Movies: Macbeth

I really wanted to love this movie. I was so excited when the first trailers came out. And then I watched it and was just kind of, "Meh."

This take on the Scottish play is somewhere between gritty realism and stylistic. Hyper-realism perhaps. But the whole thing is so . . . grave . . . and slow . . . It made me sleepy. Everyone seemed to talk with the exact same monotonous inflection. A lot of the dialogue was half mumbled. The images were monochromatic.

Let's just say I was underwhelmed.

It probably didn't help that I saw a fantastic version of Macbeth at the Globe a few years ago. The best I'd ever seen, and I see (and perform, and teach) a lot of Shakespeare. So . . . Yeah.

By the end of this movie I was half asleep and didn't care what happened or to whom. (Not that I didn't know how it ended anyway.) There was no investment in character here, just a lot of people speaking Shakespeare's words in very boring ways and with nothing much to look at. Except their faces. So many extreme close ups. Yow.

I'm sorry this wasn't better.