The BFS16 #8: All Hail MacBeth!
Title: MacBeth
Year: 2015
Director: Justin Kurzel
Other: M/17, 113 min, Drama/ War
Rating: IMDB: 7,2; Rotten Tomatoes: 80%
I still can't breathe quite well.
MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare's play so far (I've only read four of them), and one of my favourite stories ever. I had to read the play for an English Culture course about 2 years ago, and I fell completely in love with it. So, I've been fangirling over this movie since the release of the first trailer, and became terribly upset when I realised it wouldn't be released in the theaters here in Portugal.
I also have a thing to use movies and TV shows to study for my English courses, and what can be better than Shakespeare? (ok, almost everything is better than Shakespeare to study English, but hey, I needed an excuse not to really study for it!)
The film is breathtaking. Literally, it's almost two hours of no breathing. You have so much more important things to do! You have to absorb the atmosphere, dive into de score, bathe in the lines of the discourse, while simultaneously hurting and loving and becoming mad with Fassbender's and Cotillard's performances. For the one that had watched him, a few more than a month before in the ridiculously bad Steve Jobs (though he was rather good in it), this was a breath of fresh air, a cool and very much needed breeze. And though it IS brilliantly written, the words are so carefully spoken, delivered with such artistry they almost don't matter. It is, in fact, an almost universal film, in the way that even if you don't understand the speech, you are still aware of everything around it, all the pain and suffering and madness that come with the ultimate persuit of power. And if we aren't happy with the plot or the characters, we have everything else, in a gorgeous photography, where the art concept focuses on red and white, and every single piece seems to have a meaning.
It is not a walk in the park, of course. Neither I wanted it to be. But it's so brilliant compared with every movie ever made on the subject that I couldn't be happier about it!
PS - And we are still trending on "really gorgeous movies" here! YEY!
