--Anna, Lady Macbeth
"You know I shan't be parted from your life, Sebastian. Through hell and high water, I will follow you. To the cross, to the prison, to the grave, to the sky."
--Katherine, Lady Macbeth
Not about the Shakespeare character, but an adaptation of a novel inspired by the Shakespeare character, Lady Macbeth gives Florence Pugh a role that, even if she had never acted outside of this single film, would cement her as an incredible actress. Key tragedies and irony from the Shakespeare play Macbeth are given a new context and even altered in clever ways. A thorough masterpiece of acting, drama, and thematic focus, Lady Macbeth is quite the stage for Florence Pugh (and her co-stars) to display her talent, as well as an unflinching look into how selfish the human heart can be when it is not in submission to reason and morality. One monster can be replaced by another monster so very easily in a world of fools who do not love or at least understand reason, and people can evolve in complex ways; these are some of the things that Lady Macbeth tackles.
Production Values
Far more than even the sets and landscape, which often are just the background as desire and power are explored, the people are the heart of this film. With just facial expressions and mannerisms, Pugh shows how tired, bored, and frustrated her character is before she outwardly comes to life only after her adulterous relationship sparks. Katherine's playfulness and longing explode into words and even more overt expressions than the exhaustion that preceded them. Even the subtleties while she does not speak, though, are so very successfully etched into her face. Naomi Ackie (who was absolutely wasted in The Rise of Skywalker) actually does rely on a silent performance for the vast majority of her time onscreen, and despite never getting the same attention as the primary character of Katherine, she is very effective in embodying a frightened, powerless servant who is the scapegoat for the villain. Cosmo Jarvis, as the main male character, gets the chance to show far more complexity than characters introduced in the way he is would typically have. He starts out worse than Katherine, but he winds up shocked by her selfishness.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
In 1800s England, Katherine marries an older man who does not have sex with her, but who acts as if his whims should dictate everything in her life from when she goes to sleep to whether she wears clothing at night. He leaves to attend to other matters one day, leaving his wife in control of the estate. When one of her husband's workers named Sebastian forcefully enters her room, intent on a sexual interaction, Katherine at first resists him as he presses in to kiss her, but she quickly reciprocates and starts having sex with him regularly. Anna, a household servant, discovers the adultery, with Katherine becoming more open and defiant of cultural norms and other people hearing whispers of an affair. After her husband returns, Katherine does not deny charges of adultery, and in fact brings out Sebastian and prepares to have sex with him in front of her husband. An ensuing brawl results in her murdering her husband, though things do not go as she hoped afterward.
Intellectual Content
The rigidly sexist cultural landscape of Lady Macbeth is used to explore how women are sexual beings just as men are, as well as the complexities of human romantic relationships. At the beginning of her affair--which did spring forth after Sebastian literally was about to rape her--Katherine expresses her sexual desires in an adulterous way, seemingly wanting nothing more than pleasure. She and Sebastian do not start their affair because they are deeply interested in each other's personalities. They are not emotionally intimate or even once shown having elaborate conversations before their adultery begins, though they do develop an emotional attachment reflected in their kinder, softer interactions later on. Katherine is simply presented as interested in sex and the sensuality of the male body, and vice versa, despite the person she acts upon this interest with being an overtly cruel man who is quite willing to commit at least initially treat women as if they are there for his wishes. Ironically, the relationship she develops with Sebastian is, in some ways, one based on mutuality, openness, and devotion, all things that were lacking from her actual marriage, and Sebastian of all people comes to develop the more positive traits.
The passion Katherine has for him is what drives her to all but start having sex in her husband's presence as if to proclaim her brazenness without using words, which gives way to a fight in which she kills her husband. She overlooks how if adultery is immoral, then even committing adultery when trapped in a dull, oppressive marriage is immoral; if murder is immoral, even murdering a sexist, neglectful, arrogant spouse is immoral. Her lover Sebastian becomes riddled with guilt and worry after the murder even as Katherine is unconcerned by their actions, paralleling the Lady Macbeth and her husband from the Shakespeare play Macbeth in the inverse. As Katherine becomes more desperate and uncaring about social pretenses, she becomes more and more one of the egoistic upper class fools who act as if what they want is the foundation of reality. Being wealthy in no way makes one irrationalistic or malicious, but her former husband, his father, and then she herself are most certainly irrationalistic to a great extent, confusing their emotional preferences to be moral obligations for others. That Katherine ends up blaming Sebastian and a separate servant for her murders shows that she was only ever in pursuit of personal gratification at the expense of all else: when the man she had committed adultery and murder for could no longer bear the weight of their deeds and confesses their actions, she immediately lies about her own innocence.
Conclusion
As good as Florence Pugh was in Black Widow, and her performance was one of the only genuinely great things in a film of very mixed quality, Lady Macbeth gives her a better spotlight, one she shares with a much smaller supporting cast. Everyone else does a phenomenal job with more limited, secondary roles, but Pugh's character is the twisted heart of a story that acknowledges how people who are oppressed in one manner might be just as bad or worse if only they were given the chance to act on their desires. Weaving a cautionary tale about egoistic emotionalism (not that almost anyone understands the rationalism that is its antidote) with much-needed representation of how being oppressed does not make one a good person (though both genders, every race, and every class is discriminated against, not just some of them), Lady Macbeth is indeed a masterpiece.
Content:
1. Violence: There are a handful of physical fights with some blood.
2. Profanity: "Fuck" and "bitch" are very occasionally used.
3. Nudity: Katherine and Sebastian are shown naked more than once, but often in a way where only their backside is visible to the camera or where their genitalia are obscured.
4. Sexuality: In numerous scenes, Katherine and Sebastian are shown having sex with or without clothing.
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