Trevor Nunn's Othello (1990)

I originally came to this movie out of a desire to see every second of Ian McKellen doing Shakespeare that I could, but there’s a lot of other great things in here as well. As with several other movies I’ve reviewed, this is a filmed stage production that needs to be judged as such, but clever use of the stage and some wonderful acting bring it to life.

I’ve seen comments that this seems to be set in a US Civil War Era, and though the costumes resemble it, I think they served more to call to mind a militarized, hierarchical society than to specifically anchor it in the Civil War. Most of Othello takes place on an isolated military base, and I think the easily recognizable military garb served to recognize that fact. The militarism of the society was very important to understanding a lot of the characters in this production. They didn’t try to turn it into a Civil War story or really set it during the war, they just used costumes from the period to hint at the militarism of the society and setting.

The space was also used very cleverly. Despite there only being one set, by using different props and camera angles, they created the feel of a number of different locations, and it actually took me until partway through the play to notice that each scene was the same set reconfigured. That definitely served to diminish the “filmed stage play” effect and made it feel more like a traditional movie with a number of different sets.

I have to admit, I went into this slightly skeptical about Ian McKellen’s casting as Iago, mainly because, at the time I first saw this, I thought of him primarily as Gandalf: a wholly benevolent character if there ever was one. I just wasn’t sure that after giving such a marvelous portrayal of Gandalf that he could deliver evil convincingly.

I shouldn’t have underestimated him. In fact, Ian McKellen’s ability to portray extremely loveable characters well worked in his favor here, since his Iago was charming throughout. There’s an extent to which Iago’s intelligence and power is very attractive, and McKellen embodied that excellently. He also avoided the trap of playing an Iago so evil that every other character must be dumber than wood to fall for him. He played Iago very much as the soldier: job oriented and a bit stiff throughout, even when alone. This dutifulness played into his ability to come off as “honest” because he seemed very much like the paragon of military virtue. Despite his formal carriage as a soldier, and in part because of it, he wormed his way into every character’s affections. He was sweet and loving with each of them, in a slightly stiff way, and very physical in their interactions. He often hugged, stroked and touched his “friends”, setting them at ease and building an easy intimacy with them. He could, at times, play the entertainer, drawing people together and making them laugh so he could manipulate events as he desired. Especially in the scene when they first arrive at Cyprus, he alone was able to make Desdemona laugh, and his misogynistic tirade came off mostly as a joke he put on to please her.

His misogyny, however, was blatantly clear in his relationship with Zoe Wanamaker’s Emilia. Though he buttered everyone else up with dexterity, he treated her with either apathy or contempt. He didn’t need her and he didn’t view her as a potential problem to him, so he didn’t bother keeping up any sort of charade with her. She was clearly besotted with him and so she did the favors he asked for without the need for him to work any charms with her. The most he ever did was the occasional rough kiss, after which he would thrust her away again: just enough to keep her attached and assert his dominance. Because of the utter lack of charade he showed with her, when she eventually caught on to him, her realization seemed natural and horrifying: he wasn’t just cruel to her, he was cruel universally, to everyone, and she alone was in the situation to realize this.

Though Iago’s motivation for what he does is always opaque, he did seem to have some genuine feelings for Desdemona in this production. When Othello first said that he planned to kill her, Iago objected just a bit too quickly and with just a bit too much force. The sudden, genuine feeling behind that interjection made his desire for her to live seem very real, though he later reined in this desire. His feelings for her next became apparent when she cried on him after Othello began treating her badly. Emilia was explaining to him what happened as he comforted Desdemona, cradling her and slowly stroking her neck and hair. When Emilia’s back was turned, he pressed his face into Desdemona’s neck and closed his eyes. It crossed the line from his normal friendly touching to something more sensual, and seemingly slightly beyond his control. The combination of little touches like this made you wonder if he felt some sadness for her death at the end, as he looked on over the dead bodies with a face as inscrutable as ever.

My only issue with McKellen’s performance was his tendency to mumble, whisper and generally make it difficult to understand what he was saying. Though the emotional clarity of his acting never wavered, I often had difficulty understanding his words despite being very familiar with the play. I found this strange, since I usually find McKellen a very easy actor to understand. However, the quiet turning of gears in his mind during the soliloquys worked very well, and the emotional clarity of his performance carried it through when the vocal clarity was lost.

