Australian & New Zealand film Locations Relocationsand ‘Jindabyne’ and ‘Macbeth’
On the face of it, the two new films Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence, 2006) and Macbeth (Geoffrey Wright, 2006) may not seem to have much in common. But when one thinks about it, and without wanting to lash them together as a pigeon pair, it is clear that in a couple of important ways they are worth considering in tandem. by Brian Mcfarlane
irst, and most obvious, they are speare’s title, has set his version of Macbeth in Mel- based on works by famous and non- bourne’s ganglands, which have been the milieu for Australian authors. Second, they are some sensational (or at least sensationally reported) the work of directors whose name killings in the last few years. A film adaptation is – of carries a certain resonance in recent itself – neither more nor less praiseworthy than a film Australian cinema. And, third, they are original: all that matters is the skill with which the ad- Fmore than usually ambitious films in what is already aptation has been effected; whether the filmmakers a good year for locally made films. have comprehensively re-imagined the work as op- posed, say, to aiming at that dogged fidelity which In a recent issue of this journal, I wrote about the per- seems such a doomed enterprise. sistence of the literary adaptation in new Australian cinema.1 While acknowledging a shift in the kinds of These two new films,I shall argue, are the work of works adapted, from the ‘classics’ of our literature filmmakers who, while no doubt respecting their which were so significant an element in the revival of source material (why otherwise would they want to the 1970s to the more abrasive, usually urban fictions film it?), have not hesitated to take a strongly indi- of recent times (cf. this year’s Candy [Neil Armfield]), vidual line with regard to the anterior text. They are I realized that all the novels referred to, and all the directors of whom audiences have expectations, plays but one, were either by Australian authors or stylistic and thematic, and where Wright has omit- set in Australia. D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (filmed by ted some characters and events, in the interests of Tim Burstall in 1987) is the product of a few months’ a coherent relocation, Lawrence has had to be in- sojourn here by a British writer, and Michael Blake- ventive in providing, as cinema must, the actuali- more’s undervalued Country Life (1984) is derived ty of place and person that a terse short story may from Chekhov’s imperishable study of Russian pro- do without. Neither director has been exactly prolif- vincial life, Uncle Vanya. But these are exceptions. ic and the new films of each are awaited with more than usual – and justified – interest. Now, released within the space of two months, are two major new Australian films whose roots are to Jindabyne: ‘Nothing to Hide’2 be found in other places and other cultures. In Jind- abyne, director Ray Lawrence has taken Raymond Even for Carver, who habitually dispens- Carver’s minimalist short story ‘So Much Water So es words with an austerity that a Trappist monk Close to Home’ and relocated it to the Snowy Moun- might admire, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ tains, while retaining the moral dilemma at the sto- is extraordinarily close-lipped about who the peo- ry’s core. Geoffrey Wright, boldly retaining Shake- ple are and where they live. Not that this matters
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for so masterly a writer: in ten pages, ut- wanted to do a film outside.S o when Be- ognize these, or, if they do, to put them to terly free from the sort of authorial com- atrix [Christian, screenwriter] and I decid- one side. The youngest guy, Billy (Simon ment that would guide our judgments, the ed we were going ahead I said, ‘Let’s do Stone), is ‘not getting any reception’ on his lives of Claire and Stuart are laid bare be- what Raymond Carver did. Let’s go where mobile, and this seems enough reason to fore us. Stuart can insist that he has noth- we want to set it and see what happens.’4 go ahead and enjoy the weekend and re- ing to hide; Claire will have her own views Film’s necessarily higher level of mimesis port the body in the water (we’ve seen the on this and make her own reparations; and enjoins on the filmmaker the need for spe- truck-driver dump it there) when they get at the end they will have sex quickly before cificity about details of place. Lawrence back. The primeval forest, with its poten- their small son comes home. Their ways of contrasts the dry expanses in which the tial for engendering conflict, recalls not being with each other emerge with aston- unsettling opening sequence takes place only Deliverance but also the recent Mean ishing clarity from the sparest of exchang- with the serene lake near the town and the Creek (2005) where a bunch of kids do es and, as if heeding Henry James’s dic- house where Claire and Stuart and their very bad things in a setting of majestical- tum that novels should ‘dramatise, drama- son live, and with the lushly forested and ly tranquil beauty. We register the shock of tise’, they seem to reveal themselves with- secluded river (the Snowy, at Island Bend) the dying fishS tuart catches, poignant in out overt intervention. Certainly, it is told in where the men set up their camp – and its beauty, realizing that he who has been Claire’s first-person narrative, but Carver where they find the body.T hough the film semi-deranged by the horror of discover- ensures we know not just hers but