Fassbender macbeth
Though Lady Macbeth's nationality is never mentioned in the original play, it is presumed that she is Scottish. For the film, Marion Cotillard kept her French accent. Producer Iain Canning explained that her casting added another layer to the film. "It has allowed us, at the center of this story, to place a character who has an otherness, there's a slight sense of separation now, in Lady Macbeth, that she exists in the community but somehow has a slightly different agenda to the other women in that community. It adds complexity to the Lady Macbeth role", he said. Scotland had many French Consorts, so it would have been plausible for Lady Macbeth to be French.
fassbender macbeth
fassbender macbeth
In Act 4 of Macbeth, the witches show the play’s tragic hero a vision: Eight kings march by in succession, the last bearing a mirror in which are reflected many more future monarchs—all of them the descendants, not of King and Queen Macbeth, but of Banquo, the former best friend Macbeth has just paid assassins to take out. In undertaking his cinematic adaptation of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, the Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel must have felt a similarly eerie sensation of infinite regress. However successful or unsuccessful Kurzel’s version may be on its own terms, by making it he inserts himself into a performance history stretching back more than 400 years and forward into the indefinite future—as long, one would hope, as there are enough humans or artificially intelligent singularities left to put on a show. To believe one has something to contribute to that history calls for a healthy dose of chutzpah, but to actually carry it off, humility is also required. A good adaptation of Macbeth—and Kurzel’s is a very good one—must acknowledge the limits of any one interpreter’s authority over that great, ungovernable text, a work of art as compact and unassailable as a chunk of rock.It’s been called the most cinematic of Shakespeare’s plays, on clear empirical grounds as well as more nebulous aesthetic ones. First of all, Macbeth is short—around 2,477 lines, the briefest by far of the tragedies, with a running time of just over two hours in most stage productions. (By contrast, Shakespeare’s longest play, the 4,000-plus-line Hamlet, clocks in at around four hours.) The Scottish play’s dramatic action is also unusually streamlined, with no romantic subplots or lesser court intrigues to detract from the central regicide-turned-ghost-story. With the exception of one long monologue by the witch-queen Hecate that’s generally accepted to be a non-Shakespearean addition, virtually every line in the play serves to further the central story: that of an ambitious Scottish thane who, egged on by his still more merciless wife, murders first the benevolent King Duncan and then, as the play goes on, every man, woman, and child he perceives as a threat to his ongoing claim to the crown.Thanks to that concision, Macbeth lends itself to treatment as a straight-ahead action movie. There’s no Hamlet-like dilly-dallying over ontological riddles, no Othellian agonies over the symbolic significance of a missing handkerchief. From the opening lines, in which the three witches arrange their fateful meeting with Macbeth, every scene is subtended by a sense of imminent danger, with the possibility of violent death facing even the most blameless character. The body count starts high—before the audience has even laid eyes on him, the valiant warrior Macbeth is described as hacking his way across a battlefield to “unseam” a foe “from the nave to the chops”—and only gets higher. And the climactic battle—during which, true to the witches’ seemingly fantastical prophecy, the forest of Birnam Wood seems to uproot itself and march like a vegetal army on the castle of Dunsinane—offers an opportunity for the kind of grand-scale spectacle that requires magic or tricks onstage but is cinema’s stock in trade.Kurzel’s interpretation, set in a credibly bleak medieval Scotland, understands and exploits the work’s action-movie potential. Rather than having an eyewitness recount the “unseaming” described above, Kurzel shows it in super-slow motion. But the battle that earns the thane his first promotion has none of the eroticized glamor of slo-mo-happy sword-and-sandal fantasies like 300. Instead, Kurzel gives us mud and blood and horrible deaths, including that of a teenage boy who seems to be a special favorite of Macbeth’s, perhaps a reminder of his younger self. That boy will reappear as a ghost throughout the film; Fassbender delivers the “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” soliloquy directly to him, giving the words a very different tenor than when they’re addressed to an invisible floating knife.But it isn’t only the fierce, warlike elements of Macbeth that this adaptation gets right. The play’s emotional center is the relationship between Macbeth and his lady, a toxic compound of love, ambition, shared guilt and mutual rationalization. As her lord steadily loses his marbles, Cotillard’s Lady Macbeth continues to deal with the still-fresh trauma of the king’s murder by frantically dissembling her own anxiety. Only a few scenes after assuring the distraught Macbeth that “a little water clears us of this deed,” she’s admitting that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” A couple of acts later, her husband will react to the news of her death with a blankness (“She should have died hereafter”) that is sometimes interpreted as indifference but has always seemed to me like the initial denial phase of grief. The famous speech that follows—“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”—is addressed, in this version, directly to Lady Macbeth’s corpse, a dramatic choice that risks bathos but, by grace of Fassbender’s rigorously unhammy performance, just skirts it.Macbeth and Lady Macbeth may well be the most intimately connected couple in all of Shakespeare. They’re a pair of self-serving murderers damned to burn in hell, sure, but they see one another’s strengths and weaknesses with rare clarity; in their own sick way, they’re made for each other. Cotillard and Fassbender convey the Macbeths’ perverse complicity as well as their nihilistic, almost punk-rock embrace of their own cruel acts. “Returning were as tedious as go o’er,” sighs Macbeth, contemplating yet another expedient slaughter of innocents; in other words, the two of them are now in so deep they might as well wade the rest of the way across the bloody stream.
