Obviously, the headliner here is Patrick Stewart. Goodness knows he's the reason I bothered with this adaptation. And he does fulfill that role, imbuing his role with the gravitas we have all come to expect from him. After all, this is Great Performances—the production must live up to its name.
The other actors do well, too. I particularly liked the performances of, in no particular order: the porter, the doctor (and by extension Duncan, for the few minutes of screen time he gets), Macduff, Ross, and Malcolm. In all of their parts, they clearly applied every measure of training and craft to their moments on screen.
Having grown up in Minneapolis, home of the Guthrie theater, I am no stranger to oddball Shakespeare adaptations. Whether 'tis Polonius being shot through a curtain in a Nazi office or Valentine and his friend Proteus gallivanting about a mock 1950s TV set, transporting Shakespeare's characters into a new time period can breathe new life into their words and make those tired old books we all read in high school fresh again. The Guthrie is pretty well known for its sometimes "out there" production concepts, but they are equally recognized for their shows' vitality. It is an experience to see a Guthrie show.
Well, I could say the same for this production of Macbeth, with different tone of voice. It certainly was an "experience", that confirmed the gut feeling I had in the first five minutes of the film: "This is going to be a slog."
I'm not sure what actually did it. As mentioned, the majority of the actors put in phenomenal performances. Cinematic framing, for the most part, served every purpose and looked great doing it. The script was, word for word, the same as any faithful production, done straight or adapted. So why did I keep checking the time?
One major offender that kept repeating was the way director Rupert Goold set up the witches' scenes. They started out fine enough, when Macbeth first met them, but later descended into herky-jerky fast-motion. Their chants became avant-garde musical remixes, grating on the ear. In an ordinary production, the witches may be creepy, or funny, or however the actors play it, but one thing they are not? Irritating to the viewer. Through his directorial choices, Goold managed to make the witches' scenes downright irritating to watch—and did so in disservice the the overall production.
Another directorial gaffe, in my opinion, was the intercutting of historical footage with the recreated Soviet-era scenery. Things like plopping grainy, monochrome snippets of a locomotive's wheels in between shots of the train's interior were more jarring than effective in conveying the setting. The train and its movement were obvious from several other elements that fit the rest of the production. Less jarring were the intercuttings of Soviet soldiers marching…but that leads me to the main issue that I saw with this adaptation.
The setting was not believable.
A good Shakespeare adaptation, in my experience as a theatre-goer, takes roughly equal parts faithfulness to the original script and willingness to tweak little details in pursuit of creating a compelling world. Understandably, much of the fabric of Macbeth's world is woven from titles: kings, thanes, earls. Adaptations often must recast the titles in Shakespeare's plays to fit a modernized setting, with a wink and a nod to the audience when the dialogue refers to the original name. If done well, you'll never notice. In this case, the recast roles don't feel right. It breeds a disconnect between text and setting that grows wider and wider until the characters become no more than talking heads in a strangely appointed English abbey. (Sidebar: Parts of the abbey remind me of the buildings in Half-Life 2, which were patterned after Soviet-era architecture. So it seems at least the location scouts did their jobs well.)
And it is to the credit of actors like Michael Feast that I cared about what they were going through, even a little, in the face of that disconnect. I'm honestly disappointed that the venue for their great performances was so underwhelmingly conceived. But I suppose the ultimate lesson here is not to assume that anything with Patrick Stewart in it will be good.
Post-posting edit: Holy shit, I spent an hour writing and revising this. What am I doing with my time, writing long reviews of bad movies?
Review by dgwVIP 9BlockedParent2017-10-05T05:55:59Z
Obviously, the headliner here is Patrick Stewart. Goodness knows he's the reason I bothered with this adaptation. And he does fulfill that role, imbuing his role with the gravitas we have all come to expect from him. After all, this is Great Performances—the production must live up to its name.
The other actors do well, too. I particularly liked the performances of, in no particular order: the porter, the doctor (and by extension Duncan, for the few minutes of screen time he gets), Macduff, Ross, and Malcolm. In all of their parts, they clearly applied every measure of training and craft to their moments on screen.
Having grown up in Minneapolis, home of the Guthrie theater, I am no stranger to oddball Shakespeare adaptations. Whether 'tis Polonius being shot through a curtain in a Nazi office or Valentine and his friend Proteus gallivanting about a mock 1950s TV set, transporting Shakespeare's characters into a new time period can breathe new life into their words and make those tired old books we all read in high school fresh again. The Guthrie is pretty well known for its sometimes "out there" production concepts, but they are equally recognized for their shows' vitality. It is an experience to see a Guthrie show.
Well, I could say the same for this production of Macbeth, with different tone of voice. It certainly was an "experience", that confirmed the gut feeling I had in the first five minutes of the film: "This is going to be a slog."
I'm not sure what actually did it. As mentioned, the majority of the actors put in phenomenal performances. Cinematic framing, for the most part, served every purpose and looked great doing it. The script was, word for word, the same as any faithful production, done straight or adapted. So why did I keep checking the time?
One major offender that kept repeating was the way director Rupert Goold set up the witches' scenes. They started out fine enough, when Macbeth first met them, but later descended into herky-jerky fast-motion. Their chants became avant-garde musical remixes, grating on the ear. In an ordinary production, the witches may be creepy, or funny, or however the actors play it, but one thing they are not? Irritating to the viewer. Through his directorial choices, Goold managed to make the witches' scenes downright irritating to watch—and did so in disservice the the overall production.
Another directorial gaffe, in my opinion, was the intercutting of historical footage with the recreated Soviet-era scenery. Things like plopping grainy, monochrome snippets of a locomotive's wheels in between shots of the train's interior were more jarring than effective in conveying the setting. The train and its movement were obvious from several other elements that fit the rest of the production. Less jarring were the intercuttings of Soviet soldiers marching…but that leads me to the main issue that I saw with this adaptation.
The setting was not believable.
A good Shakespeare adaptation, in my experience as a theatre-goer, takes roughly equal parts faithfulness to the original script and willingness to tweak little details in pursuit of creating a compelling world. Understandably, much of the fabric of Macbeth's world is woven from titles: kings, thanes, earls. Adaptations often must recast the titles in Shakespeare's plays to fit a modernized setting, with a wink and a nod to the audience when the dialogue refers to the original name. If done well, you'll never notice. In this case, the recast roles don't feel right. It breeds a disconnect between text and setting that grows wider and wider until the characters become no more than talking heads in a strangely appointed English abbey. (Sidebar: Parts of the abbey remind me of the buildings in Half-Life 2, which were patterned after Soviet-era architecture. So it seems at least the location scouts did their jobs well.)
And it is to the credit of actors like Michael Feast that I cared about what they were going through, even a little, in the face of that disconnect. I'm honestly disappointed that the venue for their great performances was so underwhelmingly conceived. But I suppose the ultimate lesson here is not to assume that anything with Patrick Stewart in it will be good.
Post-posting edit: Holy shit, I spent an hour writing and revising this. What am I doing with my time, writing long reviews of bad movies?