Stuart’s makes valuable use of its diversity of nat- ing the body has still been able to get on attitude to the moral point at issue. He is a ural setting, Lawrence and Christian have with the business of the weekend. man who knows he has something to hide. focused very firmly on the strands of the community, the affiliations and undercur- By this point, Jindabyne has become a The story has been filmed before.I t was rents, and, very importantly, the Indigenous film about responsibilities and priorities. I‘ one of the several Carver stories Robert community just outside Jindabyne. don’t know what the fuss is about,’ says Altman adapted for Short Cuts (1993), his Stuart, just before a newspaper runs the epic study of suburban dysfunction and The film opens with a youngI ndigenous headline: MEN FISH OVER DEAD BODY, other maladies. His film was set in Los An- woman driving through a deserted brown and the SBS news reports the body of Su- geles but Stuart and his friends go fish- landscape, singing as she goes a song san O’Connor found in Kosciusko Nation- ing at a remote stretch of water and con- about being ‘off to the races at Jindabyne al Park, while the girl’s family berate the ceal the fact that they have found the dead Fair’. Unknown to her, she is being pur- men on TV. The men have not been pre- body of a naked woman floating where sued by an enigmatic and oddly alarming pared for the rage that makes itself felt in they’ve set up camp. They persuade them- man (Chris Haywood) in a truck, creating the town. ‘It’s about all of us,’ Claire tells selves that it won’t matter to get on with the sort of danger one recalls from Steven Carmel (Leah Purcell), girlfriend of Roc- their weekend trip and that it will be enough Spielberg’s debut feature, Duel (1971). This co (Stelios Yiakmus), the fourth on the fish- to report the body when they get home. cryptic encounter – who is the girl? Why is ing trip. The murderer appears in town This is the story Carver tells, that Altman in- this grizzled truck-driver pursuing her? – and talks about the need for ‘rewiring’ the corporates in his portmanteau masterpiece, gives way to an early morning sequence in church, but the film isn’t about him: it’s es- and which Ray Lawrence now makes the Claire (Laura Linney) and Stuart’s (Gabri- sentially about how the town, especially subject of his full-length film,Jindabyne . el Byrne) house, which appears to estab- the four women partners of the fishing-trip Though place and some names have been lish a close loving family, with hugs for blokes, come to terms with their self-justi- changed and though there’s a wealth of so- young son Tom, and talk of the upcoming fying expedience and how at least one of cial and personal detail that is not to be fishermen’s weekend away.T hen the film the women, Claire, needs to come to a kind found in Carver and is spread over a wider moves to another household in which an of reconciliation with the Indigenous com- range of characters in Short Cuts, what still older couple, Jude and Carl (Deborra-lee munity, even at the risk to her own mar- matters is the story’s moral core. Furness and John Howard) are concerned riage. Not that she is presented as a sim- that their granddaughter is not in her bed- ple-minded figure of restorative justice. Her Whereas Altman chose ‘Los Angeles sub- room. Quite quickly it is clear that neither ‘back-story’, to use that cultish term it’s urbs that are going to seed …rather than of these households is quite what it seems, usually better to avoid, includes a strange Carver’s grey anonymous Midwest as his that there is lurking unhappiness and less- and unexplained dereliction of maternal location’,3 Lawrence has elected the mag- than-perfect trust at work among the oc- duty when she walked away from her mar- nificentS nowy Mountains and Jindabyne cupants. There are two other couples in- riage for eighteen months after her son was area of southern New South Wales. One volved in the network of intersecting lives born. Similarly, Jude has the spectre of her of the film’s triumphs is not to succumb to that will be traumatically disrupted by the daughter’s death always in the back of her the temptations of pictorialism, this being events of the fishing weekend. mind as she and Carl bring up their grand- a film about people and community, and daughter, and in a sequence of the women every now and then one is shocked by the The thing is that they do have ‘something together they talk about babies and ‘people contrast of the natural beauty and the hor- to hide’. It’s not that they have done any- dying in the wrong order’. Mortality in all its ror perpetrated in it, as in the film’s open- thing as clearly horrific as the men in John inappropriate manifestations keeps thread- ing, and what it is allowed to close over Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) are forced ing its way through this narrative. later on. Lawrence is on record as saying to do when their canoeing weekend goes of the location: ‘I used to go there all the haywire. What the four fishing friends in Lawrence and Christian (whose first fea- time to fish …T hat was part of the fasci- Jindabyne are required to do is to consider ture screenplay this is) very skilfully inte- nation with the story, the outdoors. I really their priorities and they signally fail to rec- grate the film’s narrative strands, from the
10 • Metro Magazine 150 ‘Jindabyne’ shares with ‘Lantana’ a bracing whiff of imaginative daring as it pursues its ensemble cast of eight main players and a townful of lesser but still vividly drawn observers and participants.
