‘Lady Macbeth’: Beauty is seldom this dark
The film opening today at the Magic Lantern, titled "Lady Macbeth," isn't what you might think. That's what I explain in the review that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:
Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” was first performed around 1606, though the exact date has been lost to history. What has not been lost is the tragedy itself – a theatrical piece that superstitious actors, fearing that to say the name is bad luck, refer to as The Scottish Play.
British filmmaker William Oldroyd, it’s clear, does not share that superstition. In fact, so oblivious is he to any threat of misfortune that he agreed to call his first feature film “Lady Macbeth.”
Oldroyd’s film, though, has little to do with Shakespeare. Instead, it is based on an 1865 novella titled “Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District,” written by the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov. Previously rendered as both an opera and a 1962 film, Leskov’s novel has more in common with the novels of D.H. Lawrence and Gustav Flaubert.
Set in 19th-century northern England, on the moors made famous by Emily Bronte, Oldroyd’s film centers on a young woman named Katherine (played by newcomer Florence Pugh). Bought – and I use that term intentionally – by a landowner to give his son children, Katherine finds herself in a virtual prison, confined to the house, not a book in sight, no friends to speak to, ignored by a husband and berated by a father-in-law for not doing her wifely duties – though it is her resentful husband who has no apparent interest in marital consummation.
Katherine, though, is no Jane Austen refugee. She may have as much spunk as your typical Austen heroine, but she has something else as well: a tide of barely suppressed rage that, combined with a sense of self-regard uncommon to women in literature, if not life, leads her to embark on a path that results, ultimately, in murder.
Multiple murders, in fact. The death parade begins when, during her husband’s absence, she takes up with the household’s new groomsman, Sebastian (played by Cosmo Jarvis). It continues when she throws the affair in her father-in-law’s face. And fairly quickly come the killings – three of them in all, including that of a horse, not to mention an infanticide. All that, however, is just the beginning of Katherine’s betrayals.
Though this is his first feature, Oldroyd has a firm sense of how to make a film. His cinematographer, Ari Wegner, manages both to capture shots of the stark Yorkshire moors while giving the candle- and fireplace-lit interiors a sense of authenticity. Oldroyd himself is unafraid of long takes and silences, shown particularly by his judicious use of music.
And even though a small budget limited his choice of actors, he cast well. Pugh, just 19 when she snared the role, is a real find. But also good are the equally unknown Jarvis and Naomi Ackie as Katherine’s servant. The fact that both are black adds a racial component, complicating what otherwise is a commentary on gender and class.
In other words, though Oldroyd’s film does not use Shakespeare’s tragedy as a model, it is as dark as anything the Bard ever imagined. What’s ironic is that this darkest of tales is told in a uniquely beautiful manner.