Patrick Stewart's Macbeth
Dec. 13th, 2010 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI watched Patrick Stewart's Macbeth last night. It's an opened up version of a lauded stage production- and full of the kind of expressionist touches that work very well on stage, but not so well on film. The world of the production is a bewildering hotch-potch of times and places and cultures. The characters wear Stalinist uniforms and 1940s evening dress; the Macbeths live in an English country house with a Hitlerian bunker, hang out mainly in the kitchen and serve the meals themselves like a modern power couple; Lady MacDuff and her children are murdered in a tiled space that is clearly labelled Ladies Changing Room; the witches are military nurses who use bits of their deceased patients in their spells; the weaponry is modern, but Malcolm leads his army from the front like a medieval warlord. It's a very clever production- and would have been a better movie if three quarters of the clever stuff had been cut.
Stewart is magnificent. I thought he might be a little too old for the role, but he must be the buffest, most vigorous seventy year old on the planet. He has the menace, he has the bluff manly charm, he has the inner panic. It's a genuinely illuminating performance. This, you come away thinking, is what dictators are like; this is what Stalin was like, this is what Mao was like. Susan Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is haunted and haunting.
Unlike every other Shakespeare play of this stature Macbeth is short on great acting roles; the thane and his wife move among shadows. That said, the supporting cast is terrific- and Michael Feast turns that old ram-rod MacDuff into a proper human being. The scene in which he receives the news of his family's death- and gulps silently for breath and composure- is joltingly painful.
Stewart is magnificent. I thought he might be a little too old for the role, but he must be the buffest, most vigorous seventy year old on the planet. He has the menace, he has the bluff manly charm, he has the inner panic. It's a genuinely illuminating performance. This, you come away thinking, is what dictators are like; this is what Stalin was like, this is what Mao was like. Susan Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is haunted and haunting.
Unlike every other Shakespeare play of this stature Macbeth is short on great acting roles; the thane and his wife move among shadows. That said, the supporting cast is terrific- and Michael Feast turns that old ram-rod MacDuff into a proper human being. The scene in which he receives the news of his family's death- and gulps silently for breath and composure- is joltingly painful.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 06:24 pm (UTC)Exactly.
This is why there are so very few really good filmed versions of Shakespeare.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 06:37 pm (UTC)Which ones do you think work? Off the top of my head I seem to think first of Prospero's Books and Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995), both of which succeed in part by not aiming for the usual realism—the Greenaway is a deconstruction-retelling, McKellen's an alternate history. My favorite Hamlet may still be Kozintsev's, in Russian.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 07:14 pm (UTC)Welles' Chimes at Midnight is a masterpiece- and contains the best medieval battle scene in the movies ever.
I'm fond of Olivier's Hamlet- a skewed but intelligent version of the play- with loads of atmosphere.
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is magnificent, but I'm not sure if it counts.
Finally I'm really rather partial to Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night- largely because Nunn has this gift of making Shakespearian verse sound like real conversation.
I haven't seen Prospero's Books. Mckellen's Richard III didn't do it for me- though I thought the way the opening speech modulated from public oratory to private monologue was brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 07:54 pm (UTC)I have never seen it. So noted.
Finally I'm really rather partial to Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night- largely because Nunn has this gift of making Shakespearian verse sound like real conversation.
I forgot about that one! Yes. Also beautiful painterly cinematography, which I would not necessarily have guessed Nunn had the eye for.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:07 pm (UTC)It's extraordinary how Welles is at once so very famous and so badly neglected. If Chimes at Midnight and the Trial and F for Fake were more widely available people might stop wittering about how he lost his way after Citizen Kane.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:12 pm (UTC)Criterion, this year, released F for Fake. I've never been able to get hold of The Trial, although I've been curious about it for years.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:29 pm (UTC)The Trial is a strange film- very far from my idea of Kafka, but fascinating nonetheless- with a great, nervy, lead performance from Tony Perkins.