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riveting opening, the significance of which cause they are never anything but relation- reason why an Australian filmmaker should we will not grasp for some time and which ships, are always fragile. Jindabyne shares feel daunted by the prospect of Shake- will haunt the film till its end, to the lives of with Lantana a bracing whiff of imagina- speare, any more than Russian, Japanese, the four men friends which are shaken up tive daring as it pursues its ensemble cast American, Polish and many other filmmak- by the suppressions of their weekend, and of eight main players and a townful of lesser ers have. And also to insist that there is no to the gradual emergence from the ensem- but still vividly drawn observers and partici- reason why a film adapted fromS hake- ble cast of Claire as the film’s moral voice. pants. If one singles out Laura Linney’s taut, speare can’t be relocated not just to an- Unstable as she has been regarded, it is wracked Claire, she is really only slight- other country but also to another genre. she who cannot let the men’s feebly self-in- ly more than a first among equals. Gabri- terested prevarications rest. And in her at- el Byrne’s kind, weak Stuart and Furness Macbeth is the briefest, fastest-moving of tempts to reach the Indigenous girl’s peo- and Howard as the older couple, Jude and the great Shakespearean tragedies. It has ple, in her unwanted collection of money for Carl, all offer the spectacle of actors who no time for Hamlet’s reflections on the state the funeral, asking the priest (Bud Tingwell) are able to convey the feeling of whole lives of the theatre or elaborate staging of a play to pass it on for her, she runs herself into caught in representative moments. to ‘catch the conscience of the king’, or for danger from the murderous Gregory (in a King Lear’s sub-plot of Gloucester and his sequence that parallels the opening) as she The relocation and recreation of Carv- sons. This is not to deny Macbeth its own goes to attend the outdoor burial ceremo- er’s moral drama to such a removed set- complexity but rather to draw attention to ny. What, by unobtrusive metaphoric exten- ting and the filling in of the lives of those the fiercely headlong movement of the dra- sion, she is doing here, by comparison with eight protagonists (if, that is, there can be ma – and to the shock of innerness that her community at large, is to critique the na- more than one) so as to make them ab- Macbeth’s soliloquies offer by contrast. tional negligence of the Indigenous popula- sorbing individually and as epitomising a What is so daunting about filmingS hake- tion and the official unwillingness to effect community is a major achievement. The speare may come down to two main mat- real reconciliation. The film is not in the least very act of drawing on an American source ters. First, this is due to the prestige at- preachy about this or anything else, but it is suggests an anti-parochial reaching out; taching to Shakespeare’s name. A filmmak- so richly textured that such wider meanings the triumph is to have made it seem just er knows he is putting his reputation on the ripple out from the specificities of the plot. as socially and emotionally true in its Aus- line (as presumably a stage producer does) The film doesn’t end on a note of unrelieved tralian setting. It may well be the Austral- when he addresses himself to work of such bleakness, any more than Carver’s sto- ian film of the year; like the best national high cultural standing. Second, a huge ry does. ‘I want you to come home, Claire,’ art, it is not constrained by the specificities problem confronting the filmmaker who as- says Stuart, who has come to the ceremo- of place but in its detailed addressing of pires to ‘capture’ Shakespeare on screen is ny, as one of the mourners sings one of Su- these seems to have a very good chance that the plays belong to a non-realist cat- san’s last songs. of striking chords internationally. egory of drama. They are highly stylised in language, artificial in construction, and not Among Australian filmmakers,R ay Law- Macbeth: intended for naturalistic settings, whereas rence is a curious case. In one way he is the ‘Stars Hide Your Fires’ film has so accustomed us to a level of re- Terence Malick of Australian cinema, with a alistic depiction of the actual world that it mere three films to his VC in twenty years. Why have Australian filmmakers demands quite a lot of its audience to ac- In 1985 he directed and co-wrote (with the been so reluctant to try their arm with cept