MIFF NOTES: Macbeth (2015, Dir. Justin Kurzel)

Few directors manage to make Shakespeare's texts their own. Bold interpretations are frequent (and welcome) but the act of interpreting the bard to the big screen is generally a matter of navigating redundancy. Where Shakespeare transformed his famous "wooden O" with rich transportative poetry, cinema allows any necessary transportation to simply happen. Monologues that lay bare the players' thoughts and motivations at length can be rendered with a single tightly framed close-up (and a modicum of familiarity with the source material on the part of the audience). Even the structural considerations of feeding the Elizabethan five acts into cinema's three gives rise to an artistic frisson that will generally tend to favour ol' Bill. Cinema, more often than not, loses out.

That's not the case for Justin Kurzel's Macbeth, which seizes the accolades "bold" and "cinematic" with the ferocity and tonal gusto you'd expect of the director of Snowtown. Though all the pieces are in place here (the weird sisters, the regicide, accusatorial apparitions and the main character's vaulting ambition), Kurzel moulds the familiar into a nightmarish dream, with scene after scene bleeding into the next with horrifying momentum.

Shakespeare's language, intact and deftly pared back by adapters Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie and Todd Louiso, takes on a more resounding power, as it is growled from the bowels of Fassbender's Macbeth and wells in Marion Cotillard's piercing eyes. The text, often only barely audible, hushed under the couple's nefarious dealings, becomes one with the images. The eyes feed off the ears in a vicious circle that ultimately makes any attempt to separate the two meaningless. Macbeth is a sensory explosion. Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw's hazy atmospherics, the slow-motion camerawork, Kurzel's already signature full screen portraiture, Chris Dickens' scene smearing editing and, most importantly, Jed Kurzel's thundering score, take the play to newly harrowing depths.

So, while Kurzel does little to the play as written (on paper his Macbeth would slip comfortably within a Year 10 student's knapsack), in practice, his version is a noticeably different beast. The film's geography is far more condensed; Kurzel brings characters together more tightly and switches what once were wordy descriptions of offstage action into heavy pronouncements on Macbeth's despotic fury. Shakespeare's nature-upending parlay between upstart ambition and God-ordained right is still monstrously evoked, though here it is Macbeth who is cast as the force of nature and in usurping his king he obliterates himself. And Fassbender does this reading proud.

As astounding as it is to say, this film is more Kurzel's than it is Shakespeare's. There was barely any fat in Shakespeare's work ('Macbeth' is one of his shortest) but Kurzel has still managed to distill it into a denser, blacker, spittle-drenched, blood-soaked experience. As cinema and as Shakespeare, Macbeth is completely on point.

★★★★☆

Trailer:

Macbeth screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2015.