How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth ?*

This is a review of Macbeth (2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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3 October (End-note / Tweets added, 4 October)

This is a review of Macbeth (2015)

With Tweets added, and owning that Paddy C. is better than Marion C. than Michael F., a review of Macbeth (2015) : http://t.co/O7wKA6jMOg

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2015

Some of the inventive ways in which the Shakespeare play has been transmuted in this film simply will not have people seeking out the original, because they probably will not conceive that the play (in the form, at any rate, in which it has come down to us) has here been (in places) very much abridged, or that material has been relocated within it (sometimes within an immediate context, sometimes scarcely so, and even to the extent of introducing repetition) : at other times, it will be clear that, under licence, painting with images or with poetry are part of this endeavour. (This will be evident without anyone needing to know that it is those who have edited Shakespeare, over the centuries (and by a process of inference and deduction), who have given us both scene-locations and some of the usual printed stage-directions (e.g. as to who is on stage during a scene, and when he or she enters or exits), and thus that a licence to do something different, if it were needed even in the theatre, can be claimed.)

Of Macbeth (2015), @FilmDivider says : It’s the curse [...] that the audience [spend...] time considering [how] the source has been adapted

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 4, 2015

Where many are most likely to come unstuck, however familiar they may be with the text that we have from the so-called First Folio of 1623, is with the bewilderment that is the film’s ending : none, almost needless to say, of the pat wrapping-up, in however mournful rhyming-couplets (which we might also recall from the close of Lear), but instead much confusion of image and action – of thought, word and dream.

Thereby pursuing, relentlessly and acceleratingly, the blurring of sleeping and waking that builds across the film : just as the verse-speaking, simply gorgeous at the start (and therefore bringing tears at its beauty), becomes more and more degraded by fury, frenzy, and fire. Just, likewise, as Jed Kurzel’s score**, which began with so much heart-breaking keening and Celtic intonation, ends – through partway beginning to incorporate electronica – in quite another mood, and place. [He is sure some relation to director Justin Kurzel, being credited with scoring his Snowtown (2011) (amongst others) ?]).

Initially, battle-scenes in Macbeth (2015) reminded of Mel Gibson as Wallace, but much more like the immersive visuals at @N_T_S Culloden ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2015

On all of these levels, then, Macbeth (2015) both is and mimetically embodies a journey into night, and it slips further and further into it, whereas Shakespeare’s protagonist will have it that sleep has become elusive to his ambitious quest :

Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'

Act II, Scene II, 40–42

Except that, in fact, what distinction is there between whatever ‘reality’ is and the distracted snatches of the world that come to us as part of and, to some significant extent, filtered through the medium of Macbeth’s mind, mood, and soul ? (Which makes the screenplay, and its approach to the text itself, quite sympathetic (as, with some musical instruments, ‘sympathetic strings’ are), in wanting to make interpolations and transpositions within it.) Nonetheless, the direction may have strayed, by trying too hard to give us a visible basis for others’ opinion, such as reported here (as well as co-opted from Macbeth’s attempts at self-diagnosis), in the form of montage ? :

Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies.
Some say he's mad ; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury

Act V, Scene II, 12–14

With some material, such as the case of merely truncating the interchange between Ross and Macduff (at the end of Act IV) to concentrate on one principal topic, the screenwriters give us Macbeth pretty straight ; with other parts, they bend them very much more to their will, and for a broad variety of purposes, such as :

* In the opening (crimson) captions, as well as explicating the origins and significance of - and forces behind - the conflict that we see, even naming a battle (that of Ellon)

* To clarify how it is that Macbeth becomes / expects to become king (which, it is arguable, is not the strongest element in the idea of eliminating Duncan / committing regicide)

* In doing so, and almost certainly on no naturalistic level (but rather on that of will (again***)), characterizing Malcolm’s impulse to flee – which is exemplified in the text, and at its peak, at the moment when Macbeth puts the witches under obligation****

* To expand Lady Macbeth’s familiar scene with the doctor into the general theme of sleep-walking into the future (which not a few ages have liked as an idiom), and thereby dis-locate time and space****

* In a linked way, to widen the scope and role of the witches so that they permeate the totality : in their two-handed Macbeth (in the building in Cambridge that is known as The Leper Chapel), Richard Spaul and Bella Stewart of in:situ made enchantment and being bewitched central to the production

Is there danger in the fog of intense screenings at Cannes, and could @FilmDivider's review have gestated longer ? : http://t.co/rJFwZwUab8

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 4, 2015

End-notes

* Quoting the title of the essay by L. C. Knights, ’How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth ? : An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism’ (Explorations, New York University Press, 1964, 15-54).