characters speaking in iambic pen- novel’s author Peter Carey) the maddening- Shakespeare? Surely it can’t be because tameters. Of these three ‘non-filmic’ char- ly pretentious Bliss; maybe it was ahead of they think he’s irrelevant to antipode- acteristics, the blank verse in which most its time, but certainly in its time it was hard an life? It surely can’t be anything as nar- of Shakespeare is unfolded is the most in- to bear with, though it did win AFI awards row-visioned as that, when you consid- transigently tied to the more obviously arti- for film, screenplay and director.O ne can er all those other non-British countries that ficial mode of the theatre. only surmise that this was a dud year for have filmed the very greatest plays: think Australian films; unruly Cannes audienc- of Russian Grigori Kosintzev’s stunning Daringly then, from Wright’s point of view, es left noisily, and the failure of this stylis- black-and-white Hamlet (1964), or, Rus- if you set your film ofMacbeth among tically incoherent black comedy-cum-fan- sian again, Sergei Yutkevich’s visually im- warring twenty-first century Melbourne tasy probably accounts for Lawrence’s not aginative Othello (1955), or the Japanese gangs, he has posed himself a major chal- filming again for sixteen years.I n 2001, Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa’s lenge in deciding to adhere to the origi- he made Lantana, arguably one of the fin- savage samurai version of Macbeth, or any nal language, while relocating the action est films ever made here, if notthe finest, number of American adaptations, whether in time and place. The only other Austral- an accolade some of us would certainly go ‘straight’, such as Max Reinhardt and Wil- ian adaptation of Shakespeare that I am along with. After the stumbling start with liam Dieterle’s lush A Midsummer Night’s aware of is Neil Armfield’s film version of Bliss, Lawrence seemed to find his feet with Dream (1935) or the two disguised ver- his own modern-dress stage production the absorbing account of interlocking sub- sions of King Lear – Joseph Mackiewics’s of Twelfth Night (1986). Of this latter, nev- urban lives, and the omnibus approach is melodrama House of Strangers (1949), re- er widely seen, Cinema Papers had this to apparent again in Jindabyne: in these two made by Edward Dmytryk as a Western, say: ‘Putting any play on the screen is hard disquieting, sharply intelligent films, he has Broken Lance (1954), or the MGM sci-fi enough, but Shakespeare, in Australia, in shown a real capacity to understand and reworking of The Tempest as Forbidden 1987, 400 years and 10,000 miles from represent what is going on in a relation- Planet (1956). I adduce this heavily trun- home base, poses even more problems.’5 ship, and to suggest how communities, be- cated list merely to suggest that there is no Apart from the opening phrase about
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putting plays on the screen, the rest of this considered, an equally crucial element in mirable clarity the rise and decline of Mac- dictum needs interrogating. If Shakespeare its intertextuality is Wright’s own filmogra- beth. If a film ofMacbeth is to make sense can be successfully brought to the screen phy. Like Lawrence, he has been prepared to modern audiences who may not be fa- in the range of countries listed above, to look beyond Australian shores for his in- miliar with the play, or even with those who all quite distant from ‘home base’ and at spiration. So, what has he done with Mac- are, then this will be a major consideration. times nearly as remote from the play’s beth? In terms of setting, he has, as noted In essence the ascendancy of Macbeth to composition, there doesn’t seem to be any above, relocated it to Melbourne’s gang- the position the witches and Lady Macbeth special reason why it should be more diffi- land wars, which have received so much have encouraged him to covet and his un- cult to achieve in Australia at the same re- publicity in the last several years. And just ease in the role for which he has killed ‘the move in time. Yet, apart from Armfield’s at- as in Shakespeare’s play we get very lit- gracious Duncan’, must crucially be clear. tempt, more in the nature of a record of a tle sense of ‘ordinary life’ outside the world past success than a re-thought whole, no and whirl of king and thanes and murder- Wright and his co-screenwriter Victoria Hill one until Wright has made the daring leap. ous impulse, so Wright doesn’t dally with (also co-starring as Lady Macbeth) have the daytime suburbia of Melbourne with preserved