The Camera is the Star Here

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2016)

If you like Shakespeare, or Macbeth, be warned: this is not that. This is a visually stunning film, with a wonderful score, a number of exquisitely choreographed scenes, some stunning acting by minor characters, tremendous witches, haunting scenery, some moments of brilliance, lacklustre performances by Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, and total (and annoying) inconsistency of accents and setting. There's a wondrous sex scene early on that was not followed through on later, when we needed it again on steroids; the madness is silly and everything is too slow; yet the surreal, colourized imagery, with its strong hints of IS and desert warfare and suicide bombers gone mad, is arresting. Too bad it wasn't more consistent. The camera is smarter than the actors or the script here. The madness in general is unanchored and a bit banal, and Fassbender only looks in control when whacking. He smiles too much, and has never heard that there is such a thing as poetry, or that this is that. Still, Banquo and MacDuff are tremendous. There are a couple of really annoying things, though. First, there's an attempt to make every interpretation new, even when it's a terrible, non-narrative stretch of disbelief, so stretched that it snaps. Lady Macbeth outing her spot looks like play acting, for example. I laughed out loud, it was so pop psychology. Nonetheless, for all its missed beats, what it hinted at and failed at, is magnificent, but, really, it's too much to ask for a production of Shakespeare in a non-poetic age to be be poetic, but without poetry Shakespeare makes no sense. This doesn't. The good stuff is good, though. Go for Banquo and the photography and the witches and for what might have been if the whole thing had been given to the camera crew early on. Moments of brilliance are rare enough.