However much a good production of Othello relies on a strong Iago, Othello is not a play like Hamlet where pretty much everything rests on the quality of your lead. It’s more similar to a play like Lear, needing an extremely strong ensemble cast. For the most part, this production delivered on that front as well.

Willard White, a Jamaican-British operatic bass played a formidable, dignified Othello, despite lacking the verbal dexterity of some of the other actors. He is much more an opera singer than an actor, and occasionally, that was a bit too clear. Some of his acting seemed a little overdone at times, but there were so many other good parts of his performance that I was willing to overlook that. The first thing you notice about him is his immense stage presence: he instantly commands every room he walks into. With his deep commanding voice and physical stature, everything about him gives an impression of dignity. This immense dignity is very defining of Othello’s character, so I thought casting White was a very good decision, despite his relative lack of experience acting.

Despite his commanding presence, Desdemona and Iago both held power over him. Desdemona’s power was demonstrated most clearly in two different scenes where he placed her on a chair so she looked down on him. The first was when he first arrived at Cyprus, and he circled around her, looking up at her and declaring his love. The second time he did it, he was yelling at her and condemning her, but it showed how she was still in power over him, and he was still looking up at her at that point. When he came into the bedroom to kill her, for the first time he stood over her. In addition to suggesting her power over him, lifting her up above him suggested his almost god-like veneration of her in the beginning, which turned into abhorrence as the story progressed.

One important aspect of this Othello was that he did not understand the Venetian standards of physical contact: though all the native Venetians are comfortable with liberal physical contact between genders, Othello held himself physically distant from everyone but Desdemona. Though he was by no means the stereotype of the culturally alien Moor, part of his problems stemmed from his inability to read the meaning behind physical interactions between his wife and other men.

Imogen Stubbs brought Desdemona to life in a way that made you really care about her. I think Desdemona can often feel very flat and too angelic to evoke any real emotion. However, Stubbs’ Desdemona was a very real person. She was sweet, lively and funny, clearly possessed by the gleeful spirit of new love. Everything excited her, and her constant girly flirtation with Othello said a lot about their relationship. As infatuated as they were, her attachment to him was fundamentally an immature one, and she was not able to gauge his emotions very well, or communicate with him beyond her usual mode of adolescent flirtation. This lack of understanding between them made his growing distrust of her realistic, as did her open and intimate relationships with both Iago and Cassio. To a man like Othello who was not good at reading the physical relationships between men and women, her interactions with them could seem very suspicious. She, however, wouldn’t have even thought about those relationships in a sexual way because of her combination of naiveté and universal goodwill.

I absolutely adore Emilia, and I thought Zoe Wanamaker did a fairly good job with her. She was infatuated with Iago, or at least in need of some affection from him. He treated her roughly and she understood his capacity for cruelty better than anyone else. She was a generation older than Desdemona, both wiser and more bitter, and instead of Desdemona’s girlish excitement she had a dignified stillness to her. Her relationship to Desdemona was kind but not especially warm at first. In the beginning of their conversation before Desdemona’s death, Desdemona gave her a hug, and she responded stiffly. However, Desdemona’s charm had her smiling shortly as they talked, and before she left she hugged Desdemona fiercely. Her concern and love for her seemed to be that of an older sister figure, despite her slight hesitation to express affection.

All of that was before she realized what had happened. Suddenly, this quiet, reserved woman just exploded. The look on her face just as she realized, first Iago’s part and then her own, was perfect. Even Othello was intimidated by the force of her rage. Iago was also suddenly afraid of her, since she was the one person he hadn’t concealed himself enough in front of. She still cared for him, almost begged him to say he hadn’t told Othello, but when he didn’t deny it she had reached a point where she no longer cared at all what happened. She is the only character in Othello who ever holds real power over Iago, and I thought she handled the scene wonderfully.

Cassio was played as a bit of an idiot by Sean Baker, with a naïve, sexless adoration for Desdemona, and a gentle attitude with everyone else. His treatment of Bianca came off much less cruel that it usually seems since he seemed to have the same wide-eyed joking attitude towards everything and everyone, not just her. Even after stabbing Montano in the stomach, he was still giggling, and he seemed to visit Desdemona mostly to kiss her hand and not out of real concern for his job.

