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September 13, 2006

Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth

It would be tedious to begin this review with lofty considerations of Shakespeare—of who the man was; of what modern treatments of his work should be. We were treated to enough of that when op-ed pieces all over our nation opined with Bloomian reverence to defend the Bard from outcomes based education. Nothing was ever really said, except heated calls for the protection of our great canon. I myself am sympathetic to Harold Bloom’s conservatism, but a Year 10 classroom is not the place for it, and I am certainly not sympathetic to journalistic hacks huffing and puffing in Shakespeare’s shadow.
And so to move away from the grandiose, I’ll tell you this—I think Shakespeare’s important because Kenneth Branagh taught me so. It was then that I began to get a feel for Will’s skill with “pathos” and “gravitas” and all those words forlornly shackled to the dramatic arts.
Branagh’s Hamlet was great because Branagh knew Shakespeare, and you, Geoffrey fucking Wright, are no Kenneth Branagh. If we are to accept this basic principle, that Shakespeare’s “big plays” are great, and can still tell us things, then we are saying that Shakespeare must be the centre of a modern treatment—the script writer, editor and advisor. In Wright’s Macbeth, cheap theatrics and a taste for fetish are the unfortunate centre, and Shakespeare seems very far away…

A Humble Litany of Advice Written for Geoffrey Wright in the Hope That He Will Never Make a Film Ever Again:

1. Cast actors who can act and understand Shakespeare. I can not stress this one enough, Geoff. If you are bold enough to adopt Macbeth, then bloody well do it. Allow good actors to inhabit your film, to fill the spaces with the grand and subtle grotesqueries of Shakespeare. Great actors can do this with their eyes; good actors should be able to do it with Will’s words. In this case, bad actors mumble and mutter words they clearly have no idea about. It is obvious. It is rude. It is embarrassing. It is fucking blasphemous.

2. Reliance on a highly contrived aesthetic to divert the audience from the hollowness of it all just won’t do. Ostensibly, this film takes place in modern day Melbourne—in the heart of the city’s gangland milieu. In reality it takes place in Wright’s bawdy, neo-gothic fantasies—all fashion and fetish so that the actors are made to wear clothes resembling the reprehensible wankery of a Milanese catwalk. iPods boom in the background, and De Palma-red soaks everything. The witches are lascivious demons, all pout and curves, and Worthington reduces the teetering Macbeth to Liam Gallagher suffering a methamphetamine nightmare. Swagger, swagger, swagger, suggesting nothing of the major curse he has inflicted upon himself—his own intimacy with his heart of darkness. Ahh, to hell with it. You get the picture. Shakespeare needn’t work within the physically realistic—but, damn it, the press kits promised me gritty verisimilitude of Melbourne’s gangland. I got delirious goth fantasies instead. So what? Well, it accompanied a distorted Shakespeare—like a carbon copy was placed over the First Folio and mistakenly shifted a few inches.

3. An obnoxious score just won’t do either. The strings in this film made me ill, so much so that I wondered if infrasound had been smuggled into the score. Either way, they are an obnoxious distraction, much like the actors, the sets, the costumes, and the lighting. It is all, simply, too much. Too earnest. Too cool. All groin and gore and guns. Yes, Shakespeare was often all that, but then so are the porno vids I keep under the bed. I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that Shakespeare had a little something else, right? but Geoffrey Wright just couldn’t see it. Don’t go see this.

Posted by Marty at September 13, 2006 5:44 PM