Macbeth (1971)

Polanski addresses the transposition by trying to maintain a high degree of credibility and squeezes us into a general state of the world sieved into battle and a victory situation. It encloses the presentation of deep characters on their way through a landscape of rude climate that seems to condemn in cold to all living being. As a human individuality the determined pathos leads to guilt and injustice, regardless of the legitimacy that may be elaborated, as in the case of Lady Macbeth, all this through the contradiction that transcends reality and transposes and sees through that other it is itself but far from the normal thought carried by the drives.

I think this is my favorite movie for Shakespeare Month! The reason why this movie is so great is because of how amazing the atmosphere is and the great action scenes and drama. This movie has really made me realize how violent and sexual Shakespeare could get. Well, I'm not that familiar with the original play, but I believe it's faithful. There's a scene where there's nothing but naked women (or witches) huddled around a cauldron. The witches are probably the thing about this story that people remember the most. They really aren't in it for very long but their scenes are so great and so important everyone takes notes of them.Many people are unaware that MacBeth was in fact a real king of Scotland. Well, I don't think the witches were real. Well, maybe there were women who did indeed claim to be witches and their prophecy turned out to be accurate by chance. Even the very beginning of this movie is brilliant by showing the witches on the beach. MacBeth works great as a villain protagonist. At the same time, the true hero of the story, MacDuff is very interesting and you really do want him to succeed in slaying MacBeth. Yeah, there's a lot of blood in this movie.I am reminded of Penn Jillette saying that it's silly for people to think that video games are a bad influence because pop culture has always been violent, including Shakespeare. Yeah, the gore and sexuality in this movie really was pretty shocking to me. I guess as movie content ratings were invented, a lot of people were just experimenting with it. We even get some great surreal scenes where MacBeth continually looks at himself in mirrors over and over. Everything makes sense in the end and it's so great such a long movie keeps your interest for so long. It's just a beautiful looking film and I know where that "Out damned spot!" line came from. ****

I wrote this review as a writing assignment for my English class, and questions were asked before so if it seems like I'm jumping from topic to topic I'm sorry. The Questions basically asked were what did you think, what scenes where effective and not effective and why, also was the violence overdone, and compared to todays violence and how did Polanski add his own interpretation to the play. I really liked by review so I thought I'd post it.I really enjoyed Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth. I think it was an excellent depiction of the play and very historically accurate. I believe the most effective scene was the one at the very beginning. There were many great scenes in this movie but this scene starts the story, in what I believe, the best possible way to show you how the rest of the movie will be themed like. You watch as a medieval warrior saunters on screen, tired from battle, onto a muddy and dank used battle field covered in dead bodies. Then he marches over to one of the bodies, maybe one that isn't fully dead, and bludgeons it with a mace. I think this show's how violent and unmerciful the time was and how the movie will be.There are no scenes in the movie that weren't effective. All of them conveyed the message of the play and the reality of the time when it was set. I do think some continuity was spared to keep it accurate to the play and the time, but that might have just been the 1971 film making. Which is surprisingly good considering the movie was made by Playboy Productions over 40 years ago.I think the violence in the movie was not overdone. I think peoples ideas of what the play is like have been jaded because any other way the play has been done, read aloud or made by a low-budget high school drama club, wasn't the way it was meant to be seen. This is the closest representations of what Shakespeare wanted yet, in my opinion. Compared to the violence of today's film I think there is no comparison. Today's violence in film is all special effects and exploitation. It's all about the shock value. This movie's violence is realistic and shows how much violence is in the play and how much is implied but not seen. It's a violent play, so anything less than I violent movie would be unacceptable.I think Roman Polanski put his interpretation on the play first by making it a film. Some of the shots are comparable to Alfred Hitchcock. It is truly cinematic. The expressions on the actors faces. The composition of the Scottish countryside. The dark and musty castle. The choreography on the fights alone was simply beautiful. Even the way the Shakespearean language is spoken so naturally and conversational. This kind of excellence could not be accomplished on the stage or any other medium. Roman Polanski did an amazing job and this is one of the best reproductions of Shakespeare I have ever seen.

While watching his frighteningly dark and nihilistic take on Shakespeare's Macbeth, I think of just what a fascinating story the life of Roman Polanski is, and has become. It is with the most pitch black sense of irony I realize that the film he made, in part one must assume, to deal with his own tragedy today mirrors his future lawsuit - towards the end of the movie it was scarily easy to draw the connection line between Polanski himself and Macbeth who, despite his frustration and angst, cannot escape the consequences of his crime.If justice truly is blind - and Polanski certainly doesn't express any other point of view in this film - then anyone with blood on his hands will get what's coming to him. I still have a hard time though, to feel any greater feeling of proud anger towards a 76 year old man who got his wife gutted while she was eight months pregnant, now facing a 30 year old case that nobody cares about anymore, and that nobody involved with wants to have any more to do with.That becomes even clearer when you see Macbeth. You can only imagine Polanski's mindset when he decided to make this movie. It seems as if he was inclined on not making anything false or half-hearted, he drew a sharp line with co-writer Kenneth Tynan and seems to have held the course all throughout production. The spectator tone, of distant coldness, is never broken. Never does it seems like Polanski interferes with the action that takes place. Never do the characters plea to the audience, never is there a message being presented. It all lacks rhyme and reason, the tragedy takes place before our eyes but it only "occurs". A child is murdered, a good man gets an axe in the back, witches cackle, Macbeth himself is so afraid, his experience of fear is vastly greater than any of his other - yet none of these things are dealt with in any different fashion. Many have tried to make Macbeth into a human story - where Macbeth's follies and illusions of grandeur do assure his fall, but are also what makes him human. Maybe it is what makes Polanski's Macbeth human too. This word "human" though, comes off as meaningless and Polanski's portrayal of humanity as a whole, seems to be that of an endless chain of commitment and detachment, promise and betrayal, and murder upon murder upon murder. This is by far one of the most pessimistic and depressive films I have ever seen. The most disturbing part of it is probably towards the end where you watch killings and unspectacular executions and you as a viewer experience nothing. Whereas many modern moral tales or anti-war movies - like Requiem for a Dream or American History X - use excessive violence to shock and stir an emotional catharsis, there is a detached numbness to the excessive violence in Macbeth that makes is truly and utterly disturbing. In a way, watching the movie feels like having a lobotomy.Naturally, much of this comes from the murder of Sharon Tate, which echoes throughout the entire movie, but while there are many obvious details making the movie so hauntingly personal, there is also a lot in the movie that simply tells Shakespeare's tragedy in an even more depressing light. After all, despite the many attempts to make sense and sensibility out of the Macbeth story, the overall message of the story seems to be that life is a cold and meaningless affair, you live until you die, nothing matters and surrounded by beautiful landscapes men kill and kill again. It seems like Polanski is simply doing the play as literal as possible. Who's to say Shakespeare himself wasn't in the same state as Polanski when he wrote the play? Who's to say Polanski's Macbeth isn't the most accurate?