Another interesting choice was to cast Marsha Hunt, a black woman as Bianca. Though there are no racial comments made about her, she is openly derided by every character, including the ones who are always respectful of Othello. It complicated the nature of their relationship to race, because it demonstrated that they were willing to disrespect a black woman if she was of a lower class. Their respect for Othello didn’t necessarily stem from a lack of racism, but from a respect for his status. I’m not sure if that added racial dynamic was intended to be included when she was cast, and she did a good job as another woman helplessly devoted to a man who didn’t deserve her.

The one poor performance came from Michael Grandage as Roderigo, who consistently overdid it throughout the film. In one scene he threw himself on the ground, pounding his fists and yelling. It was ridiculous. Though that was the worst moment of his overacting, I think that sums up fairly well what was wrong with his performance.

The only other issue for me was that this was a very slow-paced film. I’m not advocating for more cutting of the text, but I do think it could have been paced up a little bit. I wouldn’t say it was boring, but at times the pace seemed almost glacial.

Overall however, it was an excellent production, carried by a strong cast and excellent direction. I’ve seen it three times now, and each viewing has been just as interesting as the others. As with any good production, it bears multiple viewings, with new subtleties coming through each time.

Michael Elliot's King Lear (1983)

This is now the third King Lear I’ve reviewed, and like my last Macbeth review, a lot of my judgment of it is based on comparison with the previous two. Most of my thoughts on it don’t exist in a vacuum, but in comparison between this production and the other two.

Most of this TV-movie Lear was good, but very little of it was brilliant. What was most striking was the real lack of imagination, both in direction and performance. It all worked, but I didn’t find anything in it to be very exciting or innovative. I suppose doing the straightest production you can isn’t necessarily an issue, but I think it’s got to be really engaging in other ways. Great acting is certainly a must (not that it isn’t also in more innovative productions). The acting here wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t good enough to make such a conventional production exciting. In terms of energy, design and acting, I prefer Nunn’s King Lear, but that doesn’t mean that this was bad: it just wasn’t as good.

The sets and costumes were both designed to look like Iron Age Britain which director Michael Elliot described as “ a primeval time, a world of mists and fogs.” There certainly weren’t any mists or fogs, but I suppose the costumes looked a little Iron Age. However, they didn’t manage to achieve a high enough level of realism: as with the Davenall King Lear it looked costumey and fake. The extreme fakeness of the world the movie was set in made it hard to get totally wrapped up in it because you kept on being jerked back to reality by cheap-looking costumes and unrealistic sets. In my opinion, if you don’t have the budget to make a setting like this look gorgeous, I’d rather see it done in t-shirts and jeans than in costumey robes and plastic crowns with the cheap Renaissance Faire vibe. Even looking beyond the low-quality sets and costumes, I didn’t get very much of a “primeval” vibe from the setting. It looked sort of non-descriptively old, and the Stonehenge replica was more silly than primeval. I love the idea of creating a Lear set in “ a primeval time, a world of mists and fogs,” but that’s just not what we got here.

In addition to cheap-looking costuming, there were also a couple of other technical issues. Primarily, there were a lot of sudden and jolting cuts, or times when I felt like the camera was paying attention to a character that it should have left alone for that scene. A couple of times, one character talked while the camera focused on the expressionless face of another. The second technical issue was the soundtrack. Most of the movie had no music, but it would occasionally include short periods of music at odd moments. Most of the time, it was distractingly bad, and I would rather it had been omitted altogether.

Laurence Olivier was the clear center of this production, and I got the sense that the movie was made in no small part because he was nearing the end of his career and he needed to do a Lear. He’d performed the part once before in 1946, when he was thirty-nine. Apparently it wasn’t much good, and I’d imagine that having a Lear in the prime of his life certainly would have been a problem. There was no issue with that here, as Olivier was seventy-five and very ill with cancer. He lived six years beyond this production, but he was clearly quite old when it was made, and a lot of his age in this was not acting. His age definitely contributed to the image of Lear as the aging, benevolent, white-haired patriarch he can be.

However, the benevolent patriarch portrayal really only became dominant in the last part of the film. For most of the first half, he seemed like an overgrown petulant child, insisting on throwing a fit because things aren’t going exactly his way. There was a certain whine in his voice during the first scene that called to mind a childish temper-tantrum. The movie also showed how unreasonable it was for him to expect his daughters to host him and his one hundred knights. When he arrived they stormed in and wrestled, drank, stuffed their faces and ran about making a proper mess of things. His horrified reaction to being told to dismiss them made you more likely than ever to dislike him because expecting a relative to put up with that seemed quite ridiculous.

