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Macbeth
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For
about its first ten minutes, this Australian modernisation of Macbeth is captivating. The three witches
– reconfigured as “Weird Sister” schoolgirl Goths – run around a graveyard,
defacing tombstones. We are swiftly hurled into a bloody episode of turf war
involving drugs and decadent clubs: guns blaze, bodies fall, and John Clifford
White’s powerful rock score whips the editing along. But once the actors open
their mouths to recite Shakespeare, the film goes completely to hell.
The
problem is not the Aussie accents or the touches of vernacular expression. Nor,
as previous inventive versions of the play have proved, is the recourse to
movie genre itself unwarranted: the shifting-balance-of-power plot, driven by
violence, lends itself irresistibly to the action/gangster template. Rather,
for a film so relentlessly stylised on the levels of image and sound design,
what is sorely missing is the sense of a confident, integrated ensemble of
actors.
Most
of the cast (Gary Sweet as Duncan is an exception) seem more intent on rattling
off the text verbatim than making it comprehensible. They (especially Sam Worthington
in the title role) perform in a kind of alienated, nervous trance that places
undue emphasis on their uneasy postures and gestures. Touches of zaniness in
the casting – such as comedians Mick Molloy and Kym Gyngell in straight parts –
further muddle the overall tone. After half an hour of this barrage, one begins
longing for the more conventional but also more lucid Shakespearean stylings of
Kenneth Branagh.
After
a frustrating period spent by director Geoffrey Wright in America – resulting
only in the lacklustre teen-horror-thriller Cherry
Falls (2000) – Macbeth might be
viewed as his grab for some highbrow legitimacy. But this project is entirely
consistent with the features that made his reputation: Romper Stomper (1992) was a
neo-nazi skinhead transposition of Richard
III, while Metal Skin (1994) anticipated the taste for spells, potions, orgies and sub-Satanic
iconography.
The
problems in Wright’s work are equally consistent: a tendency to sensationalism
and hysteria (here embodied by Victoria Hill’s outré performance as Lady
Macbeth), sometimes tipping over into inadvertent comedy; and an over-reliance
on kinetic highpoints filched from the collected works of Stanley Kubrick, Martin
Scorsese, Brian De Palma, John Woo and Abel Ferrara. Dramatic coherence and
depth are replaced by a relentless procession of flashy clichés (children are
luminous symbols of innocence, evil acts are always accompanied by booming
Vincent Price-style cackling), while stylistic affectations (handheld camera,
titled angles, exaggerated sound effects) are laid on without relief or
modulation. And, although the original promotional campaign for Macbeth tried opportunistically to associate
it with Melbourne’s “gangland wars” of contemporary times, Wright stays light
years away from any social reality.
There
are elements to admire. Although not in the league of Michael Almereyda’s
updating of Hamlet (2000), the film
makes clever use of modern technologies (surveillance cameras, mobile phones),
and occasionally conjures an ingenious transposition of the original
(Cumberland as a penthouse, a truck carrying “Burnham timber”). The best
delivery of the text occurs when it is cut free and offered as voice-over.
The
film’s shameless nod to music-video history – Macbeth wields a smoke machine on
an abandoned nightclub dance floor – indicates not only the evident debt to Baz
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), but
also the production input from Mushroom, one of Australia’s most successful
music companies. A rock’n’roll Macbeth?
As Orson Welles said long ago, any way of playing Shakespeare that works is
valid and right. The tragedy of this Macbeth is that it just does not work.
© Adrian Martin June 2007 |