What can a filmed version of Macbeth do that a theatrically staged one can’t? What specifically cinematic possibilities does this text open up for any filmmaker courageous and foolish enough to take it on? In trying to assess Kurzel’s approach, I found myself first re-reading the play, then watching earlier adaptations to understand how other directors had approached it. I excluded Macbeths that were filmed records of theatrical productions, like Trevor Nunn’s highly regarded 1979 A Performance of Macbeth (starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench)orRupert Goold’s2010 film of Patrick Stewart’s Tony-nominated Broadway performance. Also left unconsidered were adaptations so loose they left behind Shakespeare’s language entirely (with the exception of Throne of Blood, a movie too great to leave out of any Macbeth-on-film discussion.) Before deciding whether or not this new version was successful, I wanted to form a conception of what a successful on-screen Macbeth might look like, and to understand why this particular play has proved so perennially alluring to ambitious directors.* * *
For nearly as long as there have been motion pictures, there have been adaptations of Macbeth. The one-minute-long Duel Scene from Macbeth was photographed in 1905 by cinema pioneer G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, who would go on to be D.W. Griffith’s longtime director of photography. It’s a simple vision of the tragic hero as arrogant, kilt-clad swashbuckler; a flimsy excuse for a swordfight, really, lent a dash of highbrow legitimacy by its association with the theatrical tradition. D.W. Griffith would himself oversee the production of a feature-length Macbeth in 1916, with a crew full of figures destined to become titans in the burgeoning industry: Erich von Stroheim, John Emerson, Victor Fleming. Like about 75 percent of all films made during the silent era, this adaptation is now considered lost, though some production stills survive. But the lore of its making says a lot about the state of theatrical adaptation in cinema’s early days. The lead was played by the marvelously named Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, an English stage actor known for playing Shakespearean roles with the mannered bombast common to Victorian productions. Unclear on the concept of silent film’s dependence on gesture and pantomime, Tree continued to hold forth with long speeches from the play. According to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, the crew sometimes took the film out of the camera and continued to crank as Tree discoursed, so as not to waste precious feet of celluloid.In 1948, Orson Welles—having been fired from RKO studios for his tendency to ignore both budgets and schedules—managed to cadge a modest sum from the B-movie outfit Republic Pictures to shoot his own version of Macbeth. His vision for this new adaptation was to emphasize the play’s elements of gothic horror; he pitched it to Republic executives as “a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein.”Many of the directorial choices Welles made were the result of the severe financial constraints he was working under. The film was shot in 23 days on sets normally used for Westerns, with only one day left for retakes at the end. Large portions of the dialogue were pre-recorded, with the actors lip-syncing their own lines on set. Welles delivered the movie on time and on budget, and though it was roundly drubbed by most critics, it eventually turned a small profit for the company (after Republic cut out 20 minutes and re-recorded some actors’ parts with a pared-down Scottish burr). But Macbeth was nowhere near successful enough to convince anyone to finance another Shakespeare movie, let alone with Welles. He would put the bard on screen one more time, in the 1965 masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, which combined scenes from five different plays into a character portrait of Falstaff, embodied by Welles in perhaps his greatest acting performance.Decades later the starkly shadowed lighting and choppy editing of his Macbeth read not as cost-cutting maneuvers but as artistic statements. Welles’ Macbeth is sometimes compared by enthusiasts to the work of Russian modernists like Sergei Eisenstein; it’s rough-hewn and expressionistic, full of jarring juxtapositions and heavily symbolic imagery. Macbeth is undoubtedly a lesser entry in the Welles catalog, but it’s a peculiarly memorable film, and one of the first examples of a filmed Shakespeare adaptation bearing a distinct authorial stamp. (Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, released that same year to far greater acclaim and box-office success, is now remembered mostly as a record of the performance of its director and star, whose then-lauded Shakespearean declamation now feels fussy and dated, closer to Herbert Beerbohm Tree than to a satisfying contemporary performance.)How does each of these Macbeths approach the play’s most famous showcase scene, the Act 3 banquet? The choice of how to film the moment when Banquo’s still-bloody ghost appears to Macbeth, causing him to break down in front of his guests as his wife scrambles to cover for his suddenly bizarre behavior, serves as a test case for the larger dilemmas the play—filled as it is with visions and fantasies,—poses to film directors: How much of what the characters see will we see? How will the camera communicate at once the vision’s intense reality to the person experiencing it and its invisibility to others on screen?In Welles’ Macbeth, the banquet scene has a nightmarishly intimate quality. There’s little emphasis on the social awkwardness created by the king’s inexplicable outburst—a key element of the scene in most stage productions, where the other actors, standing there in plain sight, need something to do. Because of Welles’ love for close-ups (and the production’s budget limitations), what we see is mainly Macbeth’s face as he stares in horror at the bloody vision. Asthe camera pans along his trembling finger, pointing at the place where the silent ghost stands, the rest of the guests vanish. For a moment, the only people present are Macbeth and Banquo, the no-longer-living proof of his foul deed. Akira Kurosawa sets the most beautiful of all movie Macbeths, 1957’s Throne of Blood, in feudal Japan, reimagining the battling thanes as samurai warriors and the witches as forest spirits. Throne of Blood is at once faithfully Shakespearean and deeply Japanese, touching on every one of the play’s key themes while incorporating performance elements from Noh drama. Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s gruff-voiced muse, brings a fierce athleticism to the role of Macbeth (here named Lord Washizu.) His death scene—instead of being killed in a swordfight and then beheaded, the usurper is impaled through the neck with an arrow—is at once a prodigious feat of acting, of editing, and of archery. Kurosawa insisted Mifune be shot at with real arrows aimed by expert marksmen, in part so that his expression of terror wouldn’t be feigned.Kurosawa’s handling of the banquet scene in Throne of Blood is an example of the power of cinematic restraint. Rather than hasten to pile on the horrific visions, the director emphasizes the empty place set for the king’s absent friend. (In keeping with the film’s minimalism, the royal feast here appears to consist of nothing but a bowl of rice.) After several cuts from Washizu’s increasingly anxious face to the unoccupied seat, the camera pulls back to show Banquo (here named Miki) sitting there quietly, unadorned by the “gory locks” Shakespeare describes. The disequilibrium between what Washizu sees and the intensity of his reaction is the whole point. Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth was the first new project the director undertook after his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult in 1969. The screenplay, co-written with the English theater critic Kenneth Tynan, eliminates many famous passages while retaining nearly every important dramatic beat. Outside of a few inexplicable lapses in taste—like a misbegotten scene in which Macbeth’s imaginary floating dagger appears to the audience as well, via special effects that suggest a sparkling kitchen implement for sale on QVC—Polanski’s Macbeth is a triumph. Though ostensibly a period piece, this graphically violent adaptation can’t help but evoke not just the Manson murders but the socially chaotic atmosphere of the late ’60s, an impression that’s underlined by Polanski’s choice of two very young, good-looking actors—Jon Finch and Francesca Annis—to play the doomed thane and his lady.The banquet scene in Polanski’s Macbeth is a good illustration of the film’s generally maximalist approach. Over the course of the dinner, Finch’s Macbeth sees not one ghost but several; the first time he appears, Banquo is ashen and corpselike. A few shots later, he spouts blood from a deep gash in his forehead; moments after that, he rises from his seat and lumbers toward a cowering Macbeth with his hands outstretched, his body already in a state of decay. This zombie-movie approach isn’t at all out of keeping with the tenor of Shakespeare’s play, which is, after all, about dead people who refuse to stay dead. The banquet scene in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth splits the difference between Polanski’s full-on horror treatment and Kurosawa’s sparse minimalism. When Fassbender’s Macbeth—who, like Welles’, has clearly downed a few too many goblets of mead before the feast begins—lays eyes on Banquo (Paddy Considine), all the other guests—and at first, the audience—see only an unnamed man standing there, a living guest at the feast. But in a few insert shots, Kurzel shows us how Macbeth has replaced this man’s body with that body of his murdered friend—who, in this vision, isn’t obviously dead, only blackened with the same soot that covered both Macbeth and Banquo in those early battlefield scenes. Banquo gazes at his betrayer not with zombielike menace but with quiet reproach, belying Macbeth’s subsequent claim that “thou hast no speculation in those eyes/ Which thou dost glare with.” The banquet scene is only one obvious place in Macbeth where a film director has a chance to make his or her individual interpretive stamp. (That “her” leaves open the question: When will we get to see one of Shakespeare’s richest female characters in a film adaptation directed by a woman?) There is also endless cinematic potential in, for example, the witch-induced hallucination of that procession of eight kings (which Polanski renders, spectacularly if showily, as a Rosemary’s Baby–style drug trip); the “tomorrow and tomorrow” speech (delivered by Welles in voiceover only, over a minute-long shot of drifting clouds); or the emotionally shattering late scene in which Ross informs Macduff that his entire family, small children and all, has been slaughtered by Macbeth’s henchmen. (Kurzel plays this scene fairly straight stylistically, but in a telling shift of emphasis, has Sean Harris’ Macduff seem to be referring to the absent Macbeth, rather than his insensitive companionMalcolm, when he all but bellows the enigmatic line: “He has no children.”)I’ll leave it to the viewer to discover what other possibilities Kurzel finds in this infinitely malleable text, and to form an opinion of his interpretation. Some may find the director’s penchant for slow-motion battle scenes tiresome and crave the intimacy of a more pared-down rendering of the play. But Kurzel’s twist on the moment when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane is certainly clever, even if I was sort of looking forward to the classic image of an army of trees marching, impossibly, over the horizon. The important thing is to go see the Scottish movie—this version, certainly, but also older adaptations and those still to come. There’s a reason—brevity and directness aside—why Macbeth has attracted moviemakers ever since there were cameras to crank. Like the thane’s “fatal vision,” film has the power to give palpable form to otherwise ineffable aspects of human experience, making the moral corruption of the play’s tragic lead couple as “sensible to feeling as to sight.”Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard star in a dark new adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, directed by the Justin Kurzel. Nicholas Barber takes a look from the Cannes Film Festival.
