Francesca Annis – Blood and Porridge

February 15, 2022

Who is the Macbeth-est of them all?

© A24 / IAC Films / Apple TV+

I recently watched The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Cohen (without, for the first time ever, his brother Ethan co-directing) and starring Denzel Washington as William Shakespeare’s king-stabbing, crown-grabbing Scotsman. Meanwhile, in the role of Macbeth’s spouse, the ruthless Lady Macbeth, is Cohen’s real-life spouse Frances McDormand. It’s difficult to sum up my reaction to the film. I suppose you could say: liked it… stopped liking it… started liking it again.

The opening sequence, the aftermath of the battle between Scotland and the combined armies of Ireland and Norway, takes place on a beach. Thanks to Bruno Delbonnel’s monochrome cinematography, it’s palely, clammily and impressively atmospheric. Mind you, within a couple of minutes of hearing the performers’ accents – Ralph Ineson speaking broad Yorkshire, Harry Melling speaking broad RP and Brendan Gleason speaking broad Irish – you realise this isn’t going to be a particularly Scottish take on the Scottish play.

Enter Washington’s Macbeth, speaking broad American, and Bertie Carvel’s Banquo. They encounter the Weird Sisters (Kathryn Hunter) and hear their fateful prophecies. Soon after, the prophecies start coming true as Macbeth is made Thane of Cawdor thanks to his valour during the battle. And the plot – literally a plot, with Washington and McDormand conspiring to kill Gleason’s King Duncan and seize the Scottish throne – is underway.

So, for me, the film gets off to a strong start. I went off it, however, when the action relocates to Macbeth’s castle, where Duncan spends the night as a guest, and we get the build-up, execution and aftermath of his murder. Ironically, this was because of something many critics have praised the film for, its stylised sets and lighting, which give the castle’s interior the look of a perspective-bending M.C. Escher illustration, shot in the manner of a German expressionist silent movie or a 1940s American film noir.

My problem was that the shafts of stark white light (necessary to produce the black shadows elsewhere) and the sense of silence, stillness and solidity evoked by the sets make a nonsense of Shakespeare’s theme that, by murdering Duncan and violating the human social order, Macbeth sparks a chain reaction with violent effects in the natural world too: “Where we lay / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death / And prophesying, with accents terrible / Of dire combustion and confused events… / …Some say the earth / Was feverous and did shake.” Well, you don’t get any impression of falling-down chimneys, lamentings, dire combustion, confused events and feverous earthquakes in an environment as still and sombre as this. In fact, there’s little suggestion that night-time occurred at all – the castle windows seem to blaze permanently with light.

I actually didn’t respond well to the overall, stylised, sometimes artificial look of the film, though I suspect that’s just me. I spent some of my formative years in Scotland, so to me the places mentioned in the play – Glamis, Cawdor, Fife – aren’t just names but real geographical locations. I prefer Macbeth movies with proper Scottish landscapes, with primordial mountains, moors, glens and lochs that to my mind create an appropriate backdrop for the dark and bloody goings-on.

© A24 / IAC Films / Apple TV+

However, The Tragedy of Macbeth regained my interest later on. The sequence where Macbeth has his second meeting with the Weird Sisters is staged with wonderful inventiveness and thereafter the movie gets its second wind. The slaughter of Macduff’s family is impressively done too, conveying the cruelty of the deed without descending into a bloodbath. (As the first murderer assaults one of the young Macduff-lings, he utters the memorable Shakespearean cry, “What, you egg!”, although the punning follow-up line, “Young fry of treachery!” is excised here. Also removed is the doomed youngster’s exclamation, “He has kill’d me, mother!” At school, while my classmates and I studied Macbeth for the Scottish O-Grade, we found this really funny for some reason.)

One thing many critics have remarked upon is the age of the two leads. Washington and McDormand are both in their late middle-age, no longer able to have children. This makes their murder of Duncan and the seizing of the throne more egotistical – they aren’t doing it for their line, which doesn’t and won’t exist, but purely for themselves. Their childlessness, of course, contrasts with the fecundity of the two thorns in their sides. Banquo has a son, Fleance, and Macduff has a whole brood of kids. It also underlines Macbeth’s wariness of Banquo, for whom the Weird Sisters prophesise: “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.”

Elsewhere, my impression of The Tragedy of Macbeth was that some things worked well and other things less well. Kathryn Hunter is splendid as the Weird Sisters. There’s only one of them who’s flesh and blood, though that twisted, contorted body of hers seems to be inhabited by the spirits of all three. The figures of the other two only materialise in the physical world as reflections – Macbeth’s and Banquo’s first sighting of them, at the edge of a pool, is memorably creepy. Perhaps Hunter’s performance gets slightly too Andy Serkis at times, but it’s still very effective.

