Over the years, filmmakers have struggled with how to best bring the work of Shakespeare to a contemporary audience on screen. In the case of “Macbeth,” despite its simple narrative focus, or maybe even due to its simplicity — man kills king, man goes crazy — filmmakers have often made sharp visual adaptations: Orson Welles, who had been engrossed in Shakespeare’s work since his earliest days with the Mercury Theater, made his expressionist and sometimes goofy version on a shoestring budget in 1948; in his deeply personal and stark “Throne of Blood,” from 1957, Akira Kurosawa transposed the play to medieval Japan; Roman Polanski, immediately following the murder of his wife Sharon Tate in 1969, made his even more grimly personal, boldly stylized version, co-scripted by theater critic Kenneth Tynan, in 1971; the Australian director Geoffrey Wright dragged his 2006 version into the present, kicking and screaming. Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of “Macbeth,” which arrives in theaters in the US on December 4, goes back in time. The film returns “Macbeth” to its original setting but attempts to capture some of the energy of Polanski and Kurosawa’s visceral, brazenly cinematic takes on Shakespeare’s tragedy. (Its closest counterpart is Kenneth Branagh’s 2014 epic-scale theatrical production.) This means pushing the violence to stylized extremes, even, unfortunately, toward tough-guy cliché. This is a violent affair, a bloody disgusting rumble through the Scottish moorlands where sweat, phlegm, and vomit are more common than coherence — resembling something straight from the mind of the dramaturge in the dorm room.From the start, this version of “Macbeth” engages in a macho-atmospheric visual style. Following a scene depicting the funeral for the child of Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) and her husband — daringly making the couple’s later ambition and bitterness less ambiguous than the original text and signaling the film’s lack of subtly — we are thrown headfirst into battle. The camera waves back and forth through soldiers dodging swords, the clanging of metal and cutting of flesh prominent in the film’s sound design. Macbeth (Michael Fassbender), bravely fighting to the end, watches as those around him drop to the ground. But he continues fighting. Blood spurts in every direction, and heads literally roll. Every piece of violent action — and there is a lot of it — is chopped up, slowed down, or sped up, and drenched in a spooky mist, while the color palate is obvious and displays lack of nuance (red signals anger, natural light and white indicates purity and innocence). The filmmakers, it seems, are trying to beat the viewer over the head with every choice they made. It’s intense, hard to watch, and extremely predictable.Fassbender does his best with the winding Shakespearean verse, even if he seems to slip out of it at times, and Cotillard, especially in a close-up shot, can covey more emotion than the film is willing or able to handle. But they are simply props for Kurzel’s overeager visual funhouse, which has all the sensitivity of a blunt object.
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