Justin Kurzel
Macbeth

It is never easy to talk about cinema when dealing with a film based on a theatrical text. In these cases, the risks for the director are twofold and antithetical in nature. Being too reverent towards the original text, creating a sort of recorded theater projected on the cinema screen, or conversely, altering the narrative too much, stripping it of the literary breath that, in the case of Shakespeare, is very strong.

In this case, Justin Kurzel decidedly leans towards the former direction. This vision of Macbeth is very faithful to the Shakespearean text, so much so that it comes very close to two disastrous pitfalls. On one hand, the language, respectful of the original's poetic structures, ventures here and there towards excessive complexity, which perhaps makes some passages less intelligible to the less cultured audience. In general, the script manages to coexist clarity with highbrow language, but in some passages, it could have been slightly simplified. Nonetheless, the choice to not degrade the preciousness of Shakespeare's text is admirable.

Another risk Kurzel runs is presenting the audience with a work that is too thin from a purely directorial standpoint. Up to a certain point, the risk is great: long dialogues, a fixed camera on two talking faces, very few changes of shot. The sequence of the final battle, with its fiery red turning to blood red and its conceptual abstraction, sheds new light on the previous passages and prompts reflection on the clarity and stylized purity of various moments. Thus, re-evaluating the director’s work retrospectively, one can appreciate the decision to remain faithful to the text, even at the cost of sacrificing realism and spectacle, which certainly would have enhanced the enjoyment of a segment of the audience.

Instead, Kurzel remains incorruptible, faithful to the text: he finely works within the tiny interstices left free by the thrust of the dialogues. And what does he add? Landscapes, but landscapes of the soul in Valhalla Rising style: misty clearings, solitary expanses, stylized depictions of the world that find the right middle ground between the simplifications of theater and the cinematic taste for vision. Kurzel shows the world that a theater stage cannot show but modulates it with a poetic sensibility, culminating in a battle that is not a battle. Choosing to make such a chromatic finale means being faithful to the text in a profound and conceptual way.

Of course, the greatness of such a film is largely due to the text it is based on, this is undeniable. However, it is not easy to make the beauty of a theatrical text emerge in cinema: the two languages are very distant, although they seem similar on the surface. Kurzel, working with meticulous delicacy, manages to smooth the distances and disparities, allowing Shakespearean power to flow with force.