In Which We Simply Cannot Sit Through Another Macbeth

The Sad Boy

by DICK CHENEY

Macbeth
dir. Justin Kurzel
119 minutes

I have never liked Macbeth. It is easily the most patronizing of Shakespeare's plays and watching Michael Fassbender holding Marion Cotillard in his arms, gripping her like a wriggling golden retriever does little to alter my conviction.

I remember when I was a kid I explained to my fifth grade teacher that Macbeth was whipped. She highlighted this term and made me understand why it was so offensive, since it was a word that intimated a man controlling a woman was some kind of beastly slavery. She was controlling me in much the same fashion, so I substituted a synonym, or as I prefer to call it, a cinnamon. I will never forget her armpits; she never shaved them and it was very brave. Director Justin Kurzel attempts to dispense with the sexist undertones of his source material, but that is impossible and Macbeth becomes only duller for his impotent attempt.

Weirdly, Marion Cotillard uglies herself up quite a bit for Lady Macbeth. She barely ever leaves the dark rooms where she encourages her husband's misdeeds. Once she meets up with Duncan and she looks like a depressed housewife; not the wife of the Thane of Cawdor. Lady Macbeth, by all rights, should be glorious. But she is not, a fault blamed on the play's writer and the director of this year's Macbeth, who seems to think he is making some kind of Scottish horror movie.

Murder is substantially worse than Kurzel makes it out to be. As he slays Duncan, Fassbender has this very exacting look, like he is popping an extremely painful pimple. He looks good after the murder; he even seems to enjoy it on some level. Afterwards and before, the Scottish highlands resemble lesions on the face of the earth.

Even when Macbeth starts in on killing kids, we never see it, just the fire afterwards burning their corpses and the intonation of sad music. Was the point here to exclude the most interesting, painful parts of the story so that Fassbender could tawk more?

Even the theatrical Macbeth can only be saved by shifting the focus to the play's heroes. Malcolm (Jack Reynor) is a simpering man-child who weeps when Fassbender throatily informs him of his father's passing. Paddy Considine is utterly wasted in the shit role of Banquo, and he fades into the background as Fassbender overwhelms him by talking louder and more often. Sean Harris is a subtle and possessed actor who invests the key role of Macduff with a shrill vulnerability, but Kurzel and his tired author give Macbeth's mirror image little in the way of meaningful screen time. Even his grief is boilerplate: he retches.

The key scene in Macbeth is when the titular character goes mad at this big dinner in front of everyone. This is usually played partly for laughs and then it turns more serious. Since Kurzel's Macbeth is not the slightest bit humorous for any reason — it is maybe the most self-serious rendition of the tale ever perpetrated — we feel neither embarrassed nor amused.

Kurzel cuts as much of Macbeth's dialogue as he dares, the only means of turning the action into a compelling drama instead of an extended meditation on death. Avoiding the latter is difficult, because Macbeth has Fassbender intone some of his longer speeches into voiceover. All the mystery is lost in Macbeth by the end of the second act; we know everything there is to know, so the only means of keeping the audience's attention is to (1) show Fassbender shirtless and (2) wait for Marion Cotillard to do the same in vain. Everyone is ghosts at this point.

As the play spirals toward the inevitable, just before Lady Macbeth is about to take her own life for reasons unknown, Marion is actually looking a lot better. A lot of directors have trouble making sense of Cotillard's beauty, and her raw, throaty sexuality before death is the best part of Kurzel's Macbeth. It is the only time we are listening because we care, not because the diegesis is begging for any attention at all.

I don't know if Shakespeare is holding up all that much lately. His political commentary seems super dated; even twenty years ago it seemed significantly more relevant. A few of his comedies are funny, but most of them are weird jokes with sexual entendres that barely made sense even at the time. Besides Hamlet, you may want to be spared the trouble when this time could be repurposed towards getting into crossfit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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In Which Michael Fassbender Brought The Whole Band

Fassbending

by ELEANOR MORROW

Frank
dir. Lenny Abrahamson
95 minutes

In Frank Michael Fassbender has a line serrating his upper hair from his lower hair. It is the impression of the cartoon head he wears onstage as a performer in an experimental rock group for the first 70 minutes of Frank. Near the end of the film we meet Frank's parents and we learn is from the God that brought you the mentally unstable Daniel Johnston (he once crashed a plane and survived) or the astonishingly honorific Dr. Dre. I think Alanis Morisette has sclerosis?

Something is always like something else.

Frank features ensemble experimental music created by a group of actors, which was the entire reason for the failure of the John Cage musical. The songs are uniformly bad until the last number, where Fassbender bleats 'I love you all' while staring away from the camera. Maggie Gyllenhaal attempts eye contact for a few seconds during this improvised song, but it is never achieved.

Robbed of his ability to make that expression where he shows off his gums, Fassbender attempts to construct Frank purely out of his movements. The best part of Frank is when Fassbender runs anywhere - his legs revolve like those of Bugs Bunny or the Tasmanian Devil. You can tell it is Fassbender in the head the entire time, even if no one told you. You would just be like, That's the guy from everything, which is what we say before a talented artist achieves his defining role, like Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher.

At first Frank seems like a musical genius, but once you hear his songs, that possibility fades away. Frank has the worst music of any movie.