Not only was this Lear remarkably immature, he was vain and demanding. During Goneril’s speech about her love for him, she started merely kneeling, and he cut her off after a few words, motioning for her to prostrate herself and kiss the ground before him. He sat on a tall throne at the center of “Stonehenge” with everyone else standing in a respectful semicircle far away from him. When he arrived in Goneril’s palace, he was riding a horse that was being led by a servant, while everyone else was on foot.

This literal and hierarchical distance from everyone else made him a hard-to-like character at first, mainly because there was nothing about this vainglorious man-child to like. That’s not necessarily a problem, and based on his behavior in the beginning of the play, it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that Lear shouldn’t be likeable. It’s my personal feeling that Lear should be loveable but not likeable, but I don’t think an unappealing Lear is a problem, just not to my personal taste. However, one needs to feel that he is deserving of dignity, and that some wrong is being done when he is brought down so low. Though I certainly pitied him, I never got the sense that this was a dignified man to begin with, mainly due to his childish behavior and borderline-silly demand for reverence. You can portray Lear as throwing a tantrum in the first scene, and you can make him wildly unlikeable, but you have to find a dignity for him somewhere in that, and I didn’t get it from Olivier’s performance.

However, as it went on, Lear developed from the immature child he was in the beginning to the “unaccomodated man” of nature, innocent, tender and without vanity. One of the major ways Elliot did this was with a silent scene in which he washes his clothes in a river, eats some meat from a rabbit raw and seems very much like an idealized, simple rustic. In the beginning he comes in with furs, robes and jewelry, as well as a massive crown, and over the course of the movie he sheds all his outer trappings to become the idealized “man of nature”. In a way he became “purified” after being taken in by Cordelia, and he wakes dressed in all white, stretched out on a bed looking almost saintly or Christ-like. He became the benevolent father-figure, and for a moment it almost felt like everything was going to be okay. Unlike the Nunn Lear where this scene was staged on a battle field with disaster hanging in the air, Elliot chose a domestic setting for this scene, making it feel much more like a brief respite from the never ending string of horror. There was some feeling of normalcy to it, which made what happened afterwards all the more heartbreaking.

Though a lot of his lines were cut, John Hurt’s Fool was decent, and particularly shone in his relationship to Lear. It was mainly a matter of contrasts between Lear’s treatment of him and Lear’s treatment of everyone else: though there wasn’t much tenderness in their relationship, he was the only person Lear ever smiled at or allowed any informality from. He was one of the few who reached out to help Lear in any way more than a purely practical one. His scene with Lear after they are driven out of Goneril’s house was especially good as he tried in vain to make his beloved master laugh, and Lear tried just as hard in return to bring himself to laugh at the jokes. The contrast between Lear’s treatment of him and Lear’s treatment of everyone else made Lear’s relationship with him seem like something very special and interesting, even though Hurt gave a fairly standard and slightly too foolish portrayal of the Fool.

While Dorothy Tutin and Anna Calder-Marshall were both mediocre as Goneril and Cordelia, Diana Rigg really stood out as Regan. She had a strength of personality that was sorely lacking in the other two, and her chemistry with Robert Lindsay’s Edmund was very real. Unlike in the Nunn production where Regan was played as an idiot, this Regan was very clever and completely cold. After putting out Gloucester’s eyes, Cornwall fell to the ground wounded, crying out for her help, and she looked on mercilessly. As he died before her eyes, she smiled faintly. She was not a woman to be messed with, and unlike Dorothy Tutin’s Goneril, Diana Rigg had enough presence on screen to be frightening.

In contrast to Regan’s sadism, Jeremy Kemp’s Cornwall wasn’t sadistic or evil, just a dumb bully. Geoffrey Bateman as Oswald gave off a similar vibe, with his constant grinning as he followed Goneril’s orders. However, as with a lot of the cast here, I didn’t get a strong sense of who they were right away. In Nunn’s King Lear each actor had an energy and force of personality that made even minor characters like Oswald stand out, but here, even more major characters like Goneril just blended into the background.

