MACBETH by Justin Kurzel - Review

Easter, quite some time ago. I was 11 years old and we all left in a hurry to go to father's village to celebrate and eat with friends and relatives there. While the adults were cracking jokes and eating and remembering things past, we, the children, played, run like crazy and explored the places around the yard of the house in which the feast was hosted. Farmhouses were a mystery to some of us who were growing up in the city and at one point I left the others and entered an older cousin's room. And there was her book case. I browsed through the titles and one book made a lasting impression on me: the cover was a colour print of a dead king in his bed. He was still wearing his royal crown and he was peaceful under the white sheets as if asleep. On the right corner of his bed there was a red cape that witnessed his royal blood but also made me see it as a clue of his ill fate. The title on the cover, read: MACBETH. I passed the whole day reading it, and this book is still with me to the present day, a gift by cousin Elisabeth.
As a critic and lecturer, over the years, Ι realised that the feelings towards the content and the meaning of a book that stemm from the fresh look of a child can be very useful later, when a deeper analysis is required. So, I can say that my first impression after I finished the book, was that I had never seen such arrogance, ambition, paranoia and mistrust as in Macbeth's deeds and thoughts. I had never seen such guilt, a guilt that brings people to the point of madness and death. I had never imagined of a horror and agony as in the killings of the familly of Macduff.  And yet, despite all that, I felt that Macbeth the tyrant deserved respect for his folly, for his courage to break the line of succession and turn everybody's world upside-down in the way that Dionysus had repeatedly done in the Greek tragedies. To my opinion, Macbeth, along with the Bacchae is one of the most important masterpieces of the world, and deserves great courage to bring it to life on the silver screen.

Director Justin Kurzel displayed a great deal of courage dealing with Scotland's traitor, so did his actors undertaking such roles of gigantic prestige and difficulty. Kurzel recreated convinsingly an era of turmoil and conspiracy on the Highlands. However, we could not avoid being surprised at the false nose of Sean Harris (Macduff) in an otherwise epic scene in the end of the movie, and with Marion Cotillard playing her big Lady Macbeth "good-bye" scene as she could have probably rehearsed it in her own room in front of a mirror. Michael Fassbender's Macbeth was totally convincing, but the various interpretations towards which the director dragged him mercilessly, punished the Scottish King-Fassbender well before Malcolm and Macduff did.
What was Macbeth for Kurzel? A weak, filled with remorse army general who played with the fire of power and got burned? An unworthy traitor? A toy in his wife's little hands? (nudge nudge allusion to the text).  Was he just one of the Macchiavellian usurpers of the era? Was he suffering from paranoia and delusions? Was he suffering from depression (too)? Was it an exquisitly described folie a deux? Was he another innocent Oedipus who believed in fate, omens and oracles? Was he the modern man who makes his own destiny? Was he a reminiscent of the constant danger of the Catholic Scottish cousins? And of course the  fashionable hipster question: was Macbeth gay? Which honestly, is getting a little old by now.

The director alluded to many possible interpretations and this can be a blessing (he did a lot of reading) and a curse (couldn't make up his mind at times): it made the film move like mercury in front of our eyes like a collage beyond Kurzel's grasp. An additional mistake was  the use of Shakespeare's words in an ultra super modern "landscape"; and if the battlefield scenes and the (Shakespearean) gore were the desirable outcome and focus, why not put a Braveheartian allure to it and skip the "esoteric monologue"? And please, we know that the mainstream star system immitates "deep acting" practices, so to earn an Oscar one needs to: lose 20 kilos, gain 35 kilos, get wrinkles, get a toupe, play horrid characters before getting back to the normal botox acting and filming of muscles and face lifts. But why oh why should Fassbender bathe in ice cold water for three nanoseconds of meaning...lesness? For the good old allegory of chastising in baptising and the use of the magical forces of water and fire? Oh pleeeease!

In short, Macbeth did not make history (again), but with a large bowl of pop corn and a soda, you' ll enjoy nose bleeding, bone cracking, necks twisting, jaws dislocating, torsos being dismembered and some English krypto-feminists playng the evil spirits of the forest who tell Macbeth of his rise to self-made glory and his subsequent fall after, he, the great army general, would fail to recognise a simple stratagem that he himself might have used at some point: the camouflage, thus mistaking soldiers moving disguised, for a forest moving (the ultimate delusion).
One last point: why the uncanny run of Banco's child in the end of the film? Yes we got it: power corrupts and one has to fulfill one's destiny and Malcolm had a valuable lesson learnt from Macbeth and had heard of the prophecy about the ascension of Banco's children to power and paranoia would possibly cover Scotland's Paradise Lost like a thick mist (...) and was it Stephen King or Shakespeare who wrote the book?