On the other hand, the promotion of the character of Ross (Alex Hassell) from being one of the original play’s interchangeable Scottish thanes to, here, being a Machiavellian, possibly even supernatural, manipulator who’s playing both sides – he delivers the warning to Lady Macduff about Macbeth’s evil intentions, but also turns up as the mysterious third murderer who does for Banquo, and there’s even a suggestion that he has a hand in Lady Macbeth’s suicide – is intriguing but doesn’t really come off. With the Weird Sisters, the play already has Machiavellian manipulators. It doesn’t need any more.

© StudioCanal / Film4

It’s interesting to compare this Macbeth with the cinematic adaptations that have come before. I preferred it to the Justin Kurzel-directed version, released in 2015, which despite a great cast – Michael Fassbender as Macbeth, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, David Thewlis as Duncan, Paddy Considine as Banquo, Sean Harris as Macduff – seems rather subdued, thanks to the amount of low-volume muttering and mumbling going on that takes the fire out of Shakespeare’s lines. It also chops out parts of the play that, while admittedly hammy, I’ve always enjoyed, for example, the post-regicide comedy relief with the porter, and most of the “Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” hijinks with the Weird Sisters. At least in The Tragedy of Macbeth these are reinstated. Stephen Root gives a funny turn as the porter and Joel Cohen seems to relish the macabre incantations of the Weird Sisters: “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-deliver’d by a drab / Liver of blaspheming Jew / Gall of goat and slips of yew…” Well, he did start his movie career as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981).

Still, the 2015 Macbeth looks lovely and it satisfies my craving for proper Scottish landscapes in a Macbeth movie. Many of its outdoor scenes were shot on the Isle of Skye, although admittedly parts of it were also filmed in England, at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland and Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. Also visually striking is the sequence where Macbeth squares up to Macduff. Their swordfight takes place against an infernal, almost hallucinogenic orange-red backdrop while Birnam Wood burns off-screen. For yes, the scriptwriters cooked up – and ‘cook’ is the operative word – a novel way of bringing Birnam Wood to the castle on Dunsinane Hill.

For me, though, the best movie Macbeth is Roman Polanski’s version of it back in 1971, which had Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in the lead roles. This made a big impression on me. I was 15 when I saw it, so no doubt one reason why I took to it was because the film’s qualities – its simultaneous bleakness, bloodiness, bawdiness, gothic-ness, gorgeousness, rebelliousness and artiness – mirrored the mix of emotions and hormones seething at the time in my teenaged self. And no doubt I felt a connection with the film too because Finch and Annis were both so young when they made it. In fact, their youthfulness suggests they have little power to control their destinies. They’re swept along with events, propelled by dark forces that are both political and supernatural.

© Playboy Productions / Columbia Pictures

Polanski’s Macbeth was disliked by many critics, upset by its violence and disturbed by the fact that Polanski’s recent past had been pretty violent too. In August 1969, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others were butchered at his home in Beverly Hills by followers of the hippie-cult lunatic Charles Manson. Pauline Kael, the film critic for the New Yorker, even wondered if Polanski’s staging of the murder of Macduff’s family was an attempt to replicate the carnage that Manson had authored in his own life. Famously, the film’s screenwriter, Kenneth Tynan, challenged Polanski about the amount of blood shown in this scene – to which the director retorted, “You should have seen my house last summer.”

Incidentally, the exteriors in Polanski’s Macbeth look rugged enough to be Scottish, but the film was actually shot elsewhere, in Wales (including Snowdonia) and north-eastern England. And, yes, Northumberland’s Bamburgh Castle makes an appearance in this version too.

One other cinematic Macbeth I’ve seen is the 1948 production directed by, and starring, Orson Welles. I watched this on TV a long time ago and wasn’t impressed by its apparent staginess and melodramatics – by then I was in thrall to the Polanski version. However, lately, I’ve watched a few parts of it on Youtube and revised my opinion of it somewhat. Yes, it’s cheap. Welles made it for Republic Pictures, a studio that normally specialised in low-budget westerns, had to shoot it on some of Republic’s leftover western sets, and had only a 23-day shooting schedule. But scenes like Act 3 Scene 4, where Banquo’s ghost shows up at the feast with ‘no speculation’ in its eyes and shaking its ‘gory locks’ at his killer, are surprisingly well-staged. Though I suppose you’d expect that from Welles.

There are problems, however. Though he was only 33 at the time, Welles was already getting portly and resembled Falstaff more than Macbeth. It doesn’t help that he appears in an eccentric costume that, he grumbled later, made him look like the Statue of Liberty.