** It would be so useful to pause the credits (during which so many others, blocking the screen and chattering, leave), because there are also ones for improvisation...

*** Endlessly shown in train, in literature and religious writing (which, from Paddy Considine’s Banquo, one feels that he well knows), from the Cabbalistic tradition of The Golem, and the creation of Adam, to that of Svengali and Trilby (in Trilby), or Frankenstein.

Macbeth (2015) is at its / his most interesting when seen through the prism of Banquo's life - which he then seeks to break, and splinter...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2015

**** We do not directly, audibly witness these words in the film, but perhaps we already know that Macbeth demands information (openly calling it a form of conjuration), even at the cost of chaos – which is what the film, by other means, has us see, sense, and feel :

I conjure you, by that which you profess,
Howe'er you come to know it, answer me :
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches ; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up ;
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down ;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads ;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations ; though the treasure
Of Nature's germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you.
Act IV, Scene I, 50–61


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Only God forgives – so you’re dog-meat !

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3 August

* Contains spoilers *

I can't honestly recommend Only God Forgives, because that would be morally and socially reprehensible, but I may see it again. #justsaying
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I doubt that one can look for morality in this tale of Only God Forgives (2013), no more so, say, than in Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore – not to say that there are not motivations, codes of behaviour, because there are, and it is their inconsistency with each other that leads to conflict, death, slaughter.

Slaughter is the word for it, in its purest sense – despatching a beast with some ceremonial, even if not with the supposed aim of the abattoir to be humane about what is done in the service of butchery. In others’ responses, I detect an air of if not revulsion, then distaste, in wanting to relish this film, not so much as if it were a guilty pleasure as if it were immoral to say that one had watched it – might or would watch it again…

@MissSueFlay Outstanding, but be warned that it's deeply strange and even more violent than Drive. It's a very guilty pleasure.
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I am unsure about whether that is right, whether there is a moral issue, and find myself wondering whether director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), which has more propulsion from Ryan Gosling than here (where he plays Julian), is so far away : are we rooting for Gosling’s character Driver because he seems ‘selflessly’ to be risking his own well-being, life, future to protect Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her family, whom he comes to know and then she turns out to have a soon-to-be ex-convict husband ? That excuses the violence, the brutality that, bidden, seem to erupt from Driver, because it is in the knight’s service of a lady ?

We really know little about Driver’s inner life, however he has existed with his underpaid garage job and bare dwellings, because he seems to have no needs other than looking at and knowing Los Angeles and using that in the thrill of his night job – of course, we approve of him, because our film head allows us to reckon that the burglaries / robberies are of a faceless kind where there is no real victim, or, if there is a victim, then Driver is only the driver, and we want him to do what his name says, and get away.

And morality ? Is it really any more present in Drive than in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), for, in a world where X is killing Y because of – or to avoid – the death of Z, we stand back, willing The Bride (Uma Thurman) on since she seems more sinned against than sinning. Whatever the history of revenge may be, and whether we choose to trace it back to Aeschylus or to Cain and Abel, the phrase an eye for an eye (and a tooth for a tooth is part of our culture :

Which is where we come to this film’s portentous-sounding title, which has the ring of being a Biblical / Shakespearean / classical text, but without identifiably* being one : do we watch the film, bearing in mind that there seems no evidence that anyone facing, as the case might be, severance, immolation or decapitation (a sort of one-armed bandit of death, if the ‘right’ line of three comes up), appears to be preparing to meet any sort of maker ? If we do, then I think that the issue of immorality disappears – no one here is seeking any sort of forgiveness, only a craven avoidance of death or other penalty.