Superstitious actors like to call Macbeth “the Scottish play”, but Shakespeare’s tragedy of vaulting ambition has never been more Scottish than it is in Justin Kurzel’s startling adaptation. The looming mountains of the Highlands are rarely out of shot, every man in the cast has been issued with a regulation straggly ginger beard, and the actors (with one exception) have almost-perfect Scottish accents. Macbeth himself, Michael Fassbender, has obviously been listening to his X-Men buddy, James McAvoy: close your eyes and you can picture McAvoy speaking every line.
But despite these tartan touches, it’s soon apparent that the film isn’t set in 11th-Century Scotland at all. The reason Kurzel’s Macbeth is so awe-inspiring, but also vaguely unsatisfying, is that it’s actually set in Hell.
Radically cutting down and revising Shakeseare’s text, Kurzel and his co-writers open with a stark, wordless scene of Macbeth and his wife (Marion Cotillard) on a bleak hillside, lighting a funeral pyre for their baby. Minutes later, the battle in which Macbeth proves his worth to King Duncan (David Thewlis) is hardly a display of chivalric valour and charismatic leadership. Macbeth’s woad-smeared troops simply charge at their opponents like beery football hooligans. It’s only Macbeth’s wild-eyed viciousness that wins the day.
Afterwards, we move onto the cheery sight of a dog chewing on a corpse, while Macbeth and his lieutenant, Banquo (Paddy Considine), sleep on the freezing ground. And after that, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth don’t entertain their grateful king in a fine castle, but in a scattering of tents on a moorland. The wind whistles, thunder rumbles, and there is more rolling fog than in a decade’s worth of Hammer horror movies.
Foul is fair
Kurzel, the Australian director of Snowtown, has made a film which is, to quote the witches, bloody, bold and resolute. Obliterating any trace of stage-bound stuffiness, he replaces it with the mud and gore of an anti-war movie and the stylised immediacy of a graphic novel: the slow-motion blood-spurting recalls a previous Fassbender film, 300, except with jagged wounds in place of washboard stomachs. Kurzel does whatever he can do make every scene more nightmarish, whether that means including a procession of zombies (you read that correctly), or giving an inspired, apocalyptic twist to the Birnam Wood prophecy. At times, it seems as if he has shifted the action to a forbidding alien planet: Duncan and the royal court favour Jedi-like dressing gowns, while the witches’ cosmetic facial scarring makes them appear half-Klingon. Speaking of science fiction, Macbeth is the second film I’ve seen at Cannes in which an Australian director has plunged us into a blasted netherworld of feral violence. After Mad Max, we have Mad Mac.
Kurzel’s jaw-dropping vision makes Macbeth the most significant new Shakespeare film since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo Juliet. But as striking as the unremitting darkness may be, it does tend to obscure our view of a doughty general bringing about his own tragic downfall. Fassbender is typically intense, attacking the role with teeth-baring savagery, but his Macbeth is a homicidal maniac right from the beginning, so when he becomes slightly more manic and slightly more homicidal, it’s no great loss. In Kurzel’s grisly purgatory, stabbing your king through the heart seems to be par for the course. As for Lady Macbeth, Cotillard is electrifying, but, with her reptilian glare and her coiled braids suggesting Medusa’s snakes, she doesn’t look as if she’s tasted the milk of human kindness in her life. (It’s also a pity that her accent sometimes struggles all the way north from France to England, but can’t make it across the border to Scotland.)
