![]() ![]() Kurzel has also stated that his own father’s death influenced the making of the film: “I’ve had a difficult time decoding my grief, working out what to do with it. Kurzel himself is a father, and his twin daughters with actor Essie Davis were about nine years old when Macbeth was released in 2015. In Kurzel’s film the depiction of boy soldiers too young to have beards invokes the current use of real children in armed conflicts around the globe, raising deeply uncomfortable questions about the status of young people as innocent victims of war. Gemma Miller, who has examined the ambiguous role of children in various adaptations of Macbeth, similarly finds Kurzel’s version “symptomatic of a major cultural shift in attitudes towards childhood” in the last few decades (52). ![]() Commenting on the youth who populate Macbeth on the Estate, Carol Rutter has situated Woolcock’s film in Britain’s “ongoing cultural crisis in ‘childness’” that emerged in the 1990s, when adults’ “deep anxieties about relatedness and separation, about authority and autonomy” found expression in child figures on stage and screen (172). Perhaps, then, the question to ask is not why children are so pervasive in Kurzel’s treatment, but why they are relatively absent from others. 3 Shakespeare also uses numerous words related to natural and unnatural nativity: “birth,” “labour,” “swelling act,” “carved out,” “issue,” “firstlings,” “bring forth,” “breed,” and so on. There are certainly dead and phantasmic children in Shakespeare’s play: the “naked new-born babe” that will trumpet Duncan’s murder (1.7.21) Lady Macbeth’s dark allusion to the infant she has “given suck” (1.7.54) the child apparitions conjured by the witches the killings of Banquo’s, Macduff’s, and Seyward’s children and the prophecy “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.96-97). 2 But in Kurzel’s version we are also given Macbeth’s repeated hauntings by an unnamed boy soldier (a fourteen-year-old Scot Greenan), Banquo’s deep attachment to his son, Macduff’s tight-knit brood, parish children at play, and the representation of Macbeth’s madness as a regression to a childlike state. Both Wright and Woolcock portray the witches as delinquent youth. With this opening scene, Kurzel makes a significant departure from Shakespeare’s text by providing an answer to the infamous question: “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” 1 By imagining the Macbeths as already grieving parents, Kurzel follows the example of fellow Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth (2006), set in contemporary Melbourne’s criminal underworld, and British director Penny Woolcock’s socially grim production for the BBC, Macbeth on the Estate (1997). Only then do we see the witches-a weird family of four females ranging from girlhood to middle-age with another babe in arms-watching upon the heath.įigure 1: The film’s opening shot of the Macbeth baby laid out for burial. A torch is lit, and the brilliant flames of the funeral pyre momentarily suffuse the drab Scottish landscape. An overhead shot of the corpse is shown again, this time with Macbeth’s hand flattened upon the baby’s chest. Our attention is drawn to the pair since Banquo and Fleance are unhooded among the mourners draped in long headscarves. Next, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) places seashells over the baby’s eyes, and standing in the assembled crowd is Banquo (Paddy Considine), his hands resting on the shoulders of his own boy, Fleance (Lochlann Harris). As Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) steps forward to press flowers into the child’s hands, in the background composer Jed Kurzel’s minimalist and haunting string music is layered with the sound of lashing wind. ![]() × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University Effigies of Childhood in Kurzel’s Macbeth Hanh BuiĪustralian director Justin Kurzel’s film adaptation of Macbeth (2015) opens with a shot you will not find in Shakespeare-a bird’s eye view of the Macbeths’ dead baby son (played by twins Frank and Jack Madigan) laid out for burial, his skin mottled with what appear to be smallpox scars (see Figure 1). ![]()
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