the main line of narrative action As Ben Goldsmith has written of an ear- trams and bowling clubs and pavement ca- from the play. After a gangland war from ly episode from Wright’s Romper Stomper: fes. This is a film of the dark time and of which Duncan has emerged victorious, he ‘As the skateboard/camera moves under- people whose main life is lived in the dark- publicly anoints his son Malcolm as his suc- ground, the image decelerates to empha- ness: for them, indeed, the ‘stars hide cessor. Macbeth, who has been a valued sise the threat and other-worldliness of the [their] fires’. Darkness and blood are the henchman to Duncan, has been tempted environment into which the [Vietnamese] key visual motifs of Shakespeare’s play and by the idea, put to him by the three school- teenagers have descended, and in slow of Wright’s film. girl ‘witches’, that he might himself one motion the camera passes the leering fac- day occupy Duncan’s position. Lady Mac- es of the skinhead gang.’6 This account of The film opens in a graveyard (actually Mel- beth, ambitious for her husband, spurs him a moment from the film that made Wright’s bourne General Cemetery) where three into killing Duncan when the latter comes name is quoted here because it suggests a schoolgirls are energetically defacing grave- to stay. Suspicion falls on Malcolm, who filmmaker with an eye for creating in strictly stones and their attendant statues. Mod- flees; Macbeth assumes leadership; he visual terms an ambience and atmosphere ern as they are, they then present a mild murders Banquo who, he fears, suspects of danger and potential violence. Such a shock to our systems by intoning the open- him and whose son Fleance has been fore- capacity is not likely to go amiss in a direc- ing words of the play, ushering in the equiv- told as future leader; he has Macduff’s fam- tor bringing Macbeth to contemporary Mel- ocal values enshrined in the Shakespear- ily killed as an act of irrational cruelty be- bourne. Wright, like Ray Lawrence, has had ean ambiguities of ‘Fair is foul and foul is cause Macduff has not accepted his lead- a sparse career in cinema. Macbeth is only fair’ and ‘When the battle’s lost and won’. ership; he and Lady Macbeth become es- his fourth feature film since 19927 when These teenagers are the ‘witches’ in modern tranged and she suicides; and Macduff and Romper Stomper brought him to immedi- dress. They are being inscrutably observed, Malcolm plot to bring Macbeth down, and, ate and controversial attention, with its vio- we learn as they leave, by a man, Mac- in the final, shoot-out, do so.I quote this lent depiction of skinhead racism. The Roll- beth (Sam Worthington), who stands waiting sequence of events merely to indicate that ing Stone reviewer claimed of that film that while his grieving wife (Victoria Hill) is plac- the film does not, in its basic plot, play fast ‘Ron Hagen’s camera work captures the ing white roses in a vase on the grave of BE- and loose with Shakespeare, though in less delirium of carnage that drives out ration- LOVED SON of … The camera doesn’t di- centrally important matters in the narrative al thought’, but went on to say, ‘Ignore the vulge who are the parents of this dead child, chain it is prepared to take its own line.9 In prudes who think you shouldn’t make films but it does initiate the idea of Macbeth as a Roland Barthes’ terms the ‘hinge-points’ about things that scare you … This Aussie sonless man, a perception which the film will of narrative, the ‘cardinal functions’, those Reservoir Dogs opens up a brutal world that underline in various ways. The film then cuts ‘risky’ moments when alternative outcomes needs to be understood.’8 His subsequent to a river scene, with a riverboat, followed by are possible and which therefore generate films,Metal Skin (1994), about a dysfunc- a shoot-out in dark streets, all this record- the forward movement of a narrative, have tional young man from Melbourne’s western ed (on 29 July, a caption tells us) to the ac- been sedulously retained.10 suburbs who becomes king of the roads companiment of a very insistent score and by night when he’s securely inside the met- with a hand-held camera to capture the ef- If you’re going to make a film ofMacbeth , al skin of his car, and the US-made slash- fect of the equivalent of battle. Subsequent- and use the title, you will presumably feel er horror-comic Cherry Falls (2000, released ly, inside a club, Duncan (played with some an obligation to ensure that your film has in Australia, on video only, in 2001), in which dignity by Gary Sweet) asks for a