![]() ![]() Macbeth’s decision to murder MacDuff’s wife and children – in the film’s most wrenching scene – thus comes across as motivated more by inadequacy than paranoia. Even the witches, figures of transgression and malevolence, are accompanied by infant children. He is mocked by his inability to sustain a family tormented by the close bond between Banquo (Paddy Considine) and his son, Fleance (Lochlann Harris) and haunted by the ghost of the young soldier (Scot Greenan) he sees slain on the battlefield. The resonant feeling of loss that Kurzel speaks of drives Macbeth his ambition (traditionally the primary motivation for his murderous actions) seems desperately empty, as though consumed by an elegiac numbness. We all want to belong to something and we all want to feel as though we have a legacy, and when you see two characters that have had that taken away from them, I think that just feels very real and very human.” I lost my father, and went into a process of grief with it that was all about how to replace that grief, how to fill it, and I think there was something very desperate in the way that I was replacing it. I think that that is such an interesting and universal thing. In an interview with Indiewire Kurzel explained, “a lot of is about family, and two characters who are desperately trying to replace family, and everything around them reminds them of what they don't have. However, its prominent inclusion suggests Kurzel’s approach to the material, one foregrounded in personal reflections on grief and legacy. This is arguably a misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s intent a dead child would explain Lady Macbeth’s allusions to breastfeeding, but appears to contradict her husband’s “barren sceptre” lament. ![]() The child is revealed to be Macbeth’s the last of his line. Macbeth opens on a young child’s corpse laid to rest on a funeral pyre, the shaky handheld cinematography accentuating the emotionality of the scene. ![]() Combined with Jed Kurzel’s unnerving score, this deliberate bleakness creates the sense of morbid inevitability inherent to classical tragedy. The film’s grey, near-monochromatic palette is disrupted by flashes of gold – the flutter of the candles illuminating Lady Macbeth’s church, the flames that immolate Macbeth’s victims, the dull shine of the precious metal itself – or the fevered red haze that consumes the film in its final war-torn minutes. Kurzel’s careful use of colour contributes to this distancing aesthetic. After committing the unforgivable, he is fundamentally and forever alone. When Macbeth paces his dining room, shouting at a ghost only he can see, the shocked silence of his guests emphasises the existential loneliness that has engulfed him. Macbeth ascends from the battlefield to the stark opulence of the royal castle, but the camera assumes a cautious distance from its increasingly deranged protagonist. Again and again, Kurzel – with the aid of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw – frames Macbeth at the centre of an empty frame. Power corrupts, yes, but power also isolates. The film’s most memorable image is Fassbender standing solitary in a shallow body of water in an empty expanse (and not just because of his impressive physique). Having achieved his dark ambitions, he is consumed by madness – a mind “full of scorpions” – dispatching enemies both real and perceived with a relentless bloodlust that presages his demise. Impelled by the prophecies and hallucinations of three ‘weird sisters’ and his wife’s (Cotillard’s) ambition, Macbeth (Fassbender) assassinates King Duncan (David Thewlis) and claims his throne. Set – and filmed – amidst the miasmic moors of Scotland, Macbeth follows its eponymous protagonist’s rise from successful military leader to tyrannical King. Screenwriters Jacob Koskoff, Michael Leslie and Todd Louiso’s interpretation of the classic tragedy retains Shakespeare’s core storyline. Kurzel has described his take on Macbeth as a Western rather than a tragedy, but his description of its setting as “ an environment that has borne tragic people because it's completely corrupted by violence” unmistakably recalls his portentous approach to Snowtown. Tonally, Macbeth has much in common with its director’s debut, Snowtown, a grim, unsettling recreation of Snowtown’s infamous bodies-in-barrels murders. ![]()
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