This movie, adapted by Jacob Koskoff, Todd Louiso, and Michael Lesslie, directed by Justin Kurzel, and starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillar, competed for the Palme d'Or prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.From the start of the film, the writers choose to focus on different aspects of the tragedy than does the playwright himself. The Bard's version begins with three witches on a blasted heath in Scotland, but the movie opens with the funeral of the child of Macbeth and his wife. By focusing on the parents' grief, the writers give a glimpse into an aspect of the characters of the couple which Shakespeare only hints at in one short phrase by Lady Macbeth: "I have given suck, and know how tender 't is to love the babe that milks me." (Act I, scene 7)
Considering how Macbeth's heirless state later plagues him, this does indeed seem a curious point not to emphasize. It also humanizes Lady Macbeth a bit, explaining to some degree her coldblooded nature. (It is she, after all, who several times spurs her vacillating husband on to fulfill the prophecies of the witches.)
Another surprising innovation by the scriptwriters is in the interpretation of the prediction from Act IV, scene 1 that Macbeth has nothing to fear till "Great Birnan wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him." The Bard himself meant that to refer to soldiers using leafy branches from trees of the forest to shield themselves from the lookouts on the castle walls. In this production, though, the advancing army sets fire to the woods, and Macbeth stands agast at the smoke and burning ash blown by the wind to the castle.
The final updating is ending the film with Fleance, son of Banquo, dashing forward, running into a future where, as predicted, his offspring will be royalty, all the way to James himself, the first king to join the throne of Scotland to that of England and Ireland, and who extended the Golden Era of Elizabethan England. Not only did James support the career of Shakespeare, but also those of Donne, Bacon, and Jonson, and even presided over the composition of the Authorized Version of the Bible. So the long reach of the doomed Scottish lord circles back around to Shakespeare himself.