Robert Lindsay made a good Edmund, clever and bitter in private, and entirely sweet when talking to other people. Something about his big eyes and gentle demeanor made it almost impossible to think badly of him, until he transformed into a bitter, hateful man when he was alone. Unlike Phillip Winchester’s Edmund in the Nunn Lear, he came off as sweet instead of charming in his interactions with other characters, and I thought the sweetness worked well. However, I didn’t think he had quite the depth of nihilistic power that Edmund needs to have; he never seemed like anything else than a bitter man lashing out. Edmund should be extraordinarily powerful, both as a character within the play and as a theatrical representation, and I didn’t get that sense of power from him in this production.

David Threlfall’s Edgar was acceptable, but like in the other two Lears I’ve reviewed, his second and third soliloquies were cut or no discernable reason. I said it before, but I think these soliloquies very important to understanding his character and his evolving understanding of the nature of suffering. Without them, the scene where he meets his blind father doesn’t have the proper set-up, and his sanity is called into question when the soliloquies would reveal that he’s perfectly sane. The second soliloquy is easier to justify cutting because it was excluded from the Folio Lear, but they weren’t strictly following the Folio text for this movie. The third soliloquy is included in both the Folio and the Quarto versions of Lear, and I think is especially important in framing his later interactions wit his father. Because of that soliloquy, Edgar’s special gift of empathy comes through much more clearly, because the greatest suffering that he endures is seeing his father suffer. Edgar is so central a character, and I think cutting his chances to express himself alone is a big mistake.

However, with what he was given to work with, Threlfall did a decent job, especially, I thought, in the scene where he tricks his father into believing he is jumping off a cliff. That scene worked especially well because of the way it was framed: until the “jump” it was shot all in up-close views of their faces, so it wasn’t until the “jump” that the camera zoomed out and it became clear what Edgar was doing. Even though I knew what was going to happen, the added suspense of not seeing what was in front of them made that scene really stand out.

While it was mostly solid, there wasn’t much that was exciting or original in this production. Not much was outright bad, but not much was brilliant either. For me, one of the most important aspects of any Shakespeare production is that it is exciting, though that doesn’t mean it has to be wacky, overdone or novel for novelty’s sake. One of the most thrilling productions I’ve seen was Trevor Nunn’s toned down, bare-stage Macbeth. What this film lacked most of all wasn’t talent, but energy and the ability to engage.

Rupert Goold's Macbeth (2010)

On first watch, I felt entirely mixed feelings about this film. Some parts of it are very, very good. And some are… not so good. However, it was undoubtedly one of the most fascinating productions of Macbeth I’ve seen, both because it’s packed full of interesting ideas, but also because of some really stellar performances. In the end, the strange and bad parts were overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of the good and interesting parts.

This started out as a stage production in 2008 that was very successful and toured around a bit, to generally rave reviews. Part of the attention was doubtlessly due to Stewart's star power, but it was also due to it being a fairly amazing production. Because of its success, in 2010 they decided to film it, staying true to the stage production while still creating an engaging movie that was not just a film of a stage.

Goold chose to tell the story with Macbeth as a Russian dictator cultivating a cult of personality in the 1940’s. It was a useful device at times, but I thought it was overdone, and not quite as illuminating as Goold thought it was. A Stalinist dictatorship fit the story fairly well, and using the typical tropes of fascism and Stalinism served to illustrate the degeneration of the country as Macbeth rose to power. The cramped, frightening traincar where Banquo was killed, the banners of Macbeth’s face hanging everywhere and the scenes of trechcoat-clad police officers chasing down and killing dissidents all worked because they used WWII tropes to key us in to what sort of things were going on in Scotland under Macbeth. On the other hand, invoking Hitler and Stalin at the same time isn’t just overkill; it goes totally beyond overkill. Not only that, but it’s easy. It’s so easy to compare something to Stalin. If it’s bad, it’s like Stalin, and bam, you’ve got yourself a good metaphor, right? If you’re going to lay on a metaphor as heavily as Goold does here, you’ve got to at least use an original and more complex metaphor than just “bad things are like Hitler and Stalin”. The actual black and white clips from WWII seemed especially extraneous and over the top, since they only served to drive in a tired, overused metaphor. Using the tropes from movies about the era worked well, but the Stalinesque moustache, clips of WWII fighting and marching, and red banners everywhere seemed like far more than was necessary or tasteful.