What’s missing from Kurzel’s audacious drama is the feeling that anyone or anything is changing. There’s no light and shade – well, no light, anyway. Shakespeare’s comic-relief scenes have been excised, and there’s even a coda which promises that the bloodshed is only just getting started. “Lay on, Macduff,” says Macbeth, shortly beforehand. “And damned be him who first says, hold, enough.” He’s wasting his words. In Kurzel’s Scotland, everyone is damned already.
Still, it’s a hell of a film.
★★★★☆
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.mw-parser-output .infobox-subbox{padding:0;border:none;margin:-3px;width:auto;min-width:100%;font-size:100%;clear:none;float:none;background-color:transparent}.mw-parser-output .infobox-3cols-child{margin:auto}.mw-parser-output .infobox .navbar{font-size:100%}body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-header,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-subheader,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-above,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-title,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-image,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-below{text-align:center}Macbeth
Theatrical release posterDirected byJustin KurzelScreenplay by.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul{line-height:inherit;list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol li,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul li{margin-bottom:0}
- Jacob Koskoff
- Michael Lesslie
- Todd Louiso
by William ShakespeareProduced by
- Iain Canning
- Emile Sherman
- Laura Hastings-Smith
- Michael Fassbender
- Marion Cotillard
- Paddy Considine
- Sean Harris
- Jack Reynor
- Elizabeth Debicki
- David Thewlis
companies
- StudioCanal
- Film4
- DMC Film
- Anton Capital Entertainment
- Creative Scotland
- See-Saw Films
- 23 May 2015 (Cannes)
- 2 October 2015 (United Kingdom)
- 18 November 2015 (France)
- United Kingdom[2]
- France[3]
Macbeth is a 2015 epic historical drama film directed by Justin Kurzel and written for the screen by Jacob Koskoff, Todd Louiso and Michael Lesslie, based on William Shakespeare's play of the same name.[6] The film stars Michael Fassbender in the title role and Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, with Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, Jack Reynor, Elizabeth Debicki and David Thewlis in supporting roles. The story follows a Scottish lord's rise to power after receiving a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Like the play it was adapted from, the film dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for its own sake.
Macbeth premiered on 23 May 2015 at the Cannes Film Festival where it was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or.[7][8] The film was theatrically released by StudioCanal on 2 October 2015 in the United Kingdom and on 18 November 2015 in France. It received generally positive reviews from film critics who praised both Fassbender and Cotillard's performances, as well as those of the rest of the cast, visual style, script, direction and war sequences. Despite the positive critical reaction, the film grossed just $16 million worldwide against its production budget of $20 million.
Plot
Act I
The film starts with the Macbeths grieving at their child's funeral. Then, Macbeth leads King Duncan's troops into a civil war battle. He emerges victorious, despite losses, including boy soldiers. Three women with a girl and infant approach Macbeth and Banquo, hailing Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and future King, and Banquo as a father of Kings, before disappearing.
Act II
Duncan hears of Macbeth's victory and executes the Thane of Cawdor for traitorously allying with Norse invaders, giving Macbeth his title. Macbeth tells his wife of the prophecies. Lady Macbeth prays to the dark spirits for guidance. When Macbeth says Duncan will stay overnight, she urges him to kill the King to fulfill the prophecy. A feast is held, where the King pronounces Malcolm his heir. Macbeth hesitates but Lady Macbeth persuades him to kill Duncan while she drugs his servants. After the feast, Macbeth sees a boy soldier's ghost, who gives him a dagger and leads him towards Duncan's tent whom Macbeth slays. Malcolm enters and, seeing the body, flees. Shaken, Macbeth goes to his wife, giving her two daggers. Lady Macbeth rebukes him for not leaving them and puts them in the sleeping servants' hands. She meets Macbeth in the church where they wash their hands, saying they have washed their deed away.
Act III
In the morning, Macduff finds Duncan dead and Macbeth slaughters the servants to prevent their denial. Macduff and noble Lennox believe Malcolm's flight is suspicious and admire Macbeth's summary justice. With Malcolm gone, Macbeth is crowned. Afterwards, he sourly complains to his wife that killing Duncan was for nothing as Macbeth has no heirs, so the crown will pass to Banquo and his son, Fleance, as prophesied. He invites them to a banquet but discovers they plan to leave, as Banquo is suspicious. Macbeth sends assassins: Banquo is killed, but Fleance escapes. During the evening, Macbeth mentions Banquo not attending as promised. Macbeth asks the assassins for news and is enraged that Fleance has escaped. Then, Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost. Afraid, he talks to it. Lady Macbeth says her husband is unwell, but Macbeth continues to rave, prompting Macduff and his wife to leave. Lady Macbeth dismisses the guests and takes Macbeth away.
