So, this is one of those “updated” Shakespeare movies, done up for “the current generation” and “young people”. So of course that means rock music, blood, sex, nudity, guns and drugs. That’s not necessarily bad, but it has to be well thought through, not just tacked on to the play any old way. Here we’ve got Macbeth set in a gang run by Duncan and his cronies in Melbourne, Australia. It works fairly well as a setting for Macbeth, but I couldn’t help but feel a little patronized to throughout the production because it was so obviously trying so hard to be “appealing” to young people. I don’t want to get into a rant right now about my feelings on the concept of having to gear Shakespeare productions or films specifically for young people, so instead I’ll just say that I find it quite insulting and entirely wrong-headed.
Had it been done well, I think the setting could have actually worked quite well. I think the power struggles, backhandedness and disreputability of Duncan’s court lend themselves well to a gang setting. It also served to set Macbeth up as far from saintly from the very beginning. In the first scene, Macbeth is shown in battle, ruthlessly shooting down and stabbing members from a rival gang. After the first fight is cleared up, Macbeth and Banquo march into Cawdor (what appears to be a club and bar) and tie up the owner. After he’s tied and gagged, they pour themselves drinks and take some drugs while waiting for Duncan to come by. Most modern people have a strong aversion to violence of this sort, particularly if acquisition of property is the only motive, so it establishes Macbeth as a brutal anti-hero from the very beginning. The fact that Duncan is also a violent drug lord, as is everybody else involved, takes the moral question out of it. Macbeth is not any worse than any of the people he kills nor is Malcolm about to go turn the gang into a non-profit charity when he takes over. Because we don’t feel that there is a moral reason why Macbeth shouldn’t be leader, the focus is entirely on him as a character, and the effects of his actions on his psyche.
The only main logical issue with the setting was that, as far as I know, leadership of drug gangs is not patrilineal, so Macbeth’s concern that his future sons will not be leaders seems a little strange. It was a small enough problem that I was willing to suspend my disbelief. The other issues they got around in a couple of different ways. They replaced the word “England” with “seaward” so, instead of going to England, Malcolm and Macduff went and sat on a boat by the docks (why that made them safe from Macbeth is anyone’s guess). When Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, the invaders rode in on a truck of lumber labeled “Birnam Wood”. Okay, whatever. I feel like directors of modern adaptations spend too much time patting themselves on the back about “clever” things like that. It mostly cohered, provided you were willing to suspend your disbelief about a patrilineal drug gang.
So the setting could have worked, and it certainly had some interesting effects, but I think in his frantic desire to “appeal” to young people Wright overdid it pretty much the whole way through.
One of the most readily apparent features of this Macbeth is the constant use of silent scenes to show things instead of having them happen offstage and be recounted by the characters, as is done in the original text. The opening is a long string of silent scenes, broken up by only brief exchanges of words. First we see the three witches, played by three attractive adolescent looking girls, running through a graveyard smashing and defacing statues and gravestones. They briefly agree where to meet again before exiting. The Macbeths enter and put flowers on a fresh grave with the words “beloved son” on it. Then we see the gang pull a boat up to the docks, hand over bags of what is probably drugs, and motor away. The men carry the drugs to a meeting spot, exchange them for money with the other gang, realize a foul and begin shooting. The battle goes on for a while, then Macbeth and Banquo drive away and go into Cawdor, and tie up the owner. All of that happened in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and only about three lines were said. It picks up the pace after that, but throughout, a large portion of the story is told through silent sequences.
Wright decided that dramatizing everything that Shakespeare left up to imagination in the play makes for a more exciting movie. Thus, we get to see (in gory detail) the first fight, the execution of the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth smearing blood on the guards, and all the other scenes that are only described after the fact in the text. My problem with doing this is that it meant that the characters lose the chance to tell what happened from their perspective. Perhaps Wright felt that if he showed it, having the character describe it would be redundant, but a significant part of Macbeth’s character is lost if he doesn’t get to describe his murder of Duncan to his wife, as it is with all characters who are describing significant events in the play. The way they choose to talk about these things is important, and I didn’t think it was good to lose that in exchange for overwrought fight scenes and too much fake blood.