Part of this is a disagreement between Goold and myself about setting Shakespeare plays in specific cultural contexts. In interviews he’s stated that he thinks “Shakespeare is illuminated by a socially specific environment”. I couldn’t disagree more. For me, each play sets up its own distinct universe and world, with its own rules, culture and feeling to it. I don’t think they need a socially specific context at all, because I think a good production creates that context within the play. For instance, Measure for Measure isn’t really set in Vienna, it’s in the world created within the play. Going to great lengths to make the set look as much like sixteenth century Vienna as possible isn’t going to help you make a better interpretation of the play. Costumes and sets can hint at a general era or location, but I think once you get too specific with something like “Soviet Russia” or “1980’s Gibraltar”, oftentimes more is obscured than is illuminated, because the play’s own unique universe must be made to fit into a different time and space. Ultimately, I don’t care if you do it in togas or t-shirts, but I think trying to place it too specifically is often merely distracting.

Most of the sets were what looked like a series of underground tunnels or basements with industrial kitchen appliances installed. As a visual metaphor, it worked very well. To get to Dunsinane you took an elevator down into the earth: literally a descent into Hell. The whole place was dirty and damp; paint peeled off the walls, open piping dripped, footsteps echoed against concrete. An almost apocalyptic horror and grimness surrounded everything. There was no touch of humanity or comfort, even in the bedrooms. However, as a logical setting it made no sense. Why would the King of Scotland be living in a dank underground tunnel? Goold made the decision to put visual metaphor above logical setting. Whether or not that worked for you is a matter of personal taste and willingness to suspend disbelief. For me, it mostly worked, once I got over trying to figure out what the logic was supposed to be.

One of the first things I noticed about this production was that it was constantly unsettling, even more so than Macbeth inherently is (and that’s saying something). Little touches scattered throughout built tension and discomfort, with the cumulative effect being both unsettling and frightening.

Little touches of the inanely domestic were used to horrify and alienate the audience. Food was used most commonly, usually juxtaposed against alarming events, making the banality of a sandwich genuinely horrifying. The food, throughout, is lit or framed in a way to make it appear disgusting. It’s a reversal of the normal human instinct to be drawn to food, just as everything good and bad seems inverted or confused in Macbeth. Fair is foul and foul is fair, and all our normal instincts are so warped that Macbeth preparing a sandwich is both horrifying and revolting. The red soup they serve up at the banquet, right after Banquo’s murder, is positively stomach-turning, all the more so because you realize that it is actually totally innocuous-looking tomato soup. By lighting and context, Goold turns the banality of food into one of the most unsettling elements of the play.

The Witches were also extremely unsettling, mostly because they were omnipresent and seemingly normal- until they suddenly transformed from ordinary servants or nurses into something else entirely. The opening scene (after the already-tiresome WWII clips) was 1.2, where Duncan speaks to the wounded messenger about the battle he just came from. The messenger is on a hospital bed, being anxiously tended to by the nurses, and after Duncan leaves he quickly dies from his wounds. I was wondering where the witch scene would come in, but I figured that they had probably just decided to inverse the order to better illustrate what the political situation was at the start of the play. And then the three nurses pulled off their masks and planned where to meet Macbeth. It was totally unexpected and totally scary.

The witches were everywhere: working in the hospital, preparing food when Duncan arrived, tending on Lady Macbeth, serving food at the banquet, and following Macbeth during the battle. Their omnipresence was alarming because their behavior was so unpredictable and frightening. Something about their over-modest servant outfits put shivers down the spine.

During the witch scenes, a number of strange effects were used to blend the supernatural and the natural. Some combination of jump cuts and fast-forwarding made them seem to speed up and slow down their actions at a dizzying pace, sometimes appearing to jump from one location to another without moving. The first metaphor that came to my mind was quantum leaping electrons discontinuously moving to a different location. The second main effect that was used was some sort of strange synthesizer used to distort their voices while they chanted. The effect was alien and strange, but nothing near the typical “far off supernatural” sound effect that is so often used in bad science fiction.

The witches were also possibly endowed with the gift of reanimation, though the edge here between science and magic was totally blurred. Were electric impulses causing the corpses to move and speak through them? Or was it something more than that? The answer was unclear and therefore unsettling, and by treading that line carefully without ever crossing to one side or the other, they balanced well the necessary ambiguity.

