Butchery

Rating: 1/10 (12 October 2016)

I can't remember the last time I was so exasperated by a film. I didn't see it on its cinema release, but I remembered it getting good reviews at the time and so I was really looking forward to watching it when it was televised a week ago on Film 4.
Sadly, about five minutes in, I thought "I'm not going to like this"; ten minutes in, I knew I didn't like it; somewhere around half way through I stopped it and deleted the recording I'd made of it.
The problem for me was the treatment of the text. OK, Shakespeare's plays are long (although Macbeth is just about the shortest), and the non-stop dialogue that you get in a theatre performance doesn't work on film, so the text is inevitably going to be adapted for a film. If it's well done, as in Polanski's 1971 film or the BBC's Hollow Crown series, then you hardly notice or at least willingly accept it, but in this case...
Firstly, there's very little of the text left; twenty per-cent, ten per-cent? maybe even less than that, and some of what's left is modified. There seem to be two main reasons for these changes: (a) because the words conflict with the visuals (and this film is all about visuals - style but no substance) or (b) because they are too "poetic" and thus presumably jar with the naturalistic acting style. And there was I thinking that the poetry was the bottom line with Shakespeare...
Secondly, and this was what really exasperated me, such words as were retained were often inserted completely out of context, out of sequence, in a way that made them just about meaningless. Why on earth does Macbeth, galloping off to burn Lady Macduff and her sprogs, shout out "Then fly false thanes and mingle with the English epicures"? They haven't flown anywhere yet. I don't know what happened after this; this was where I turned it off.
Maybe it's possible to enjoy this film if you're not familiar with the play - but anybody who is is going to hate it, which I think is why there are so many negative reviews on this site - one more now.
Towards the end of the play (probably not in this film), Macbeth is referred to as a butcher. The only butchers here are the little committee who came up with the screenplay; I wonder whether they actually understood half of the text at all.