The Weird Sisters Prophesy Blood From a Dance Floor

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Published: July 6, 2007

For four centuries William Shakespeare’s plays have been reinvented to fit contemporary sensibilities. But few recent efforts can match the Australian writer and director Geoffrey Wright’s brutal and thrilling new version, which envisions the thane of Cawdor as a longhaired, drug-addled gangster and his poisoned realm as a decadent MTV dreamscape of nymphet witches, smoky nightclubs and point-blank, slow-motion gun battles.

Laudably, though, this “Macbeth” isn’t content to riff on Shakespeare’s short and bracingly violent tragedy. While Mr. Wright’s movie goes to great, often inventive lengths to tell the tale visually, it dutifully preserves great swaths of the playwright’s verse and often ramps down its machine-gun-style editing and jittery handheld camera work to allow sensuous language and the cast’s consistently imaginative, lively performances to take center stage.

Mr. Wright and his co-writer, Victoria Hill — the actress who also plays Lady Macbeth — reimagine the title character as a loyal foot soldier in an urban gang in today’s Melbourne. The film opens with a drug deal that becomes a double-cross and then a bloodbath. Macbeth (Sam Worthington) ruthlessly sets things right, earning a promotion from his boss, the criminal kingpin Duncan (Gary Sweet).

But Macbeth isn’t content because he’s had a vision of something grander, seen in a pill-and-booze-fueled fantasy of three teenage goth chicks whispering prophecies in his ear as they shimmy against him on the foggy dance floor of an empty nightclub. (Macbeth turns on the music and fog machine himself — a neat touch.) Once Lady Macbeth gets into the act, filling her man’s head with dreams of power, the bodies start to pile up.

Mr. Wright — a former film critic whose debut feature, the powerful 1992 skinhead drama “Romper Stomper,” made a rising star of Russell Crowe — isn’t just another would-be Quentin Tarantino, piling on gore and self-referential cuteness. He respects the visual power of killing. When Macbeth and other characters shed blood, the movie insists on showing how physically hard it is to murder a person, how the act corrupts and numbs the perpetrator and how it implicates those who watch (the viewer included). This “Macbeth” is one of the year’s most violent movies, and every crimson drop is justified.

“Macbeth” has been made as a gangster picture before, in the laughably bad Mafia potboiler “Men of Respect,” for instance. Mr. Wright’s version is a huge improvement over that film. The pulsing, club-ready soundtrack, plentiful nudity and frenzied, sometimes pretentiously edited action sequences are clearly intended as bait to broaden the audience beyond Shakespeare buffs, but “Macbeth” is ultimately true to the horror and sadness of Shakespeare’s vision. A cloud of guilt hangs over every cruel act; even the henchmen who kill the wife and son of Macbeth’s chief rival, Macduff (Lachy Hulme), eventually quake with shame over what they’ve done.

But the movie is fun too. Mr. Wright and Ms. Hill know that part of the pleasure of modern-dress Shakespeare is seeing how the adapters are going to depict certain indelible scenes, phrases and images, and their imagination rarely disappoints.

In this telling, the three witches are first glimpsed in the opening scene vandalizing tombstones (a funny pre-emptive strike against critics who might accuse Mr. Wright of despoiling great literature). Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me” monologue is delivered while staring at an empty swing behind her house, a blunt allusion to her barrenness. Macbeth utters “is this a dagger I see before me” in the garden behind his home at night, while staring at a plant’s shadow that vaguely resembles a blade. And Birnam Wood ... well, let’s just say that the “Die Hard” hero, John McClane, would approve.

MACBETH

Now Playing!

Directed by Geoffrey Wright; written by Mr. Wright and Victoria Hill, adapted from the play by William Shakespeare; director of photography, Will Gibson; edited by Jane Usher; music by John Clifford White; production designer, David McKay; produced by Martin Fabinyi; released by Union Station Media and Truly Indie. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 109 minutes. This film is rated 'R'.

WITH: Sam Worthington (Macbeth), Victoria Hill (Lady Macbeth), Lachy Hulme (Macduff), Steve Bastoni (Banquo), Gary Sweet (Duncan), Chloe Armstrong (First Witch), Kate Bell (Second Witch) and Miranda Nation (Third Witch).

Now ... if we can only find the film we can watch it!!!!!