Macbeth

dir: Geoffrey Wright
[img_assist|nid=821|title=This is Macbeth as a poncey emo wannabe gangster. Shakespeare would be so proud.|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=428]
With the last 20 or so murders that occurred in during the so-called Melbourne Underworld war, I guess it seemed like a good idea to combine the Shakespeare play about ruthless ambition and the crime pages of the daily newspapers. A natural alliance, like whisky and baby formula, or dope and speed.

They decide to play it fairly straight, despite the contemporary and Melbournian setting, and keep the language as the Bard would have liked it. So the dialogue hasn’t been made modern with people saying ‘like’ or ‘whatever’ all the time.

Macbeth (Sam Worthington) loyal to mobster king Duncan (Gary Sweet), oversees something like a drug deal gone wrong that results in lots of dead Asians. Victorious, Macbeth is commended by the king and seems like he’s on top of the world.

Whilst taking drugs, he sees three jailbait redhead witches, who tell him he will be king.

When he mentions this prophecy to his wife, the beautiful and fearsome Lady Macbeth (Victoria Hill), she goads him into taking firm action. Where he vacillates, she unleashes the most emasculating tirade ever launched by a vicious shrew at a weak, cowardly man. It is one of the greatest parts ever written for an actress in the history of acting, except maybe for the way the character falls apart in the end.

She starts off like an Amazon, like Boadicea, like Lucretia Borgia or Catherine de Medici, but goes out like Terry Schiavo. It’s a goddamn shame is what it is.

If you’ve ever read the play, endured it at high school, seen it staged or watched any of the screen adaptations, then you know exactly how the story is going to play out. As a script that stays loyal to the original, this Macbeth proceeds in exactly the same way every single other Macbeth story does.

We know the journey and the destination; the question for us is what quantity and quality of bells and whistles they manage to hang off the vehicle along the way.

Thing is, though, they do nothing with the Melbourne crime connection angle, it doesn’t really go anywhere. I’d heard the flick played in to the idea that it was like the Williams gang, the remnants of the Moran clan and the Gatto crew, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s filmed in Melbourne, and that’s about it. All the people dress in this flick dress like Eurotrash with very large trust funds. Most of the people who lived and died during the gangland insurgency were killed wearing trackie daks, coming back from the footy or at a pokies pub. They weren’t wearing Dolce & Gabbana or Armani, for crying out loud.

I’m not entirely sure what the term ‘Eurotrash’ really means, just that it’s probably an American pejorative aimed at the sophistication and sartorial elegance of, uh, some European people. To me it’s a pretty specific look that practically no-one in Australia wears, well, no one that matters. We don’t see our politicians, footballers, cricketers or their wives dressing up like Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace.

But all the crims here are. Especially our main boy Macbeth, who is the weakest link in the whole production. The line “something wicked this way comes” comes from the play, and is used in the film, but it doesn’t mean there’s anything dark and gothly about the story apart from the fact that a few people get butchered. Still, the promotional poster of crows and graveyards implies an aesthetic that doesn’t really come through. I guess the little minx witches are considered gothly, and they do get naked and have group sex, which are mandatory components of the goth scene, but really, there’s was no need to make Macbeth such a nancy boy. He comes across as less of a feared crime lord / Scottish thane than he does a slightly less masculine version of Michael Hutchence in Dogs in Space.

I guess that’s the problem in most of the versions of Macbeth; even when they’re played well, it’s still a pretty crap character. He’s not, for my money, a very interesting character, and he comes across even less interesting in this version. I don’t think it’s a bad version of the Scottish play per se, I just don’t think it is one that used it well as a starting point and then burst out into inspired or interesting directions. Clearly that wasn’t part of the mission statement, which is fair enough.

The performances otherwise are okay throughout. I probably could have done without Mick Molloy taking sexual pleasure in strangling one of his victims, but there you go, we don’t always get what we want. He and his brother both play assassins who do look like and recall the grubby brutishness of the gangland wars, totally at odds with the Dynasty-style melodrama of the rest of the production.

There are some interesting choices made, interesting ways decided upon to deliver lines or structure the plot. Most of the actors use “I’m an ACT-OR, dahlink”, voices to deliver their lines except for Worthington, who delivers Macbeth’s genius lines like he’s a mumbling crazy guy on the tram who’s about to ask you for sixty cents.

Where the story varies significantly from the original, they wisely choose to allow matters to transpire without new dialogue, so there are quite a few sections that occur in silence, to the film’s benefit. The workaround for the soliloquies is also easily managed by having them tram

It’s bloody, and perhaps needlessly bloody, but it is a story about carnage, ruthless brutality, war for power, deceit and betrayal, and the terrible guilt that destroys the strongest of us all. So a bit of blood isn’t too much out of place.

One choice I’m curious about: I’m not sure, in the original play, did Macbeth get to fuck all three of the witches, because he certainly does here, the little minxes. I did like the way they were introduced into the story by showing them maliciously desecrating graves in a cemetery. Who’s never done that on a slow Friday night?

Sure, the flick is unnecessary, but it wasn’t unenjoyable, and is probably a decent enough rendering of a classic. Flashy and superficial, but amusing all the same.

It’s no Throne of Blood, that’s for sure.

6 times I wondered whether the girls knew how much they, ahem, had on display during the kitchen sex scene out of 10

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“a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – like 90 per cent of the films that come out, Macbeth.