Missy - The Scottish Play ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 Well the 2015 Macbeth was certainly a beautifully shot version of that play. Also it was brief. This is Shakespeares shortest tragedy and they edited it down even further. It’s my 4th different version of the play and probably my second favorite. 

Things I loved. 

The two stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard were fantastic. 

The score was eerie and slow. The scenes, every single one of them were peak artistic expression.

If you haven’t seen this version have a listen here to the score. 

Also you just cannot beat Scotland for haunting beauty. I have this thing where I am sometimes nostalgic for things I have never seen. I miss American Chestnuts and I miss the Isle of Sky in this way. 

10/10 for location shooting here. 

I liked the semi Bravehart war make up and the shifting into madness color palette. I liked the fight choreography. I liked the witches deadened delivery and I liked the bloodiness. 

I mean come on. Look at this!

Things that startled me. The youth of Fleance, who I had always envisioned as a young man, pulled at my heart. The beginning with the death of the young Macbeth(s), was something I’d often thought of but I hadn’t expected to show up on screen. The number of witches that ignored my preconceived maiden, mother, crone triumvirate of witchcraft sort of bothered me. Plus I kept thinking about James and his occult obsession  

I adored the out damn spot scene  It was great as delivered but after the pan to show her child on the floor with her it became bar none the best version of that soliloquy that I’ve ever seen  

I don’t think this scene can be topped. This is probably peak out damn spot. 

I did not like how Macbeth instead of shrinking from personal violence after killing the king, charged headfirst into it. I’ll admit it felt very in line with the self destruction of the character and fed into the madness of his wife. It even granted a sort of “You asked for it!”, pathos to her break. But it hurt my feelings and I didn’t enjoy it. I especially did not enjoy the burning of the MacDuff family. 

Things I feel about this play:

This has always struck me as a pandering supremely Jacobean work and I’m less enthusiastic about James than Elizabeth. That being said I find this to be one of the very few works of Shakespeare that benefits from hard thinking character analysis. 

When Iago is a villain it doesn’t really matter why. When the Capulets fight the Montiques the origins of their dude is irrelevant. Even in the comedy’s motivation and genius’s don’t count. 

With Macbeth it all matters. 

Hamlet and Macbeth share this actor problem. The ‘is he isn’t he’ of the madness and the difficulty of playing these parts as sympathetic (or at least believable enough) when they act so strangely. 

Fassbender was a flawed and fragile man pushed and self deluded into a very recognizable self destruction. I loved this portrayal but it didn’t represented the hard fall the text indicates, because he started in the edge then slipped over it so seamlessly. 

I read a review I liked from Medium that cemented this feeling for me. 

I’m glad I saw this version. It made me think as much as it made me feel and that was great. Because of my mom score tracking it made me think again about women in Shakespeare. 

I feel like Shakespeare didn’t get women the way that lots of male writers don’t. But then I think well it’s not a book it’s a play and only archetypes will do for some versions of theater. Then I think I’m too temporally removed from era to know if he’s misunderstanding and misrepresenting or if my assumptions about the female voice are just as off. 

Then I wondered if he is great with the male voice. 

So I asked my husband. 

Do you think Shakespeare understands men? He said some men sometimes. Ugh

I am hoping to convince him to write something small here about it. I’d also like to see if our friend Donnie has thoughts about this. 

Fassbenders Favorite version of this play is Throne of Blood and I’m thinking more and more that when we finish this list we should go back and do recommended alternative versions. 

My favorite version by far is the 2005 Shakespeare ReTold BbC series MacChef version. 

Macbeth 2015 - 4 stars for beauty and the leads minus a tiny bit for editorial choices that I don’t even entirely disagree with. 

Mom score - ooofff I’m not sure what to say here. I think lots of the things Shakespeare gets wrong about the essential nature of women  are corrected here. 

I see too many of James’ female hangups in Lady Macbeth to read the character as anything other than propaganda. On the other hand she just works. She sticks with you because she’s got so much depth. Maybe it’s just that she’s a great cipher. 

If this is interesting to you I recommend having a look at this video about James coming to the throne of England. 

I’ve linked a lot of videos here and asked for outside voices and all of that is a sign that this play did the thing that good theater can do, and scrambled my brain a bit. 

Three cheers for Shakespeare. 

I need to make a further adenda here. The great author Dorothy Dunnett wrote a book called King Hereafter which is an historical fiction version of the story of a posited Macbeth. 

It’s the only book of hers I have not finished despite my adoration and this post has reminded me that I mean to do that. 

Hypothetical suplemental post for that in future.