of that. Is there some need to make the play darker?
 
Worse than these examples though, are the “artistic” additions to the story. Consider the scene where Macduff’s wife and children are caught and killed. Somehow the writers thought it insufficient to have them slaughtered by the sword. Instead the writers decide to make a much larger spectacle of it, burning them alive in front of the locals who in dark robes stand grimly on a gloomy heath. What are they thinking? Are they trying to appeal to the Game of Thrones crowd?  On that note, I can only comment that the Game of Thrones people do it much better.
Picture
What most put my shorts in a knot though is what happens near the end of the film, when Lady Macbeth is dead, lying on her bed. “She should have died hereafter,” Macbeth says. A very touching moment, and the start of Macbeth’s final dissolution. From this point everything falls apart for him. He is cut off from every consolation. And so he begins his speech—that masterpiece of nihilism: “Tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day...” This is one of the most riveting, frightening, depressing speeches in all of literature. This is a speech suitably delivered on a dark moor (where most of the film is shot) but instead, the director has Macbeth says these lines while holding his limp wife in his arms. No, no, no! Macbeth is far past grieving over the death of anyone at this point. He is already a dead man walking. And he goes on and on, holding his dead wife and commiserating like he thinks he’s King Lear—wrong play, guys. I can only think Marion must be thinking, “God, will he ever stop talking and put me back on the bed?”
 
Macbeth is a dark tale, and the producers of this film have succeeded in finding landscapes that underscore this fact. The Scottish Tourism Board would not be pleased, I think. The louring clouds drifting across barren snow-draped Scottish mountains are as appealing as the grave. The battle scenes are ugly, long and fierce. All this is well and good but, honestly, do they need to rub it in our face quite so much? The story is dark; yes, I get it.


Picture
Maybe the whole idea of having a Scottish play retold by Scots (this is a British-French-American production; I can only assume some Scots were involved) is a bad idea from the start. Let the Italians do it next time, or the Spanish. I’m sure the Italians would have kept the porter in. And rather than giving us the bland, haggard—looking like they’ve just got off a twelve hour bus ride from Vancouver— weird sisters, let some hot-blooded Latin director give us real witches to sink our teeth into.
 
What can I say? Mess with a masterpiece at your peril!
 
a little footnote: After reading about this movie in Wikipedia I see that it received considerable critical acclaim, even got a rating of 79% in Rotten Tomatoes. All this might mean that I could be quite wrong in my reflections, but I’m not!
 
So says the Shakespearean curmudgeon!
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.






    ​Author

    Brian d'Eon, fiction writer: whose work modulates between speculative, historical and magical realism.

    Categories

    All
    1917
    2010
    Ainsworth
    Albert Einstein
    Apollo XI
    Astronomer
    Baillie Grohman
    Baillie-Grohman
    Begbie
    Big Ledge
    Blade Runner 1982
    Blade Runner 2049
    Bluebell Mine
    Book Review
    British Colonist
    Bruce Dern
    Capitalism Vs Climate
    Chapbook
    Civilization
    Climate Change
    Cosmology
    C.S. Lewis
    Dandelions
    Davie
    Dead Crow
    Deon
    D'Eon
    Diana Morita Cole
    Draper Catalogue
    Dreams
    E-books
    Economics
    Editing
    Eileen Delehanty Pearkes
    Eta Carinae
    Fassbender
    Flashbacks
    Gravity
    Gray
    Green Manifesto
    Grohman
    Guess Who's Back?
    Hammill
    Harold Fry
    Hayao Miyazaki
    Hendryx
    Hitler
    Internees
    Isaac Newton
    Jamaica
    Jfk
    Jobs Vs Environment
    John Keats
    Kenneth Clark
    Kootenays
    Korolev
    Lily Langtry
    Lunatics
    Mark Twain
    Matt Haig
    Mikado
    Millet
    Nebraska Movie
    Nelson
    Nixon
    Novel
    Novel Drafts
    Novella
    Novel Structure
    Opium
    Oscar Nominees
    Photography
    Pitch
    Plague
    Point Of View
    Primack & Abrams
    Publishers
    Queenie Hennessy
    Rachel Joyce
    Rejection
    Review
    Richard Bausch
    Sam Mendes
    Saoirse Ronan
    Science And Religion
    Science Literacy
    Sean Arthur Joyce
    Serkis
    Shakespeare
    Sideways
    Sinixt
    Sproule
    Sputnik
    Steamer
    Stranger Things
    Submissions
    Sweet Melancholy
    Telescope
    The Humans
    The Price Of Transcendence
    The Wind Rises
    Travel
    Treasure Beach
    Van Gogh
    Victoria
    View From The Center Of The Universe
    Von Braun
    Winter Photos
    Yeats

    Archives

    February 2022
    October 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    June 2019
    October 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    July 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012