Lady Macbeth

"Lady Macbeth" is like a Charlotte Bronte novel if the main heroine were a psychopath.

Florence Pugh plays a young woman saddled with a marriage and an estate that she did not choose for herself, who gets a taste of what it is to give in to her own passionate urges when she shacks up with a hunky stable boy and then decides that she will have a life with him no matter what or who she has to eliminate to make it happen.

"Lady Macbeth" sounds dark and juicy on paper, and it could have been a fabulously lurid spin on the Victorian Gothic template, but as treated here it's far too restrained to take advantage of the pulpy subject matter. The whole film, from the direction to the performances, really needed to go for it and not hold back. Instead, it's too quiet and slow by half, and though Pugh does an admirable job, one can't help but wonder how much more memorable a character she might have been able to create had she been allowed to really go off the rails. Maybe an odd and random thought, but the whole time I was watching this movie I was thinking what a younger Naomi Watts could have done with it.

Not a total misfire, but nowhere nearly as good as it could have been.

Grade: B

This film tells the story of a young woman who is sold into a loveless marriage with an older wealthy gentleman. She has a passionate affair with a servant of the house. The promise of a happier life eludes her, until she takes full control of the situation.

Initially I thought the film was really about Macbeth's wife, but I soon learn that it is not the case. The title comes from the similar ruthlessness and cold bloodedness that the leading woman and Lady Macbeth have. It is engaging to see how Katherine transforms from a timid woman into a sociopathic woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. The pacing is a little slow, with artistic shots lasting 10 or even 20 seconds but does not really help story telling. Overall, the story is good and Katherine's character is very interesting.

I was enthralled by this movie from start to finish. The cinematography and sound were excellent. The complete absence of a music soundtrack except for two notable atmospheric crescendos added to the overall oppressiveness of the story and the location. All of the performances were excellent and the lead was outstanding IMO. The story was in many ways familiar - being evocative of Bronte and Hardy - with its portrayal of Victorian country gentry and the brutality and sense of entitlement that sometimes occurred between the classes but the way the story unfolded frequently surprised me by not following through in the way one might have expected it to. I too would recommend a cinema viewing in order to get the full effect of the landscape and the oppressive silence of the house.

Looking at the title, you might think director William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth is about revenge, lust, murder, and boredom, and you would be right on all counts. Katherine (Florence Pugh), a 19th century teen bride of an arranged marriage to a middle-aged drunk, can't get no satisfaction. Her husband is impotent for starters, and the estate is so forbidding murder would seem to be a required pastime.

Yet, sex is the prime mover here, where she discovers randy groomsman Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), and takes him to bed in the long absence of her hubby. Meek black Anna (Naomi Ackie), Katherine's servant, observes the shenanigans, much as we do, unable to change what she sees will be an outcome unpleasant to the core. To the end Anna is faithful to Katherine, a slave to a mistress who is herself a slave to men and convention.

Several archetypal themes arise in this somber, artfully-photographed drama. For instance, one that emphasizes the wages of sin is prominent; another about the subjugated rising against the oppressor; and another about the danger of socially imprisoning smart women in a paternalistic society. A leitmotif also surfaces about the dangers of debilitating class distinctions, which are never a good thing in the long haul.

Ari Wegner's cinematography is portrait-like if considering only the recurring shot of Katherine sitting on her Victorian couch in a consuming dress that seems to deteriorate with each similar shot. Underneath the dress is the corset, so long a symbol of the era's tight hold on women.

Remembering Amma Asante's Belle, I'm pleased to see another art- film treatment of fraught race relations in merry ol' England. That none of this will ever stop is promised in the spawn of the miscreants, children of evil destined to repeat their parents' sins.

Lady Macbeth is an interesting minimalist story of a smothered young woman, whose intensity will lay waste to the social fabric of the estate. In fact, much of the proceedings are Shakespearean with their emphasis on man's weakness in his dominance, a woman's Eve-like ability to lure men into sin, and the pride that inevitably leads to a fall.

Depressing but dramatically satisfying.

You've been sold off into a marriage, not made in heaven, to a man who sees you only as possession, life has ended now for you, you should do, what you're told to, that's sit all day, a little pray, absorb oppression. But desires are on fire and you need passion, there are shackles that you need to have unfastened, and Sebastian's the key, can unlock all misery, by removing all unsatisfied frustration. It's not just clothes that are discarded and come off, soon the wheels of the carriage are all troughed, discretion lets you down, but you're tough, and don't bow down, although your actions may make one or two souls scoff.

Brilliant, Florence Pugh is absolutely fantastic!!!