Gyllenhaal too is focused on her physicality. Left as the only interesting thing to look at in a group of guys who look like they were taken from central casting for  a Freddie Mercury biopic, she writhes and poses in equal measure. She has aged very well and is only now being cast in parts appropriate for her dashing, tilting artifice. She can keep something - a scene, a moment - alive long after you believed it was dead, and show the camera how it has been changed by being resurrected.

The only time the film is quiet or at rest is when the band's manager is tweeting about their album recording session or tumbling about a really moving artistic moment. The tumblr and twitter posts appear onscreen, just so you're 100 percent sure that none of this is the least bit authentic. All of them are super-cringeworthy, the ones that are meant to be and the ones that aren't meant to be. Telling the difference is a job for scientists, artisans, or psychologists. The only thing that is certain is that this movie is not a satire, unless...would that make it better?

Having never approached the sun, you can be certain Frank never tried to imitate the actual creative process. It just tries to stand in the light nearby.

The point of Frank, I guess, is that nothing is authentic, especially in, but not limited to, the musical world. John Cage was possibly authentic, but no one else, especially not Lou Reed or Andy Warhol or Mark Kozelek or Gary Lutz or Marlon Brando or Junot Diaz or Stanley Fish or Javier Bardem. They were all in soap operas. You will know the real thing when you see it.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find an archive of her writing here.

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"Daddystitch" - Ashrae Fax (mp3)

In Which We Envy Cormac McCarthy's Therapist

Art By Omission

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Counselor
dir. Ridley Scott
117 minutes

The lawyer (Michael Fassbender) is a very happy-go-lucky guy. His business is with the cartels; his partner is Reiner (Javier Bardem). The two plot to sell $20 million in cocaine to the Mexican cartels. It turns out this is a very ugly business, although not quite as ugly as you may have imagined, since it is being carried off by people who look more like models than criminals.

Fassbender's love relationship is with a sweetly innocent Penelope Cruz. There is a fantastic scene between the two of them where we only hear the male side of the telephone conversation. Instead of excising the time it takes for the other person to respond, we have to suffer through Fassbender's patience to hear her completely, even if only for a moment, out of respect for the one he loves. "Being together is everything," he crows, "the rest is just waiting." Bullshit.

Fassbender is the most exciting actor working today. The only thing he cannot carry off seamlessly is any kind of sexuality — hence the phone intercourse. He more resembles an androgyne with a working set of genetalia; it is no wonder he seems perched on the edge of a career playing robots. He is the anti-Rock Hudson.

Mr. Scott seems to adore using Fassbender because he is wonderful for distracting you from the point of the scene. In The Counselor, such distractions are useful, since there is really nothing in the way of conflict between the characters, at least nothing that would feasibly be resolved with words.

Plastic surgery has altered the boundaries of Cameron Diaz's facial expressions. She is now prone to playing emotionless characters because the vast majority of her cheekbones' communicative abilities have been reduced to either a coy smile or utter disgust.

"My parents were thrown from a helicopter when I was three," she informs a priest for some reason. (He cannot even bear to share the same confessional as this woman.) The Counselor features Diaz's best role in some time, both because she is supposed to be cold in it, and because she does a nice job of showing how a person can be both corrupted and have that corruption be sort of infectious.

Brad Pitt portrays the middle man in the counselor's transaction with the cartel. He looks years younger than in his recent roles, probably because his part here demands more boyish charm than a grim father surviving the apocalypse.

Diaz having sex with a car windshield, as she does in a flashback Reiner recalls to the counselor, does not make very much sense. It is the only funny part of The Counselor, the rest is just extended long conversations between famous Hollywood actors pretending to be people they are so obviously not.

Yet there is a sort of benign, harmless charm to The Counselor, something like visiting a family ride at Disneyland. You try to enjoy it even though you know you are not the audience for which it was intended. The film never feels overly long or boring, since it is composed only of anticipation, not action.

In a way McCarthy is making a joke on how cinema represents anything at all, calling it to moral account. Do I have to tell you at whose expense this joke is being made?

The events of The Counselor all connect to each other, and there is very little in the way of plot to follow. These scenes might take place in any order. "I'm not going to tell you what mistakes you made that got you here," a member of the cartel tells Fassbender, who can only respond idly in a fakish Texas accent brought into existence purely for this role.

This explanation — that the counselor was doomed all along, simply because of his race and status, is meant to be an ironic commentary.

McCarthy's art here is entirely by omission. By drawing our attention away from how action usually takes place in cinema, he forces us to reexamine our role as spectator. It is something like looking into a microscope instead of the entire rhesus monkey: Fassbender, Pitt, Diaz, even McCarthy himself are merely cells in a larger organism. Instead of the way you are told evil unfolds, it has already unfolded more quickly than you realized. When you woke it was at your doorstep.

These people have known each other for longer than you have known them, possibly much longer. After they order two Heinekens, Pitt and Fassbender get to talking. Pitt's cliches are so wrapped up in themselves that they approach parody; it is all that his fellow actor can do just to keep a straight face he mugs so much. Pitt's career was founded on looking levelly at people with sunglasses and taking their measure; the counselor looks away until the penultimate moment, the only one at which he is ever alive.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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