Review of LADY MACBETH
by Lucy Johns, mentor
Before there was film noir, there was Lady Macbeth. The woman whose passion overwhelms and thereby corrupts men is a timeless force that undermines patriarchal order. Whether she grasps without reserve for sex, power, or knowledge (Eve!) she must, in the end, be punished.
The new film “Lady Macbeth” from the little known British director William Oldroyd adds a disturbing enhancement to this timeless parable. Not only is she not punished, the lady uses her power to reach into and destroy within a segment of society that truly has no recourse, the black underclass, even more helpless against patriarchy than a woman whose wiles may save her. A white woman is oppressed, no question. A black person, woman or man, is ever a handy surrogate to suffer the wrath of the oppressor. A white woman knows this, exploiting white supremacy to avoid or at least postpone her own reckoning.
The film opens on an image of a bridal veil on a head of dark hair. The veil has intricate detail: this is not a poor person. While the congregation sings a benediction, she turns her head slightly to the black-clad shoulder looming next to her. Florence Pugh’s eyes, the angle of the camera on her face, unmistakably convey that she doesn’t know this person. In fact she was sold, along with some land, for marriage to the son of a local Scottish tyrant. Her new husband treats her with icy contempt, her father-in-law, living in the same house, with implacable hostility. The black maid servant Anna, taking her cue from her masters, shows no sign of potential for female bonding. She wakes her new mistress every morning with a clatter of immense wooden shutters. She tightens the corset strings with expert strength. She does as she’s told but intuits that she can take her anger out against another woman helpless against the family males. Catherine is utterly alone, utterly powerless in this house of strangers.
When her husband leaves for an indeterminate time to take care of business, Catherine takes to the moors, which she has been forbidden to do. Exultant from fresh air and momentary freedom, she happens upon a gathering of farmhands tormenting Anna. Her manner betrays no diffidence as she orders them to stop. Something about the ring leader makes her hesitate. He rushes her. His temerity, followed by invasion of her bedroom, evokes passion rather than rage. They fall into tumultuous sexual bliss.
Of course this cannot end well. Murders, betrayals, extraordinary complications emanating from the dead, follow. Yet this lady Macbeth, asserting agency that violates the limits of her time, models what women have to do to gain any freedom of action whatsoever. That she ends as she began, utterly alone, is not the price normally exacted for such transgression.
Oldroyd’s filming shows great skill in shaping the medium and the messengers to the story. Catherine is posed, motionless, for longer periods than actors normally sit or lie still in a movie. There is little music to distract from the visual bleakness of life in that time and place. The house is almost as soundless as its denizens are constricted in movement and expression. Oppression conveyed through lengthy and repeated minutes of stillness ensures the eventual explosions are all the more emotionally powerful. The actors - Naomi Ackie as Anna the servant (slave? This is never clarified.), Christopher Fairbank as the presiding tyrant, Cosmo Jarvis as the irresistible force of illicit sex and especially Pugh as a maid mad to test her and others’ limits - are thrilling to watch. This is a Macbeth expertly fitted, 400 years later and filtered through Nicolai Leskov’s 19th century short story “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk,” to a modern sensibility alert to the misogyny and racism that pervade western societies to this day.
© Lucy Johns, 2017