report on some connection with the original, but that a psychopath is murdering virgins, would the foregoing and Macbeth is praised for his is very far from implying that such an ad- seem to confirm Wright as a director who part in the fracas. aptation requires a reverential approach, wouldn’t flinch from the bloodier aspects of or that the film should aim to be, in that Macbeth. At very least, knowing what one While the action that gives rise to Duncan’s absurd term, ‘faithful’, even if it is Shake- does of Wright as a director, it was never tribute to Macbeth is not as clearly estab- speare. For my money, the duller Shake- likely that he would succumb to decorous lished as it might be (a criticism that might speare films are in fact those that tread just obeisance to the great play. be levelled at the end, when the support- this path, some examples of this include ers of Macduff and Malcolm seek their re- Zeffirelli’s handsomeHamlet (1990) or Ol- If the phenomenon of adaptation, and of venge on Macbeth), with too much un- iver Parker’s respectable Othello (1995, Shakespeare in particular, are two of the differentiated gunplay between opposing UK/US): neither of these is stupid or mer- key contexts in which this film needs to be forces, the film as a whole treats with ad- etricious; they are just not very exciting.
14 • Metro Magazine 150 Wright’s film at its best does make one re- where, ‘bear-like’, he must fight to the end, his wife’s ambition, is fulfilled by the idea of think the play, as well as offering a gen- though he has lost heart all but complete- ‘kingship’ (of a gang in this case), but the erally compelling film experience. He has ly. My reservations about these two se- absence of a son, in his patriarchal view of not only retained most of the crucial plot quences, mentioned above, are that, for things, makes the honour a ‘hollow crown’. moves from the play, as I’ve indicated, but all the dextrous camera work and the per- The witches have prophesied in Macbeth’s the main characters and their functions suasive modern realization of conflicting dream that Banquo’s children will inherit, in this plot are also preserved. There are forces, the details of the action are simply and this notion is borne out in the film’s last some minor changes, such as showing us not clear. There is almost too much visu- shot as Macduff takes benevolent charge (instead of, as Shakespeare does, merely al energy at work here: it has its own kind of Fleance. I don’t know how important this referring to him) the treacherous MacDon- of excitement but clarity of exposition is train of thought was to Wright and Hill, but wald, bound and gagged with grey mask- not one of the virtues on show. Elsewhere, for me it confers on their film the kind of in- ing tape in the club that bears the name though, realism is vindicated in the horror tellectual purchase that makes adaptation a ‘The Cawdor’. His title, Thane of Caw- of the murder of Duncan and the grooms, potentially exciting enterprise. The modern dor, in the play bestowed by the grateful in the assassination of Macduff’s wife and and local trappings have their place in the Duncan on Macbeth, is sensibly, in a Mel- child, and in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking interests of realism, but this perception of bourne gangland setting, eliminated here, and bloody suicide. These latter scenes what the play means to its adaptors goes to though used by the witches subsequent- are attended very convincingly in human the heart of the matter. ly. They are so clearly not part of the ‘real’ terms by her housekeeper/maid (Katherine world of the gangs that they can get away Tonkin) and doctor (Kim Gyngell), who give Jindabyne and Macbeth have little in com- with the stranger idiom. Angus, a mere us necessary glimpses of lives not caught mon except their willingness to look further presence in the play, is given more screen up in the pervasive bloodshed and dark- afield than usual for their source material. space here and is noticeable because er impulses. Their professional solicitude This wouldn’t, however, have been enough he is played by an actor with long blond strikes an aptly realist note in a film which cause for cheering if the resulting films locks. None of these – and other – addi- also aims to make the supernatural figures hadn’t so hearteningly shown their mak- tions or changes affects the onward rush of the witches believable as figments of ers willing to take what they wanted and to of the narrative of blood and darkness. Macbeth’s increasingly disturbed mind. make it their own.