Act IV
Macbeth talks to the witches. They show him a vision of slain soldiers who tell him to beware Macduff, and that Macbeth shall be King until Great Birnam Wood comes to the royal castle at Dunsinane Hill. The boy soldier's ghost who gave him the dagger tells Macbeth that he will not be slain by man born of a woman. The King is found wandering by Lennox who tells him that Macduff has fled. Anxious and enraged, Macbeth orders the death of Macduff's family and servants. The family are burned at the stake, while a distraught Lady Macbeth watches. Afterwards, she washes the dagger. Meanwhile, Macduff meets Malcolm, who is gathering troops. Ross and Angus inform Macduff about his household's murder. Grief-stricken and angry, Macduff swears revenge.
Act V
Guilt-ridden, Lady Macbeth returns to the church, lamenting their deeds and her bloody hands (in a soliloquy often referred to as "Out damned spot!"). She sees her child's ghost, which she urges to sleep. Then she wanders in the hills and sees the witches.
In the castle, Macbeth is rumoured mad, and all fear his anger and tyranny. He is told of his wife's death. Speaking the famous soliloquy, starting "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" (also known by the lines in it beginning "Out, out, brief candle!"), he carries her body in despair. Seyton brings news Malcolm is leading an army and Macbeth demands his armour.
Macduff fires Birnam Wood: with smoke blowing towards them, the prophecy is fulfilled. Macbeth sallies out and duels with Macduff. Macbeth is confident, as "no man born of woman" can kill him, and he defeats MacDuff, a dagger at his throat. Macduff states he was untimely ripped from his mother's womb and MacBeth drops his dagger, saying he won't fight (the prophecy). Macbeth regrets his mistakes, knowing redemption is impossible. Macbeth refuses to bow before Malcolm, allowing himself to be killed. The witches, observing, leave. Malcolm is hailed King and all go to his castle. Malcolm leaves the throne room while Fleance takes Macbeth's sword and charges through the empty battlefield, disappearing into the smoke.
Cast
.mw-parser-output .div-col{margin-top:0.3em;column-width:30em}.mw-parser-output .div-col-small{font-size:90%}.mw-parser-output .div-col-rules{column-rule:1px solid #aaa}.mw-parser-output .div-col dl,.mw-parser-output .div-col ol,.mw-parser-output .div-col ul{margin-top:0}.mw-parser-output .div-col li,.mw-parser-output .div-col dd{page-break-inside:avoid;break-inside:avoid-column}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul{line-height:inherit;list-style:none;margin:0}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol li,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul li{margin-bottom:0}- Michael Fassbender as Macbeth
- Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth
- Paddy Considine as Banquo
- Sean Harris as Macduff
- Jack Reynor as Malcolm
- Elizabeth Debicki as Lady Macduff
- David Thewlis as King Duncan
- David Hayman as Lennox
- Maurice Roëves as Menteith
- Brian Nickels as Thane of Cawdor
- Ross Anderson as Rosse
- James Harkness as Angus
- Seylan Mhairi Baxter, Lynn Kennedy, Kayla Fallon and Amber Rissmann as the Witches
- Lochlann Harris as Fleance
- Hilton McRae as Macdonwald
- Scott Dymond as Seyton
- Rebecca Benson as Maidservant
- Gerard Miller as Macbeth's messenger
- Roy Sampson as Doctor
Production
The production company behind Macbeth is See-Saw Films; the film was distributed by StudioCanal worldwide.
Filming
Principal photography took place over seven weeks in England and Scotland,[9] beginning on 6 February 2014 in Scotland.[10] On 21 February, filming took place at Hankley Common in Elstead, Surrey.[11] On 26 February, the cast and crew were spotted on set at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland with almost 200 extras.[12] Other locations used include Quiraing in Skye, and Ely Cathedral in Ely, Cambridgeshire.[13][14][15]
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Bamburgh Castle.
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Quiraing.
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Interior of Ely Cathedral.
