“Macbeth”
We
know that Lady Macbeth has had one child or more, or at least has breastfed.
Marion Cotillard, as the Thane’s wife, utters the indicative speech in a small,
cold, dimly lit church building with the even tone of one speaking in her
sleep, in Justin Kurzel’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, and
moves quickly onward to the kind of vicious talk that is closer in tone to the
film’s median:
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.”
I’ve
always thought that Macbeth was her second husband, and she’d lost her first
along with the child she speaks of. Kurzel seems to have taken it as meaning
that the Macbeths had had a child together who, since he or she is nowhere to
be found during the action, died before the play begins. This infant’s grey
corpse fills the screen in the first shot of the film, and marks all that
follows in the actions of Macbeth and his Lady with an entirely comprehensible
sense of grief.
Such
a move is no error in itself, and when adapting Shakespeare – or any literary
source, for that matter – for the screen, a director is meant to take self-asserting
action, to reign the source material into the pen of his vision for his work.
Kurzel does this with cutting and moving parts of the text, departures from
convention in his sets and performances, and his motif of slain children,
strewn throughout the movie, presumably to echo the loss of the Macbeths’
child. The problem here is that with his radical revisions, Kurzel all but
leaves behind Shakespeare and the life with which he infused his most
terrifying tragedy, and doesn’t hasten to add much of his own.