The other, and perhaps bigger reason for the extended silent scenes is that Wright gets to make things happen that not only do not happen in the text, but are not even hinted at in the text. Lady Macbeth cries over her son’s grave, Banquo vomits after the fight, drugs are exchanged and taken, Macbeth returns home to find Lady Macbeth unconscious in a bathtub, apparently from a failed suicide attempt, Fleance wanders through the final battle scene and shoots Lady Macbeth’s servant, Banquo’s murderers get captured and brutally killed by Malcolm and Macduff, Angus gets his jugular slit by Malcolm, Lady Macbeth dances and flirts with Duncan when he comes to their house, and all sorts of other additions. Some seemed worthwhile to me, such as the extended silent relationship developed between Fleance and Macduff in the second half of the play. Fleance’s large silent part added a human element to a movie often lacking that, as he was truly sympathetic and actually a victim of events that weren’t of his own making. His relationship with Macduff was both charming and frightening, since Fleance was clearly losing quite a bit of his childhood to be a part of this brutal gang.
Most of the time though, the made-up silent scenes felt gratuitous and unnecessary. One example of that are the scenes they added on with Lady Macbeth. They added scenes of her crying over her son’s grave, attempting to commit suicide in the first act, snorting cocaine, and reacting with tears to the death of Lady Macduff. Perhaps they felt that this added depth and motivation to her character, but I didn’t find it particularly illuminating. If you just let her say all her lines, and make sure you’ve got a brilliant actress, you don’t need any of that to make the character cohere. Their problem was that they cut massive amounts of text and were then compelled to add in silent scenes to make the characters make sense. Except, of course, that the silent scenes didn’t add much as the real text would have, thematically or character-wise.
Not only were the descriptions of events cut, but massive amounts of the text were cut, re-organized, given to different speakers or slightly reworded. Almost no entire speeches were left in the text, and dialogue was transposed between characters and speeches with such promiscuous frequency that figuring out where it was supposed to be in the text was almost impossible. I actually gave up following along partway through the first act. A lot of the nobles in Macbeth are fairly indistinguishable from each other, so some of that wasn’t too serious a transgression, but a lot of Macduff’s and Malcolm’s lines were switched around and given to other characters too. Whole soliloquies were cut, especially noticeably Macbeth’s soliloquy where he resolves that “the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand.” His soliloquy in reaction to his wife’s death is also chopped up. Most of it is left unsaid after he finds her dead, and is instead read in voiceover after the battle is over. It turns it from a reflection on her death into the last lines of the play, and thus a reflection on the entire play and especially on the slaughter that just happened.
The entire Porter scene was cut, because Wright stated that he viewed it as only filler to allow the main characters to change costume, and was therefore unnecessary in a film production. I don’t think he could be more wrong about that scene. In general, when one of Shakespeare’s fools speaks, it’s best to listen, and I think that’s definitely the case with the Porter. On it’s surface, it’s a brilliant juxtaposition of comedy with horror on either side of it. However, the “comedy” is really the Porter saying “Welcome to Hell!” Not exactly filler material in my opinion. I think my bigger problem, though, was the careless attitude with which Wright chose to dismiss it, because I think that carelessness was emblematic of the way he treated all of the text.
The extreme cutting and re-arrangement of the text was unfortunate, but the bits of text that were included didn’t seem to have any poetry in them. Sam Worthington is not a Shakespearean trained actor, and it shows through very, very clearly. He delivered most of his lines in a slightly monotonic drawl, seeming very much a drugged out, less than intelligent gangster. They were aiming for a naturalistic delivery of the lines, but lost all the poetry and a lot of the beauty along the way. Macbeth has a beautiful, poetic imagination, with enough strength to totally capture his entire person in it, but with the poetry gone from his words (and many of his words gone too), that imaginative power didn’t come through at all.