Costumes
Costume designer Jacqueline Durran was in charge of the costumes for the film.[16] Durran took reference from a book called the Tilke, which is a sort of encyclopaedia of folk costume, compiled and illustrated in the 1920s by a German artist and ethnographer, Max Tilke.[16]
Marketing
A couple of photos from the film were revealed on 18 April 2014,[17] followed by two teaser posters on 14 May.[18] The first trailer was released by StudioCanal on 4 June 2015 and crossed over 2 million views.[19]
Character posters featuring Fassbender and Cotillard were released on 27 August 2015.[20] The first North American trailer was released by The Weinstein Company on 1 September 2015.[21] A new pair of posters were released on 4 September 2015.[22] In the Philippines, the film was marketed as Macbeth: Warrior King.[23]
Release
Director and stars promoting the film at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
In October 2013, The Weinstein Company acquired distribution rights to the film.[24] Macbeth premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival on 23 May 2015 and was released in the United Kingdom on 2 October 2015 and in France on 18 November.[25] The film had a limited release in the United States across five theatres in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on 4 December 2015, before expanding theatres on 11 December.[26] The film was released in the Philippines by Pioneer Films on 13 January 2016.[27]
Critical reception
Macbeth has received positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 80% based on 198 reviews, with an average rating of 7.24/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Faithful to the source material without sacrificing its own cinematic flair, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth rises on the strength of a mesmerizing Michael Fassbender performance to join the upper echelon of big-screen Shakespeare adaptations."[28] Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 71 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[29]
Writing for The New York Times on 3 December 2015, Manohla Dargis complimented Fassbender's depiction of the lead role, stating:
.mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}Kenneth Tynan once wrote that 'nobody has ever succeeded as Macbeth' because the character shrinks from a complex figure into a cowering thug. The exception, Tynan continued, immediately contradicting his claim, was Laurence Olivier, who in a 1955 production 'shook hands with greatness.' With his Macbeth, Mr. Fassbender, who routinely shakes hands with greatness in films that don't remotely do the same, produces a man whose anguish eventually becomes a powerful counterpoint to his deeds, partly because he's already dead by the time he utters his first word. Mr. Fassbender gives you a reason to see this Macbeth, although the writing isn't bad, either.[30]
Cotillard's performance also earned high praise from critics, particularly for her rendition of the famous "Out, Damned Spot" monologue. Guy Lodge from Variety stated that "Cotillard electrically conveys misdirected sexual magnetism, but also a poignantly defeated sense of decency", and noted that it was a performance that "contains both the woman's abandoned self and her worst-case incarnation, often in the space of a single scene," and remarked that "Her deathless sleepwalking scene, staged in minimalist fashion under a gauze of snowflakes in a bare chapel, is played with tender, desolate exhaustion; it deserves to be viewed as near-definitive."[31]
Luke Buckmaster of The Daily Review rated the film four out of five stars, calling it "bold" and "fearless" and praising the production values as well as Fassbender and Cotillard's performances, but criticised the actors' poor enunciation or peculiar accents, which distracted from the film's other qualities.[32]
Accolades
Award Category Recipient(s) Result .mw-parser-output .tooltip-dotted{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}Ref. British Independent Film Awards Best British Independent Film Nominated [33] Best Director Justin Kurzel Nominated Best Actor Michael Fassbender Nominated Best Actress Marion Cotillard Nominated Best Supporting Actor Sean Harris Nominated Best Cinematography Adam Arkapaw Nominated Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or Justin Kurzel Nominated [34] Empire Awards Best British Film Nominated [35][36] Best Actor Michael Fassbender Nominated Goya Awards Best European Film Justin Kurzel Nominated [37] Satellite Award Best Art Direction and Production Design Fiona Crombie Nominated [38] Best Costume Design Jacqueline Durran NominatedReferences
