There are so many snarling and belligerent Scotsmen in “Macbeth” that for a moment I thought I’d wandered into a random bar in Edinburgh at 11 p.m. But amid all the bloodshed of the latest film adaptation of the Scottish play, there is an eerie beauty to the treachery.
Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard play Mr. and Mrs. M, he the nobleman of “vaulting ambition” who slays his king, Duncan, and, amid fear of retaliation by Duncan’s son Malcolm, learns from the witchy Weird Sisters that no man of woman born can harm him and also he’s completely fine as long as Birnam Wood never comes to Dunsinane. That could never happen, right?
Fassbender, Cotillard and director Justin Kurzel conjure up a dank, shivery, low-key mood punctuated by gory “Braveheart”-style battle sequences. The text has been radically truncated, but given the exigencies of the movies that isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
It must be admitted that Shakespeare wrote long, and Kurzel unsentimentally boils the script down to the greatest hits. The story becomes at times mere backdrop to arresting, even brilliant photography: The images of the enemy army emerging in the distance hiding behind those Birnam trees is particularly glorious. Meanwhile, Fassbender and Cotillard are devastatingly effective as they explore the internal anguish of both the Macbeths’ traitorous slaughter and the twisted sexual dynamics of their relationship.
Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s “Macbeth” takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.