Tragedy without the drama

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2016)

It's not a bad movie at all, beautifully shot and acted, and the filmmakers' studies in Shakespeare's play have led to many interesting choices, such as exploiting, for instance, Freud's old idea that the tragedy of the Macbeths derive from their childlessness. This idea is carried through with great consistency; the child Macbeth loses in the opening of the film is directly linked to the destruction of the Macduffs who are likewise burnt in Kurzel's film. The dialogue has been taken apart and put together in interesting ways, such as King Duncan's fatal announcement of his son's succession which has been moved to the Dunsinane party while the king is drunk. The Weird Sisters are the kindest witches in the history of the play. Rather than trick the protagonist into mischief, they inform him, with much sympathy, about his unalterable fate.
A lot of the dialogue is missing, though, and for a reason. Fassbender's Macbeth suffers from a post-traumatic stress disorder which renders him emotionally numb. In Kurzel's film, Macbeth starts out at the point at which Shakespeare only lets him arrive in Act III: "I am in blood/ Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er". This means no deliberations or vacillations before the murder of Duncan, no fear of reprisals, no feelings – which, by the way, makes his wife's reproach, "Why do you make such faces?" in the Banquet Scene seem out of place, for Fassbender makes no faces at all; he is dead pan for the duration of the film and seems to be courting his own destruction near the end. This, I think, is where the film fails as a version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Since it starts with the real tragedy, the loss of Young Macbeth (who also haunts Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene), the film has nowhere to go. Lastly, it irked me a bit that the soliloquies were not done in voice-overs, for everything else fails to work on film, methinks.