‘Lady Macbeth’ turns up heat in a cool and vital fashion
Rituals define and often confine our lives. There’s great satisfaction in watching a woman break free from everyone and everything pinning her down, consequences and bloodshed and buried bodies be damned.
“Lady Macbeth” establishes and then disrupts an entire brutal social order. It’s an unusually sharp feature-film debut and a mid-19th-century period piece both cool and vital. The woman at the story’s center, Katherine, is awakened each morning by a servant, Anna, who wordlessly enters her bedroom and throws open the shutters. Outside, the unglamorously seductive Northumberland landscape beckons to this young woman, played with riveting precision by Florence Pugh.
But her grim, loveless marriage is strictly a business arrangement; she came with the land in a financial transaction. Her husband will not touch her; he’s the pathetic son (Paul Hilton) of a dour mine owner (Christopher Fairbank, muttering and seething exquisitely), and Katherine’s life suffers under every possible patriarchal restriction. Then, with the men away, she takes her chance. One of the estate workers, the insolently sexy Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), has apparently read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and the game is on. The sex in “Lady Macbeth” generates real heat and hard-edged tension.
From there, the story goes not in the direction of Shakespeare, to whom this material owes little but its title, but in all sorts of fruitful literary and dramatic directions. Screenwriter Alice Birch has fashioned an adaptation of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” the 19thcentury Nikolai Leskov novel. (The 1934 Dmitri Shostakovich opera is probably the best-known version.) The director of the film is William Oldroyd, like Birch a theatrically trained artist. He films “Lady Macbeth” with a rigorous eye for ritual and confinement; this gives the story, and the movie, somewhere to go, once Pugh’s desperately thwarted, resourcefully vengeful protagonist busts out of her life.
In addition to themes of class, gender and sexual mores, “Lady Macbeth” has a strong racial component without being fussy or anachronistic: Naomi Ackie (Anna) is a terrific, eloquently watchful actress of color. Jarvis, too, is a first-rate actor, playing each encounter for high stakes and real emotion. A lesser treatment of this material might have made obvious points about the related plights of servant and mistress, and of the forbidden-fruit aspect of the love affair driving the increasingly bloody action. But Oldroyd, whose short film “Best” asserted a highly promising talent and a careful camera eye, taps everything into place and allows the performers to breathe, even within the stuffiest and most forbidding of the domestic interiors.
Oldroyd told one interviewer: “We’re used to so much literature of that period where women either suffer in silence or run away. Katherine full-bloodedly takes her destiny in both hands.” A key scene in this modestly budgeted, supremely confident feature shows Anna once again entering her mistress’s bed chamber, opening the shutters. Then she sees something new, on the floor by the bed, a clear sign of Katherine’s ultimate fate as well as her own.
Throughout “Lady Macbeth” we see Pugh’s eyes, full of possibility and optimism at the outset, gradually darken. Even her breathing changes. It’s a wonderful performance in a very fine film.