Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth is a two-hour epic that is entertaining from beginning to end. The Oscar-worthy performance of Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth has garnered considerable attention from critics and viewers across the globe and deserves every bit of it. The digital cinematography is breathtaking beyond all means and the story is very well conveyed visually. Macbeth is almost on the level of filmmaking as an art-house picture because it feels slightly more experimental than a linear three-act-structure. Shakespeare, of course, wrote all his plays in a five-act structure, but this film jumps around with numerous flashbacks, delusional-like hallucinations, and several other filmmaking techniques in order to tell a visual story. Most of the dialogue is not necessarily important. The thick Scottish accents at some points of the film seem to be unintelligible and can leave the viewer to continue to ask “What did he/she say?” throughout the entire runtime. I don’t necessarily see the problem as being solely the accents, but more so the sound mixing. The background noise is often louder than the characters speaking and even when you do pick up the dialogue and what is being said, the old English could leave some viewers confused. The dialogue is more burdensome to the story than helpful. This is one of those movies that you could watch without the dialogue and understand about 95% of the story. The director and cinematographer did an outstanding job in accomplishing that.

   Although the cinematography and directing are among the film’s strongest elements, the editing seems to defy both of those roles at some point or another. To my knowledge, the film had a longer cut before being released. I would be very interested in seeing that version of the picture. It seems as if they took too much out in the film and the fast cutting and pace that the filmmakers went with did not seem to work with the heart of the film’s story. The beginning and the end use too many cliché visual techniques to make the film look exceptional. The picture, however, already looks as good as it could be with the stunning photography, lighting, and exceptional performances by the actors. Due to this, the fast pace cutting, over color-corrected ending, and slow motion battle scenes often appear extremely grating throughout the film. That, however, is no one else’s fault other than the editor or the director (if he had a say). It seems as if the producers and distributors did not want a three-hour long film and may have forced the filmmakers to cut the footage down by an hour (which is an extreme amount). I hope the longer cut will eventually be released. The reviews by most critics tended to be more favorable when the longer version was still in place, but now with the shorter cut, the reviews are still good, but just not as good as before.

   Despite, some of the technical flaws of the film, other than the cinematography and lighting, the film’s performances by Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Sean Harris (Macduff) with the directing by Justin Kurzel come to be nearly flawless. This version of Macbeth is one of the best to date, along with Roman Polanski’s version from 1971 and Kurosawa’s feudal-Japanese version Throne of Blood. I can see more good things coming from Justin Kurzel in the future.

B+