But not quite everyone : when requested, the man who aided the failed ambush on the police in the eating-place / bar goes into a corner in the shadows and writes his excuse, which is read by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), and then handed to one of his officers. We have no more notion than that of what the man has to say for himself, and there is then a moment of uncertainty until Chang acts – when he does so, the story moves on, and we do not know what effect, if any, ‘the excuse’ had… Except that, in this respect, the film is explicit about crime and punishment, so can we suppose that he received clemency (of some sort) ?

If by immorality it is not the downward spiral of retribution to which people object (which haunts A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as fully as it does the graphic bloodiness of Titus Andronicus, to which, to King Lear, and to the Sophoclean Theban trilogy of plays concerning Oedipus there is more than a shallow nod), but the tribal, self-appointed justice of the police through the offices of Chang, then I am at a loss to follow the argument or experience the feeling.

The echoes that I have mentioned are there, and I shall explore them at greater length in a separate posting, but musically, in tone, in plot, and in modes that essentially consist of stasis (fixed poses, unblinking gazes, etc.), slow motion (for example, slowly receding down or proceeding along corridors, as if of a maze) and sudden activity (Julian chasing Chang, Chang enacting vengeance, or Chang chasing the man whom he gives a Bob-and-Vic-type treatment) I was hugely put in mind of Enter the Void (2009).

As to music, I found it as unsubtle, because I was fully aware, say, that the only tension in the scene where Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) seems – if the scene happens in reality, not imagination – to be masturbating in from of Julian after tying his arms to a chair came from the chordal disharmony, which I mentally stripped away, and the visuals were devoid of it. Since, in these terms, the soundtrack was too much on the surface, too obvious, I could not help detaching it at other times, such as the early appearance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal, Julian’s mother, and a moment that, better done, could have been laden with the significance that was sought. With Void, I could likewise not help being aware that the cinematic effect was largely created by an attempt to manipulate the viewer and create sensation that was lacking from the screen itself.

My recollection is of an over-indulgent sense of stasis in that film, connected largely with the use of drugs – as here, drug-induced crime leads to dislocation, mayhem, revenge, and I cannot claim, ever since Robert de Niro was shown stoned in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to have found those under the influence a source of fascination, whether going ‘to meet the devil’ as Billy (Tom Burke) does, or sitting staring on a sofa. If either film sees itself as a meditation on death or the truths of life, it falls far short for me :

Void felt pretentious, and Only God feels too much like a mash-up to be more than pastiche, whether referencing (slightly) The Matrix (1999) and the film-world that influenced The Wachowskis in making it, or William Shakespeare’s bloodier moments, as well as the softer ones that we see in Julian, both in would-be revenger Hamlet, or in Macbeth, needing Lady Macbeth (equals Crystal ?) to stir him to the pitch where he can murder Duncan.

I believe that Only God is a step or two in the wrong direction from the impact of Drive, which impelled the viewer – this viewer found more in the naivety and yet, with it, un-guessed-at ferocity of Driver than in the sub-Freudian musings behind portraying Billy, Julian, Mai and Crystal.

Our film-maker may believe that he is using reflectiveness and moments of quiet to speak to us, but the techniques are so evident that, unless he intends an alienation to make us step back from the detail of the action and view it as a sort of ballet, as a sort of death-laden dance in the spirit of Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), he simply fires up our critical faculties to unpick what plot there is and whether it hangs together. In that respect, a response very like that to Holy Motors (2012).


More to come


End-notes

* The Internet / Google does not help much here with a search, because it is laden with references to the film, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does.


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Shakespeare in a Tweet

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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4 June

Yes, cousin Marmaduke and I have had to leave out a few things in our attempts to give you a play in no more than 140 characters, and maybe the wrong ones.

See what you think with my most recent one (from Twitter® - Marmaduke's there, too):

Two men mistrust the wrong offspring, and the others take power: one man goes mad, one's blinded. Both are healed and reunited before death.


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Fiennes as Coriolanus - a touch of Anthony Hopkins?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 February

* Contains spoilers *

I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.

Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.

As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.

And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)

As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.

All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').

As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.

Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).

So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.

Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.

They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.


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