Critics reviews

Steve Jobs seems so eager to make its subject comprehensible that it threatens to flatten what should be intriguing and strange into an all too familiar, bland narrative… This is the same move by which Macbeth, one of our best-known explorations of extreme ambition, of power and its corruptions, becomes instead a portrait of a grieving dad.

Unfortunately, this promising revision is delivered in lugubrious terms by a self-conscious director who cannot ever change the tone of the play without endlessly calling attention to those changes. The film constantly grinds to a halt so Kurzel can overdirect scenes with montages of stately images rendered less imperial by the jittery, eager editing.

Kurzel and his three screenwriters (Todd Louiso & Jacob Koskoff, and Michael Lesslie) have drastically cut and reshaped Shakespeare's text and swamped it in grime, gore, and murk. Even slashed to the bone, the words should still spill over with vitality and splendor, but the filmmakers bury them alive.

It isn't the conceptual spin that ultimately undoes Kurzel's Macbeth, but his ponderous approach, hefting each scene on top of the last as though moviemaking was an act of grunting, straining brute force, stacking up a big, bleak cairn.

Macbeth is certainly Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, but the extent to which Kurzel's adaptation subordinates the poetic to the visceral makes Polanski's grim, muddy 1971 version look as frothy as Much Ado About Nothing by comparison. We're talking maximum sound and fury, and while no movie that stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard could signify nothing, this one doesn't signify a whole lot.

Does Macbeth kill Duncan because of magic, fate or ambition? Or is Lady Macbeth to blame? These are the questions that, like the fog that Mr. Kurzel keeps pumping into the fray, obscure the character and that only Mr. Fassbender's exceptionally fine performance disperses. Quietly, insistently, he pulls you to him in scene after scene, largely with a restrained intensity that creates an intimacy between you and the character, effectively turning you into another Lady Macbeth.

Certainly the film excels on a technical level. Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw does bold (occasionally excessive) work with tinting and visible light, and he captures a real sense of desolation and foreboding in the snowy, foggy, muddy vistas that make up Scotland's stage of carnage. It is a handsome production, but that's insufficient. After it struts and frets its hour upon the stage, expect this Macbeth to be heard from no more.

Throughout, Kurzel's stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices, from the intimate realism of his interiors to his ultraviolent battlefield set pieces, anachronisms that evoke no other impression of the director so much as an arthouse Zack Snyder.

This physicality, along with the intensity of the performances, recasts Shakespeare's spookiest drama as a realist trip into PTSD. No matter if Macbeth remakes what was already written – after all, it always has been concerned with the prescribed nature of destiny.

Fassbender, arguably never better, steers the role into a gladiatorial exhibition, finding himself at the center of a nightmarishly menacing pomp, and emerging from a pool of freshwater the morning after he commits his first murder like some topless heartthrob too convinced of the camera's ability to render him immortal.

The camera sways, as if blown by the wind in an unstable world. Kurzel doesn't cut the text as much as Kurosawa did, but his Scottish-accented cast mutter rather than declaim, and visuals are more eloquent than vocals. It's a film rich in gesture. As they plot murder, the Macbeths whisper intently, brow to brow, and their hands find flesh under thick layers of clothes: assassination as aphrodisiac.

While much of Kurzel's Macbeth might seem heavy-handed, it's almost something of a virtue when wrestling with such melodramatic subject matter. In this sense, instead of shying away from those elements in Shakespeare's play, Kurzel has created the most dramatic and loyal adaptation of Macbeth in recent memory that simultaneously adds to the story in plot and thoroughly explores and expands on its ever-relevant themes of masculinity and power.