Macbeth (2010)

hyped garbage

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Macbeth... a member of the one percent who got it all though his actions as a violent, unrelenting and un-apologetic warrior.... an accomplished killer. However, once he murdered the king and assumed the throne, he discovered that he did not know how to govern. His inability to shoulder the true trappings and responsibilities of power led to his destruction. In light of the threats to today's - July 2017 - governmental horrors.... does this sound familiar????

On the day of his victory on the battlefield, Macbeth is told of his future by three sinister harpies – first as Thane, but then also as King. Sharing these visions with his wife, the two commence immediately to work towards this fate – with villainous murder and deception as the tools they choose to employ.I have seen a few versions of this play now and while this one is not my favorite, it is one with plenty to love. Since the series that holds this film is called 'Great Performances', it does seem natural to start with that element of it and of course the performances are, as the title states, great. Stewart of course is the draw, and he plays his Macbeth really well; he keeps him believable and understandable whether he is being guided by his wife past his doubts and morals, and also when he is soaked in blood and mad with guilt. He would not be as good though were he not matched by a brilliant Lady Macbeth from Kate Fleetwood; she is by far the best I have seen this character played and she is utterly convincing in her manipulation and also in her madness. The support cast features a few faces and names you will know, but even if you do not, all of them are on-message with the tone of the production, and their performances are strong.The tone of the production is very much set by the design of the piece. Shot entirely in Welbeck Abbey, the film does feel a little limited in some ways by the lack of variety in the location, but hard to complain as it brings so much more. Darkness, cold stone, a sense of war, and a genuine sense of creepy dread, all come across here really well. The lighting and framing of shots is equally great and while it is a very dark film visually, it is also one that has a lot of effective style to it. It does seem to run slower than it needed to at times, but it is a strong production, with two really great performances in the leads.

I get the point that other reviewers have made, a lot of Shakespeare's works do work in a modern setting. But to me, it only works if you also update the dialogue. I found the text jarring with the setting, the exact text (as far as I could tell) spoken in an utterly different context. Zero believability. No basis for a suspension of disbelief.If they'd had the sense to update the language a bit and make it fit a 21st century authoritarian regime it might have worked a lot better, at least for me.It also lost the clues in the prophecies that fool Macbeth, that could have been included without difficulty.

The richness of Shakespeare's plays, and the vagueness of their settings, lends them to many adaptations and interpretations. This version of Macbeth, the "Scottish play", doesn't feel particularly Scottish, more Orwellian, and Patrick Stewart plays the central character less as an opportunistic chancer out of his depth, and more as a deranged psychopathic tyrant: if the film resembles any other, it's 'Downfall', the story of the last days of Hitler. As always when watching Shakespeare, one is stunned by the sheer number of brilliant phrasings that have entered general usage from his works. But Macbeth is an odd play dramatically: the main action occurs offstage, the leavening self-referential humour present in 'Hamlet' is here lacking, and there are few appealing characters. In Kenneth Brannagh's version of 'Hamlet', for example, I really enjoyed Derek Jacobi's ambiguous Claudius; but in this story, there is little other than war and death. As a film, it also falls between two stools, as it is shot neither naturalistically, nor with the brilliant invention of Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet'; rather, it feels like a stage play jazzed up with the occasional camera trick. So I'm not sure this is the best of Shakespeare's tragedies, nor that this is my favourite production; but it's certainly intense. Indeed, if this was once popular entertainment, one can only regret the undemanding nature of modern tastes.