Macbeth versus the apocalypse O
Sue de Groot dons her oxygen mask and makes it through two viewings
N the surface, the new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play — first performed in 1611 — seems to have nothing in common with the 21st-century story of a girl kept captive by a large loony survivalist, but deeper down there are some striking similarities.
There is the claustrophobia, for one thing. In 10 Cloverfield Lane (which is not a sequel to 2008’s Cloverfield but could well signal a longrunning franchise), Michelle, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, wakes up after a car accident to find she has been taken into an underground bunker by Howard, played with jowly subtlety by John Goodman.
There are shades of Room in Howard’s sealed domain, and his stockpiling recalls 1999’s Blast from the Past, although this is in no way a comedy.
The claustrophobia that makes it difficult to breathe throughout Australian director Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth is of a different texture. The weight of madness and ambition is suffocating in the sticky confines of tents on battlefields, but even in throne rooms and out in the wilds of Scotland there is a lack of air, possibly because the film never varies from its ponderous, one-note emotional tone.
Michael Fassbender makes a magnetic Macbeth but Marion Cotillard, as faultless as she is in every other film, is sorely miscast. Her French-accented English is too charming and her face too guileless to embody the formidable Lady Macbeth’s warring extremes, or perhaps she is simply not given the space to explore and express these demons. In the famous remorse scene she seems to be regretting the purchase of a badly made dress rather than mourning the loss of innocence and sanity. In cinematic terms this is a beautiful Macbeth, with extremes of blood and gore that rival Polanski’s violent 1971 masterpiece — the final battle scenes, all limned in red and yellow smoke, are magnificent, and I’d love to know what the Foley guy used to make the gruesome squishing sound of a dagger exiting flesh. In all other ways, however, it is not a patch on Polanski’s.
Meanwhile, back in the bunker in that other film, Howard sounds as paranoid as the Scottish thane when he tries to convince Michelle that the air up there is contaminated by either chemical or nuclear poison as a result of attack by either the Russians or the Martians. Is he mad? Possibly. But the intricacies of the developing relationships between three characters (the third underground inhabitant is a young man called Emmet, played by John Gallagher Jr) make this into a mind-twisting thriller that switchbacks breathlessly between possibility and impossibility. With her expressive chocolate eyes and feisty spirit, Winstead’s Michelle is a much more watchable character than Cotillard’s languishing Lady Macbeth.
10 Cloverfield Lane might be a pastiche of genres that uses clichés to manipulate the viewer’s reactions and expectations, but it is still an exercise in excellent entertainment.
Macbeth, sadly, is not.