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.