Is this the most Scottish version of Macbeth ever made? The accents are thick, everyone's faces are covered in mud, blood and warpaint, there's punching, there's swordplay, it looks like it's about minus twenty degrees... It's like a night out in Glasgow, just with a bit more infanticide.
Snowtown director Justin Kurzel is in charge of helming this tale of toil and trouble, and he makes a pretty good stab of it. It amps up the violence and Catholic guilt, but flourishes on atmosphere: you really do feel like you're there with Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and Banquo (Paddy Considine) during the first battle sequence, even if there is an irritating overemphasis on slow-motion. It untethers itself from the necessarily grounded space of the theatre with intense visions of colour, replete with dream-like throat slittings and wordless exchanges between the very manliest of men, brutalised by warfare. There's nary a bubbling cauldron in sight.
Kurzel takes some bold leaps with the material, too: he opens with the funeral of Macbeth and his wife's (Marion Cotillard) child, only alluded to in the play through their childlessness and a reference to breastfeeding. It's a gamble, but it pays off, as the couple's political ambitions are refracted through the embitterment of grief - seldom before have Lady Macbeth's cuckolding jibs felt so raw and emotional, and there's a great scene where Macbeth idly twists a knife against his wife's stomach.
And he does what the best cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare do: he strips back the verbal language in favour of visual invention, of showing and not telling - in spite of how pretty the Bard's words sound - while still keeping (and re-shuffling) the best lines.
Michael Fassbender is, as you'd expect, a commanding presence. He completely encapsulates the savagery of the play, choosing to growl many of his lines from behind his shaggy beard while still remaining perfectly legible. He also brings out Macbeth's most adolescent aspects of madness: spending most of the film in his pyjamas, he prowls about Cawdor Castle, sweating and sincere one minute, giggling the next. His abilities are on full show during one of the play's best scenes, where Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo at a feast.
Yet for me, the show was stolen by Marion Cotillard. It's maybe an odd choice, casting a French woman to play the most Scottish of wives, particularly when she retains her original accent. But it works. It makes her character an even more distant and ethereal presence, never quite able to fit in with her community and all the more driven to spur her husband on. Of course, as her guilt mounts we see a sad desperation emerge, which crystallises in one of the most incredible readings of Lady Macbeth's "sleepwalking" speech that I've ever seen. She'd better be in the running for an Oscar.
It should be noted that, in spite of everything, this is still blockbuster Shakespeare, in that it occasionally loses subtlety and nuance in favour of big, bloody action. (A production with James McAvoy at Trafalgar Studios did the same thing, though it was much, much worse.) But there's plenty in here to love and lose yourself in: a tale of sound and fury, told by someone who's certainly not an idiot.
★★★★