And then there are the accents – dear God. Welles’s American cast dial the fake twee Scottish-ness up to 11 and roll their ‘r’s for minutes at a time. Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth is shrill and hard to listen to and even Welles himself, during his more excitable moments, sounds like Scotty in the original series of Star Trek (1966-69). Meanwhile, the Weird Sisters’ accents are so piercing they remind me of those advertisements that Scottish children’s entertainer and showbiz personality Molly Weir used to make for Flash, the household cleaning agent, back in the 1970s: “Flash cleans baths without scr-r-r-r-ratching!”

And on that topic… While one of the play’s strengths is that it can be adapted to countless different settings and styles, I would one day like to see a truly Scottish film version of Macbeth, with authentic Scottish actors and accents as well as those brooding Scottish landscapes I’ve talked about. You can’t claim, as you might have been able to in the past, that there aren’t enough bankable Scottish actors to draw audiences to it. Not with the likes of Peter Capaldi, Robert Carlyle, Robbie Coltrane, Martin Compston, James Cosmo, Brian Cox, Kate Dickie, Lindsay Duncan, Karen Gillan, Shirley Henderson, Jack Lowden, James McAvoy, Kelly Macdonald, Ewan McGregor, Kevin McKidd, Bill Paterson, Dougray Scott, Ken Stott, David Tennant, etc., on the go nowadays.

Hell, I’d even pay money to see Gerald Butler as Macbeth. Cawdor Has Fallen, anyone?

© Mercury Productions / Republic Pictures

November 18, 2021March 27, 2024

Spice-world: the movie

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Like everywhere else, one sector in Sri Lanka heavily hit by Covid-19 was the country’s cinemas. In Colombo, establishments like the Liberty, Savoy and Regal had stood closed-up, empty and silent for so long that I’d begun to doubt if they’d ever open their doors again. However, with the Sri Lankan Covid-19 death toll down (for now), the authorities have permitted cinemas to reopen, albeit working at a reduced capacity. During the first half of November, their auditoriums could only be 25% full. For the month’s second half, the maximum capacity has been increased to 50%. To do our bit to help Sri Lanka’s beleaguered cinema industry, myself and a mate went a few days ago to the Scope multiplex at Colombo City Centre shopping mall. There, we watched Dune, this year’s big-budget, Denis Villeneuve-directed adaptation of the famous 1965 science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Or at least, Villeneuve’s adaptation of the first half of it, as Dune is one fat book.

And we had no regrets about seeing Dune in a cinema. It’s a visually majestic creation that needs to be seen on a big screen to be properly appreciated. In fact, you’ll be committing a minor crime against celluloid if you watch it in reduced form on a TV or laptop screen. And if you dare to watch it on a phone-screen… Well, you don’t deserve to live.

I have to say, though, that I read Herbert’s novel as a teenager and it was no favourite of mine. In part, my being unimpressed by it was probably down to bloody-mindedness. A lot of earnest, nerdy people gushed about how great it was, which probably predisposed me to not liking it. This was similar to my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-worshipped Lord of the Rings – although unlike Rings, I did read Dune to the end. (With Rings, I gave up four-fifths of the way through.) Also, it didn’t help that I read Dune a couple of years after Star Wars (1977) came out. Many of the book’s plot elements – a scheming galactic empire, a desert planet, an elite sect with psychic powers – had recently featured in George Lucas’s sci-fi / fantasy blockbuster, so they seemed less fresh than they had in 1965.

© New English Library

Though I found Lord of the Rings overrated on the page, I did enjoy the movies that Peter Jackson made of it in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Well, apart from the last half-hour of the final one, The Return of the King, which consisted of nothing but various characters getting married. A second-rate reading experience can, with an excellent cast, a great director and all the epic locations and special effects that Hollywood money can buy, be turned into a first-rate viewing experience.

And so it is with Dune.

Its cast is wonderful – Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Timothée Chalamet, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Jason Mamoa, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Javier Bardem – and director Villeneuve has already helmed two of the past decade’s greatest sci-fi movies, Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). And its 165-million-dollar budget has been put to good use. The filming locations in the UAE and Jordan really do transport you to the film’s main setting, the endlessly sandy and murderously hot desert-planet Arrakis; while the special effects, conjuring up fleets of spacecraft that stand like gigantic, angular cathedrals when they’re parked on planets’ surfaces, but look as tiny and inconsequential as pollen-grains when they’re bobbing in the black void of space, are stunning. Hence, the absolute necessity to see Dune on a large screen.

Denis Villeneuve, of course, isn’t the first filmmaker to bring Dune to the screen, for an earlier cinematic version of it had appeared in 1984, directed by that genius of visionary weirdness, David Lynch. The 1984 Dune was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics – I remember the New Musical Express retitling it Dung – but I didn’t think it was that bad. Lynch added some delightfully bizarre touches to the story and he arguably had an even better cast of actors than Villeneuve: Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and the great (and now, sadly, late) Dean Stockwell. Sting was in it too.

