Word: macbeth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...point is debatable. Cowed by the official castigation of his 1930-32 masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
Superstitious theater folk call it "the Scottish play." For them, merely to speak its name is to invite worse agonies than any conjured from eye of newt and toe of frog. More rational observers, too, view Macbeth as fraught with difficulties. Its plot cannot work unless skeptical modern audiences will believe in witches and the supernatural. The central couple kill in unforeshadowed haste and repent in wearisome leisure. As a tyrant, Macbeth seems a paranoiac cross between Herod, slaughtering a legion of innocents to be sure he got the right one, and the pathetic people who kill entire families...
...forthright speech and action. Alas, what sounds like explosive chemistry proves inert. The missing catalyst is a directorial idea of what the play is about, a point of view. From the opening declamatory rant of a wounded soldier to the final hortatory hollowness of the youth who supplants Macbeth, volume substitutes for meaning. This fish stinks from the head: Plummer copes with the poetry of "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" by denaturing it in monotone; Jackson distracts attention from her shrillness by twitching, fidgeting, and slithering her hands over her torso in erotic confusion...
There are cinematic scene shifts, striking tableaux and, too late to help, affecting moments for Macduff and the wife and son whom he unknowingly abandons to their murder. At the end, Macbeth and Macduff duel in silhouette, then tumble behind a row of soldiers, so there is momentary doubt about who felled whom. But surely almost everyone knows the plot: such pseudo surprise is no substitute for the deeper astonishment of fresh insight into two of the great archetypes in world drama...
...Hedda, played here by Holly Cate, is never a bore to watch. Cate portrays Hedda with proportionate coldness, but wisely refrains from histrionics. Hedda's fury isn't the tumultuous kind of a Lady Macbeth or a Medea. In her appropriately antiseptic delivery, Cate invokes the quiet strength of Ibsen's heroine...