.mw-parser-output .reflist{font-size:90%;margin-bottom:0.5em;list-style-type:decimal}.mw-parser-output .reflist .references{font-size:100%;margin-bottom:0;list-style-type:inherit}.mw-parser-output .reflist-columns-2{column-width:30em}.mw-parser-output .reflist-columns-3{column-width:25em}.mw-parser-output .reflist-columns{margin-top:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .reflist-columns ol{margin-top:0}.mw-parser-output .reflist-columns li{page-break-inside:avoid;break-inside:avoid-column}.mw-parser-output .reflist-upper-alpha{list-style-type:upper-alpha}.mw-parser-output .reflist-upper-roman{list-style-type:upper-roman}.mw-parser-output .reflist-lower-alpha{list-style-type:lower-alpha}.mw-parser-output .reflist-lower-greek{list-style-type:lower-greek}.mw-parser-output .reflist-lower-roman{list-style-type:lower-roman} ^ .mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotesmw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right{padding-right:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflink{font-weight:inherit}"MACBETH (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 1 September 2015. Retrieved 1 September 2015. ^ "Macbeth (2015) | BFI". BFI. Retrieved 3 September 2019. ^ "LUMIERE : Film: Macbeth". Lumiere. Retrieved 3 September 2019. ^ "Justin Kurzel, 'Macbeth'". Screen International. 12 May 2015. Retrieved 7 November 2015. ^ "Macbeth (2015)". Box Office Mojo. Amazon.com. Retrieved 21 December 2016. ^ "Macbeth review: 'Fassbender was born for this'". The Daily Telegraph. 1 October 2015. Retrieved 6 December 2015. ^ "2015 Official Selection". Cannes. Archived from the original on 18 April 2015. Retrieved 16 April 2015. ^ "Screenings Guide". Festival de Cannes. 6 May 2015. Retrieved 8 May 2015. ^ Sandwell, Ian (6 February 2014). "Macbeth starts shoot". screendaily.com. Retrieved 8 February 2014. ^ Hopewell, John (6 February 2014). "Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard Roll on 'Macbeth'". Variety. Retrieved 8 February 2014. ^ Morris, Jennifer (21 February 2014). "Inverness comes to Hankley Common for Macbeth filming". getsurrey.co.uk. Retrieved 23 February 2014. ^ "Hollywood A-lister Michael Fassbender filming in Northumberland". chroniclelive.co.uk. 26 February 2014. Retrieved 16 May 2014. ^ Russell, Michael. "Filming of "Macbeth" begins on Skye". whfp.com. Archived from the original on 19 April 2015. Retrieved 23 February 2014. ^ DAY, JORDAN (17 March 2014). "Setting up for filming of Macbeth at Ely Cathedral gets underway". ely-news.co.uk. Retrieved 16 April 2014. ^ "Ely: Macbeth Filming Underway". heart.co.uk. 20 March 2014. Retrieved 16 April 2014. ^ a b Rachel Lee Harris (16 December 2015). "Michael Fassbender and the Robes of Royalty". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 December 2015. ^ Anderton, Ethan (18 April 2014). "First Look: Michael Fassbender Holds Marion Cotillard in 'Macbeth'". firstshowing.net. Retrieved 18 April 2014. ^ DAVIS, EDWARD (14 May 2014). "First Posters For 'Macbeth' Starring Michael Fassbender Marion Cotillard". indiewire.com. Archived from the original on 16 December 2015. Retrieved 16 May 2014. ^ "Macbeth – Official Teaser Trailer". YouTube. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 10 July 2015. ^ "All Hail Michael Fassbender Marion Cotillard in New Images and Posters From Macbeth". indiewire.com. 27 August 2015. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 1 September 2015. ^ "MACBETH – Official U.S. Trailer". YouTube. 1 September 2015. Retrieved 1 September 2015. ^ "Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard's 'Macbeth' Posters Stun in Black and White and Blood Red". indiewire.com. 4 September 2015. Retrieved 5 September 2015. ^ Unjieng, Philip Cu (25 January 2016). "Shakespeare's masterpiece by another name". The Philippine Star. Retrieved 2 February 2016. ^ Tatiana Siegel (23 October 2013). "The Weinstein Co. Nabs Michael Fassbender Starrer 'Macbeth'". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 7 April 2022. ^ Rosser, Michael (19 May 2015). "'Macbeth' gets awards season release date". Screendaily.com. Retrieved 22 May 2015. ^ "Macbeth (2015) (2015) – Box Office Mojo". boxofficemojo.com. ^ Inquirer Pop (12 January 2016). "Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard in Macbeth – opens January 13". Inquirer Pop. Inquirer Interactive Inc. Retrieved 2 February 2016. ^ "Macbeth (2015)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 21 March 2022. ^ "Macbeth (2015) Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 22 September 2019. ^ Dargis, Manohla (3 December 2015). "Review: 'Macbeth,' Starring Michael Fassbender, Awash in Gorgeous Carnage". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 25 January 2016. ^ Lodge, Guy (23 May 2015). "Cannes Film Review: 'Macbeth'". Variety. Retrieved 26 October 2016. ^ Buckmaster, Luke (2 October 2015). "Macbeth movie review". The Daily Review. Retrieved 26 October 2015. The text is challenging enough without performers mumbling their dialogue or ... coming up with an odd verbal flavour ^ "The Lobster on a roll with seven British independent film awards nominations". The Guardian. 3 November 2015. ^ "Justin Kurzel's 'Macbeth' in the running for the 2015 Cannes Palme d'Or". sbs.com.au. 17 April 2015. ^ Nugent, John. "Jameson Empire Awards 2016: Star Wars and Mad Max lead the nominations". Empire. Retrieved 15 March 2016. ^ Metro.co.uk, Rebecca Lewis for (18 February 2016). "Mad Max: Fury Road leads the pack at the 2016 Jameson Empire Awards". Metro. Retrieved 15 March 2016. ^ "Premios Goya 30 – Los nominados". Academia de Cine. ^ "Satellite Awards (2015)". International Press Academy. IPA. 2 December 2015. pressacademy.com. Retrieved 2 December 2015.External links
- Macbeth at IMDb
- Macbeth at AllMovie
- Macbeth at Box Office Mojo
- Macbeth at Metacritic
- Macbeth at Rotten Tomatoes
- Official screenplay
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- Macbeth (1910, Bloch)
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- Pity (1795)
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