Alas, Lynch’s producer was old-school movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted Dune to be a regulation two-hour movie. Cramming all the events of Herbert’s doorstop-sized book into that caused massive problems for the script. Early on, Lynch had wisely envisioned Dune as two movies, and then proposed it as a three-hour film, but this cut no ice with old Dino.

I remember going to see Lynch’s Dune at a cinema in Aberdeen with my girlfriend of the time. Having read the book I was familiar with the plot, which goes like this… (Beware – spoilers are coming.) In the distant 102^nd century, the galaxy is ruled by an empire that incorporates a number of powerful families, or Houses. One of these, the House Atreides, headed by the well-meaning Duke Leto (Isaacs in the new Dune, Prochnow in the old one), his ‘concubine’ Lady Jessica (Ferguson now, Annis then) and their son, the young Paul (Chalamet now, MacLachlan then), is entrusted with running the desert-planet Arrakis. Arrakis is vital for the Empire because a mysterious ‘spice’- in reality a consciousness-expanding drug – is mined there and its properties enable spaceship-navigators to find their way through interstellar space. The planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the reclusive and Bedouin-like Fremen, are suspicious of the Atreides because previously the Empire had put them under control of another House, the Harkonnen, who treated them genocidally.

Before Leto can win hearts and minds on Arrakis, the Harkonnen launch an attack to retake the planet, with the Emperor’s blessing – the whole manoeuvre has been a plot to get rid of the potentially troublesome Atreides. The Atreides are wiped out, save for Paul and his mother Jessica, who flee into the planet’s deserts. They now have the formidable task of rallying the distrustful Fremen and persuading them to retake Arrakis from the homicidal Harkonnen – which, in the book’s later stages, they do.

Villenueve’s film ends with Paul and Jessica fleeing the Harkonnen – a second Dune movie, which will tell the remaining story, has now been greenlighted. Poor old Lynch, though, had to squash everything into just over two hours. I remembering being in an Aberdonian pub after seeing his Dune with my ex-girlfriend, who hadn’t read the book. I spent about an hour trying to explain the film’s plot to her, which she’d been flummoxed by.

Villeneuve’s Dune only covers half of the book and is still 19 minutes longer than Lynch’s version, so obviously the story gets more space to breath. This also enables Villeneuve to do a lot of the important sci-fi business of ‘world-building’. It’s gratifying too that Dune’s secondary characters, the various soldiers, courtiers and allies of the House Atreides, like Gurney Halleck (Brolin now, Stewart then), Duncan Idaho (Mamoa now, Jordan then), Thufir Hawat (McKinley Henderson now, Jones then) and Dr Liet-Kynes (Duncan-Brewster now, von Sydow then) get much more time to establish themselves and win the audience’s sympathy. In the compressed 1984 Dune, their roles were brief and their deaths, if they occurred, were blink-and-you’ll-miss-them events.

Certain critics have sniped at this new version of Dune for being humourless. Now while I admit to counting a total of three jokes during the film’s entire 157-minute running time – it’s telling that two of those jokes turn up in the trailer – I have to say I found it refreshing to experience a science fiction film willing to treat its subject matter seriously and not populate it with, say, bumbling comedy droids or wisecracking bipedal rodents. In effect, those critics are showing their snobbery. They’re protesting: “But this is just science fiction! It’s not, it can’t be serious! You’ve got to have bumbling comedy droids in it! And wisecracking aliens!” So, stuff ’em.

One thing David Lynch’s Dune was memorable for was its depiction of the Harkonnen. Played by Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Brad Dourif and Sting, they were a grotesque, evilly-perverted bunch – no more so than McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, who was a levitating, leering sack of pus. Probably wisely, Villeneuve doesn’t try to out-Lynch Lynch here and makes his Harkonnen a more sombre lot, communicating their malevolence through stillness rather than histrionics. Stellan Skarsgard is especially effective as a brooding, Brando-esque Baron.

I read somewhere that Frank Herbert intended the good guys, the Atreides, to be descended from the Greeks on faraway, long-ago earth, although some visual and verbal references to bullfighting in both his book and Villeneuve’s film suggest they’re Spaniards. However, when the Duke, his family and courtiers arrive on Arrakis, the film shows them being led out of their spaceship by a bagpiper… which implies they’re actually Scottish. Well, their home planet’s name is Caladan, which sounds like ‘Caledonia’. One of them is called Duncan and another is called Gurney – Scots gurn a lot. And by half-time they’ve already been slaughtered. So yup, I think they’re Scottish.

One thing I believe makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.

Anyway, for now, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Dune completes a science-fictional hat-trick for Villeneuve. Perhaps it’s not quite as impressive a run as Stanley Kubrick achieved with the sci-fi or sci-fi-related Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972), but it’s still pretty amazing. Let’s hope he can knock Dune 2 out of the park and make this triumphant threesome a foursome.