In addition to butchering the text, the movie was full of contrivances that seemed inserted just to “attract a modern audience”. That, of course, means violence, blood, sex and drugs. The violence is, I think, a necessary part of the play, since Macbeth is inherently a violent play. The main character is a serial murder, and it ends in a battle. However, the violence here felt like just too much. We didn’t need to see blood spurting out of Angus’s jugular, or oozing gunshot wounds or gallons of blood on Duncan’s sheets. A certain level of violence is necessary to accurately portray the play, but excessive violence on this level is not. One of the very violent scenes that I felt was warranted was the killing of Lady Macduff, where she was garroted with a wire. I think that scene needs to be shocking, horrible and difficult to watch, and the violence there felt relevant to the point that that scene is trying to make, and not just gruesome for gruesome’s sake.
Nudity was also overused in the movie, to little positive effect. Lady Macbeth was naked throughout her sleepwalking scene and suicide. Why? I’m not sure. I have no inherent objection to nudity, I just think it has to be used wisely, and only with a very clear reason in mind. I couldn’t quite think of why having her naked was necessary in this scene, or what it communicated. Perhaps it was to her desolation and the casting off of the rich clothing she usually wore, but in that case a t-shirt would have worked just as well. The fact that they had her do a large amount of writhing around and shaking makes me think it was only for the sake of nudity and not furthering the play in any way.
The second encounter with the witches was another overuse of nudity and sex, and one of the two lowest points of the movie for me. I watched it several times and I just couldn’t figure out what Wright was trying to get at. For the first encounter, Macbeth took some drugs and then ran into some creepy young vandals when he was at Cawdor club. It worked acceptably, and I thought having him be very high for the encounter added to the believability of a modern man taking seriously three girls who claim to be witches. The second encounter I just couldn’t get my head around. I honestly have no idea what they were going for. The witches broke into his house, naked, then brewed up a potion literally composed of all of the ingredients they list, and then each drank it before offering a sip to Macbeth. This would appear to be a hallucinogen (though I don’t think any of those ingredients have that effect) because the movie then launched into a psychdelic, pseudo-pornographic sequence, in which he had an orgy with the “witches” as they moaned out their prophecies. As I said above, there has to be a valid artistic reason to include nudity and sex scenes in movies, and attracting teenage boys with the prospect of naked women is not a good enough reason. Wright said of them that he “made the witches more intriguing- to Macbeth- as sexy young vixens.” Okay, perhaps that’s understandable. A young mafia lord is perhaps more likely to be interested by them than by old hags, but the sex scene that stretched for nearly five minutes? Unnecessary and gratuitous. It was entirely unclear what they were trying to achieve with this. Were the witches supposed to be actual witches, because their potion ingredients were not metaphors for anything, but entirely literal? Was the sequence supposed to be real or hallucinated? Were the witches really privy to some secrets of the universe, or were they just young vandals looking to mess with someone? How did they even get into his heavily secured estate? Their bodies were covered with strange, black tattoos, was that supposed to hint that they were truly otherworldly? Why were they naked when they brewed the potion? Why did an extensive sex scene help to illuminate the incident? I don’t know, and I’m not sure anybody did. Young people like nudity, right?
The other low point was the final battle, in which Wright seemed to be under the impression that a scene becomes more dramatic and exciting in direct proportion to the amount of slow-motion used. It was actually difficult to follow what was going on because the scene was slowed down so much, and instead of being dramatic, it was laughable.
There were a couple of good points in the movie. One, as I mentioned above, was the extensive silent role for Fleance that emphasized, almost more than Macbeth’s story, the costs of this lifestyle. One other scene I thought was good was the banquet scene where Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost. Along the walls of the dining room were long mirrors, and the ghost was visible to Macbeth in the mirrors, standing directly behind him and later trying to strangle him. The image of Banquo’s pale, tall ghost standing behind him was startling and memorable. As Macbeth lost his touch with reality the camera tipped wildly from side to side, giving the whole scene a mad, hallucinatory feeling to it. I also appreciated the scene where Lady Macduff was killed- it was one place where I felt that the brutal violence worked in the movie’s favor. She was garroted after being forced to watch her son die, and while difficult to watch, I felt like the brutality served a very clear purpose in showing Macbeth’s descent into complete depravity.
Overall, I thought parts of it and certain ideas were very good. The gang setting was actually an interesting twist on the story, and a couple of the scenes were quite good, especially the banquet scene with Banquo’s ghost. Had they treated the text with a bit more respect and made sure each additional silent scene had a real purpose, it could have been good, or at least better than this.
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