‘Macbeth,’ with Michael Fassbender, a daring departure

All that glistens is not gold in Western culture, but a few things always pass the acid test: Shakespeare remains both the supreme genius of the English language, and the standard by which screen actors prove they are “gentleman of brave mettle” (“The Tempest,” Act 2, Scene 1).

And you never really know what’s going to happen, from Marlon Brando’s muttering Marc Antony (1953’s “Julius Caesar”) to Ian McKellen’s fascist Richard III (1995) to Ethan Hawke’s hipster “Hamlet” (2000). Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” from 1990 is still well-regarded; people who saw Peter O’Toole’s calamitous “Macbeth” of 1980 still seem traumatized.

“Some actors get it in their bones; others say, ‘I would never do Shakespeare,’ ” said Bill Pullman, who spent seven summers doing Shakespeare while teaching at Montana State University. “We cut every play to an hour and a half. That’s the longest people could sit on the ground on blankets,” the actor said. Pullman was part of a more radical interpretation of “Othello” earlier this year in Norway. He played the title role not in blackface, as white actors would in the 19th century, but as a character distanced from the other characters by language, rather than race.

A daring departure, to be sure. But no more than Australian director Justin Kurzel’s “Macbeth,” which opens Friday.

The actor putting his credibility — and ego — on the line this time is Michael Fassbender, the German-Irish heartthrob whose work has ranged from “Hunger” to “X-Men: Days of Future Past” to the title role in “Steve Jobs.” He partners with Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard for “the Scottish Play,” as it’s traditionally called by the wary, in a film that is violent, cinematic and daring in both its visual style and psychology: The Macbeths, this time around, are sympathetic.

OK, that may be overstating it, especially when Macbeth himself is putting the torch to his enemies. But there’s certainly pathos behind their murderous escapades — rather than the unquenchable ambition with which they’ve always been synonymous.

The film opens with the funeral of a baby, out on the Scottish heath, with a windblown Lady Macbeth (Cotillard) and her husband laying stones on the infant’s eyes. Later, Macbeth prepares a young boy for a battle — one that will win him favor in the eyes of the king, Duncan (David Thewlis). The boy, who will die in that battle, is clearly meant to be seen as Macbeth’s son. And his parents are clearly meant to be seen as victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, as they kill their way to power.

It’s an approach guaranteed to provoke Shakepeareans of every stripe, even those inclined to accept new readings and interpretations of texts that have been scrutinized for more than 400 years.

“Fixating on actual children limits rather than increases our empathy with the Macbeths,” said Professor Maureen Connolly McFeely, who teaches Shakespeare at Hofstra University. “In the face of such explicit motivation, we can explain away their ruthlessness, as the results of some medieval PTSD, instead of looking into our own hearts for the seed of ambition that links us to them.”

Shakespeare, she said, presents us with a man “too full of the milk of human kindness” who is both enslaved by his ambition and tortured by his conscience. “So he wades deeper and deeper into blood, and in the process loses his ally Lady M, first to madness, then to death.”

“As [scholar] R.A. Foakes writes, Macbeth engages our sympathy,” she said, “because he is driven by a common human instinct, ambition to . . . reach the top.”

McFeely said she couldn’t comment directly on the film because she hadn’t seen it, just the approach. Likewise Amy Cook, an associate professor of Shakespeare and theater at Stony Brook University, who found the Kurzel interpretation vaguely familiar.

“It’s funny, because I directed an adaptation of ‘Macbeth’ for the first Fringe Festival NYC many moons ago that included an empty baby pram as part of the set,” Cook said. “I thought I was doing something interesting, too. Sarah Siddons, the first female to play the role, performed the role visibly pregnant in 1785, making for a richly complicated Lady Macbeth.”

She said that the speculation about any Macbeth progeny has a long history in criticism: In 1933, L.C. Knights published “How Many Children Hath Lady Macbeth?,” which made fun of critics who spent too much time inventing history that’s impossible to corroborate.

“This is different, it seems to me, from a director adding these things as part of the performed world,” Cook added. “Actors automatically bring back story and motivation to the performance that isn’t explicitly in the script; this is an extension. Sometimes these things really bring new life to Shakespeare and sometimes they muddy or complicate matters. My guess is that the behavior of the Macbeths is easier for contemporary audiences to understand if it’s motivated by that kind of extreme trauma. For Shakespeare, I think, the witches and ambition were probably enough.”