So, with the scene of alienation, discomfort and fear set, I can turn to Macbeth and the rest of the cast. Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth was dangerous from the very beginning, and he gave off none of the feeling that Ian McKellen did of being essentially a nice guy who went down the wrong path. In fact, his coldness was almost too much, since he seemed like the kind of man who wouldn’t have had much difficulty killing Duncan. His own imaginings didn’t scare him so much as intrigue him; in the dagger scene he seems interested but not remotely frightened by his hallucination. His power came not from being a sympathetic villain, but from being a powerful portrait of evil, entrancing but not likeable.

His relationship with Lady Macbeth was also not a relationship based on love, but, as Stewart himself said “complete enthrallment”. She was much younger than him and possessed a very powerful sexual vitality. He was obsessed with her, almost dependent on her and completely incapable of standing up to her. Kate Fleedwood’s Lady Macbeth was just the sort of woman who could command this sort of power over him, and started out as the uncontested dominant half of the relationship. As Macbeth rose to power in Scotland, he also gained power in their relationship, until she was under his control by the end, watching as he executed the murders of Banquo and Lady Macduff without her. Her descent into madness was beautifully done, but again, didn’t elicit much sympathy. As with Macbeth, the power came not from sympathy, but from the entrancing power of depravity.

Throughout the film, they would place their hands on top of each other to walk forward, usually when they were going into a new stage in the play. They way they held their hands and assumed this position was very revealing of the state of their relationship at the time. The first times, Lady Macbeth holds her hand up, and he reluctantly follows. By the end, he grabs her hand and practically drags her away. It doesn’t seem like a disintegration of their relationship, as it was in McKellen’s Macbeth. Instead, it seems more like a radical shift in power dynamics, which also entails him becoming less enthralled with her power as he takes on more power of his own.

In McKellen’s Macbeth, where Macbeth started out sympathetic and very much in love, the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” speech was the final cut off from his humanity and his ability to gain audience sympathy, because it was delivered utterly coldly and dispassionately. Whatever shreds of the great man he had been were excised during that speech. In this Macbeth, Patrick Stewart achieved the exact mirror image of that effect. He started off cold, distant and unsympathetic, and became more so as the movie went on. By Act five, he was totally alienated from the audience, until that speech that suddenly brought him back into humanity. He was so completely devastated that his only possible choice was nihilism. In one Macbeth it dehumanized a great man, in the other it humanized a terrible one, and I found the fact that it can have two such opposite effects to be really fascinating.

The Porter had an expanded role in this film, because he also played one of Banquo’s murderers, the Old Man who talks with Ross and Seyton. He was clearly supposed to be one continuous character through each of these scenes, and I thought it worked very well. His Porter scene was demonically powerful, and he had a bit of the same alarming inhuman quality that the witches had. By focusing the camera on the background of the tunnel he was in, he would essentially blend into the foreground only to “pop” back into existence when the camera changed focus. This vanishing effect gave him a lot of his inhuman quality, but his performance was also very scary. He was disgusting, demonic and uninhibited: the perfect porter to welcome you to Hell and equip Macbeth for his last battle. When he entered Lady Macduff’s room with saw in hand, my blood ran cold.

Ross’s role, played by Tim Treloar, was also expanded, but not by giving him extra lines. He was one of the few of the nobles who was clearly differentiated from the beginning, and attention was drawn to him on several occasions. He didn’t wear the same military garb as the rest of them, and was also older than most, looking more like an awkward teddy bear than a warlord. The first scene where he really stood out was the scene where Ross speaks to Lennox about the current state of Scotland. Usually, Lennox’s praise of Macbeth is played as sarcastic or satirical, but this time, Lennox was interrogating the tied-up Ross about the whereabouts of Macduff. It worked well in context, and though it certainly changed the entire meaning of the scene (and required some fairly large cuts to work), I thought it was effective. Ross, at this point, defies expectations quite a bit with his unwavering refusal to voice support for Macbeth, and later goes on to ally himself quite clearly with Macduff and Malcolm.