That reference to the omission of the ti- But there is more to Wright’s treatment than Brian McFarlane, an Honorary Associate tle of Thane of Cawdor leads one to note a mere transposition of poetic drama into Professor at Monash University, is currently that Wright has not sought to do away with film realism. Not only has he audacious- writing a book on Great Expectations: Nov- the play’s blank verse. Nor has he opt- ly retained the artificiality of the iambic pen- el and Adaptation, and is preparing the third ed for an all-purpose ‘stage English’ that tameters, thus linking himself to the play’s edition of his Encyclopedia of British Film, vaguely suggests affiliations with respect- poetry in which is created the dominant im- both for publication in 2007. • able theatre. There are some minor adjust- ages of darkness and bloodshed, but he ments and curtailments: Macduff’s ‘castle’ has given it his own emphasis. His Macbeth Endnotes is now referred to in Macbeth’s statement is – like Shakespeare’s – a nature divid- 1 ‘The Film of the Book: Adaptation and the Aus- of murderous intent as ‘The house [my ital- ed against itself. From the graveyard open- tralian Cinema’, Metro, No. 149, Winter 2006. ics] of Macduff I will surprise’, because, giv- ing where Macbeth’s sonless state is an- 2 ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1977), in en the modern open-space kitchen area in nounced, there is a thread of allusion to fa- Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When which the assassins do their work, it would thers and sons which goes some distance We Talk About Love, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, be incongruous. Once or twice, someone to explaining the rift in Macbeth’s nature. 1981, p.82. is addressed as ‘My lord’ which, in the cir- Duncan talks of passing over his business, 3 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Short Cuts’, Sight and cumstances, grates somewhat. The actors the ‘Cumberland’ empire specifically, to his Sound, March 1994, p.80. speak the verse with a range of Australian son Malcolm; Macduff (in a brief scene cre- 4 ‘Interview with Ray Lawrence’, Press Book, accents which are convincing in the context ated for the film) kisses his sleeping son Jindabyne, April Films, 2006, p.15. of the relocated drama. Purists may well and takes a sheet of the boy’s paintings be- 5 James Waites, ‘Twelfth Night’, Cinema Papers, object that the poetry is to some extent the fore going to answer a summons from Dun- July 1978, p.48 loser in this way of approaching the verse; can; Banquo and his son Fleance, whom he 6 Ben Goldsmith, ‘Metal Skin and the Cinema of by compensation, its essentially low-key has earlier restrained from alcohol, go hur- Noise’, http://www.sensesofcinema.com 2000. delivery works well enough in realist vein. tling off on motorcycles (Banquo to meet 7 His 1988 film, Lover Boy, starring Noah Taylor, The actors give the verse a conversation- his doom, as it happens, from Macbeth’s appears never to have been released in Australia. al quality (which in some Shakespearean thugs); and, when the avengers come to 8 Rolling Stone, 10 June 1993. productions I’ve seen I’d have welcomed) unseat Macbeth at the end, the remain- 9 This summary of the main narrative events that helps to effect the transition from the ing sons, Fleance and Malcolm, are in their was first written for a Study Guide on Macbeth conventions of the drama to those of the forefront. The film then closes, not on Mal- which I prepared for ATOM. There seemed to screen’s greater and easier naturalism. colm’s supposedly rallying speech to ush- be no purpose in merely rendering it in other er in a new order (never as convincing in words to say more or less the same thing. There is realism of another kind in the gang Shakespeare as the disorder that has pre- 10 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structur- war at the start of the film when a mat- ceded it), but on Macduff’s walking away al Analysis of Narratives’ (1966), in Image-Mu- ter of drug trafficking and a street shoot- into the dawn with Fleance, whom he has sic-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Fontana/Collins, out are involved, and in the sequence near taken under his wing – the wing that failed Glascow 1977, p.93. the end when the forces of Macduff and to shelter his own son. Some part of Mac- Malcolm invade Macbeth’s stronghold, beth, as well as his being fuelled by his and
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