movies: macbeth

I have this really odd connection with Macbeth...

It was one of the Shakespeare plays I studied in Year 11 English (and I think we watched some random film version of it too)... and I've been to see two different stage productions, a random community theatre thing that wasn't bad (although Macbeth did kind of look like he was armoured in a VW)... and a more lavish production at the Festival Theatre starring Jeremy Sims where I had a front row seat...

And I've read Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters (which is incredibly loosely based on Macbeth) and seen the cartoon version...

Which means I know the material... moreso than any other Shakespeare play actually... granted, I couldn't recite chunks of it from memory, but I know how the story goes and who's doing what to whom...

And I'm also very fond of Melbourne...

So take Macbeth, set it in modern day Melbourne with gangsters... and you really can't do much wrong in my books...

Which is exactly what happened with this Geoffrey Wright version... although with around 45 other movies titled Macbeth (according to IMDB.com), you do wonder if the world needs any more.

This version was good though... the tweaks and stretching of the original tale that they had to do to get it to work in the "ganglands of Melbourne" actually worked really well... mostly they just used the very simple trick of having random action without any dialogue for things they wanted to "interpret" that weren't in the original play. And I'm fairly sure they didn't cut that much out of the play... although they did cut one of the lines I remember really well, but it's a silly line, so I can see why they didn't go with it.

And this version of the three witches was quite good... they seemed more like a figment of Macbeth's imagination than real flesh and blood creatures. And slightly psychotic tattooed schoolgirl witches at that...

One thing that I'm not sure worked in the movie's favour or to it's detriment was the fact that I knew almost all of the male actors on sight... that's the problem with some Australian movies... a lot of times they don't go out looking for the new talent, the unknowns... they just use the tried and true actors that you've seen in a million, billion other things... in this case people like Steve Bastoni (who I kind of always associate with Police Rescue), Matt Doran (who was Mouse in The Matrix), Damian Walshe-Howling (from Blue Heelers), Rel Hunt (who showed up on not only Heartbreak High but also Blue Water High) and Gary Sweet, one of the "old men" of Australian teevee, who's seemingly been in everything at one time or another...

And then there were the three actors I automatically associate with being comedians (I don't necessarily think any of them are actually that funny... but comedy is what they do)... Bob Franklin, Mick Molloy and the seemingly uncredited Kym Gyngell...

Not to mention the couple of other actors that I either recognise the name of but can't place the face, or else know the face but can't remember their name (and the whole "no photo" thing on IMDB.com isn't helping either)... and then there's Lachy Hulme who is actually a very good friend of a couple of people I used to know... weird...

The really odd thing though was that while I recognised almost all of the male actors, there wasn't a single one of the female actors that I knew from a bar of soap. I don't know whether the host of recognisable female faces just weren't interested in the movie... or whether it was because the role of Lady Macbeth went to the movie's co-producer, Victoria Hill, the rest of them just didn't want roles... or what... but it just seemed odd to me.

I was also a little disappointed that for a movie that was set in Melbourne, it seemed very light on recognisable bits of the city after the first ten minutes or so. I guess there's not much you can do when the movie is pretty much set all in one castle (or, in this case, private house)... but I did enjoy the couple of bits of Melbourne that I did recognise.

Big snaps go to the costume designer, Jane Johnston, though... not only for Lady Macbeth's gorgeous dresses, but also for putting Macbeth in both a teal and gold suit (it sounds hideous, but was actually very hot) at one point and then a leather kilt for the finale. And also for dressing the sole blonde gangster (Rel Hunt) in white or light colours.

As far as the acting goes, I thought that some of the actors were a little spotty in their line readings... particularly Sam Worthington as Macbeth and the aforementioned Victoria Hill as Lady Macbeth... there were a couple of moments when Macbeth's lines seemed to be delivered too quickly and in too modern a speech pattern... I can't describe it really, it just felt wrong.

That's part of the problem with doing Shakespeare I guess... and especially with doing a modern version of it... not only do people have a wealth of previous performances to judge you against, they also have very strong ideas about how roles should be played and lines should be read.

All in all though, it was very enjoyable... not up to the standard of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but still enjoyable.

yani's rating: 2 tattooed schoolgirl witches out of 5