The Macduffs’ story line was also told very well, and I think it also served as a good parable for the virtues of understatement. Lady Macduff was sweetly played by Suzanne Burden, and I think the universality as a mother-figure that she gave the role did a great deal to endear her to us in the short space of time she’s given. She also replaced Lennox for the first half of the scene where Macduff discovers the murder of Duncan, so she seemed less like a character pulled out of the blue. I was disappointed by the cutting of her son’s line where he says “Then the beggars and liars are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to bear the honest men and hang them.” I’ve always loved that little insight of his because I think it says a lot about the world he’s grown up in. Beyond that, I thought their murder was handled excellently. It needs to be horrifying, there’s no doubt about that, but I always think the best way to achieve horror is to hint at it and leave most of it to the imagination, which is precisely what they did. We see the two murderers, the demonic Porter and Macbeth close in on them and then it cuts to a scene where Ross, terrified, peers around the corner and retreats in horror. All we see is the decapitated head of her daughter’s doll, and the heel of her foot, but Ross’s reaction tells us everything else we need to know. Instead of showing the horror in its full, we are free to interpret from Ross’s face what has happened, and the imagination is always able to come up with better monstrosities than the screen can.

Macduff’s reaction too, was very well done. His devastation came through not in breaking down or sobbing, but in the look in his eyes and the tremble of his lip. I feel like his line “All my pretty ones, did you say all?” after he has been told twice already is one of the most devastating lines in Shakespeare, and needs to pack a punch with it. Macduff, strong, masculine Macduff, asks the same questions over again then leaves the room without another word. It was extraordinarily effective, and all the more so for the lack of hysterics.

Now, unfortunately, I must get to the bad parts. Actually though, calling them bad parts is a little misleading. They were more like weird parts than anything else. The main two were the dancing scene during the banquet and the second witch scene.

The banquet scene started out well, and was played especially awkwardly. Macbeth trying to pretend this was a fun party reminded me a little bit of when Patrick Stewart played Claudius and he was trying to convince the court that he and Hamlet were getting on splendidly. His forced cheerfulness made everyone else’s stiff awkwardness even more sharp. The witches went from person to person, ladling soup, seemingly almost aware of what was about to happen. When Banquo entered it was genuinely frightening, more zombie-like than ghost-like, and Stewart’s response to him was spot on. And then it got weird, because for some reason the guests all started dancing to what may be the most annoying song ever, playing a game that seemed a little bit like musical chairs, except instead of having no chair, you had to dance with a mop. It was strange (and oh my god, that song is annoying), and it seemed especially weird because they leapt up to do this dance before finishing the first course of the meal. It seemed to be in response to Macbeth’s hallucination, and I just couldn’t figure out what the point of it was. And that song is still stuck in my head (why oh why did it have to be so annoying?). It went on for a long time in exquisite pointlessness until Banquo (thankfully) returned.

The second weird scene wasn’t quite as strange and confusing, but I don’t think it really served the purpose it was intended to. The second time the witches meet Macbeth, they are brewing up a potion. As they chanted the ingredients, weird synthesizers played over them, and they danced grotesquely around the dead bodies. My first impression was that it looked like a rap interlude from a Lady Gaga video, and I had no idea what it was doing there. The second time I saw it I got a better sense of the purpose, but it still had the same effect. My little sister, who is alarmingly astute about Shakespeare for an eleven year old, had pretty much the same reaction I did: “Why are they rapping?”

There were a couple of other strange decisions, but the main one was having Macbeth physically help kill Lady Macduff and her children. I always found it meaningful that after killing Duncan, Macbeth doesn’t personally hurt a single person again: he always hired other people to do his dirty work. Having Macbeth do it himself dramatically changes his relationship to his own violence.

Everything that Nunn’s Macbeth lacked in the ending was present in this movie. The battle began with Macbeth fighting practically alone, with only Seyton on his side. By the time Macduff found him, he was sitting alone in the dining hall, drinking and mumbling. As he went into battle with Macduff, he shouted “And damned be he that first cries ‘hold!’” They fought briefly and then the witches entered, seeing Macbeth for the last time. As he saw them he murmured “Enough,” and Macduff struck him down. As Malcolm says the last lines, he holds Macbeth’s decapitated head up to the air as the screen fades to black. Malcolm surely is little better than the man he just displaced. The camera then moves to each different key location of the movie, empty and dead, before revisiting the image it had already shown once before: the Macbeths, soaked in Duncan’s blood, holding hands as they ride a lift down into the earth.

Overall, despite the few weird scenes and despite the overdone gimmick of WWII analogy, it was extremely effective. It’s hard to say that I like it better than Nunn’s Macbeth, because they’re so different. Both are beautiful and fascinating despite taking totally different approaches.