"Seeds of time": Women, children, and the nation in Kurzel's Macbeth (2015)

From the outset, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (2015) foregrounds the family, presenting it as the building block of civilized society. While Duncan and his son Malcolm are obviously central to the state, the Macbeths, the Macduffs, and Banquo all have progeny, and in this film even the witches and the Scottish army have children among them. In its opening images, the film presents women as mothers, implying that they are primarily biological and social reproducers. We see the witches on a hillside with two children, and Lady Macbeth gazes grief-stricken at the corpse of her son on a funeral pyre. Multiple boy soldiers are slaughtered in the opening battle and, later, Macbeth personally murders Lady Macduff and her three children. Children, then, are highly valued—Fleance is a beloved son and of course he will be the progenitor of kings, the Macbeths never recover from their child's death—but they are endangered subjects. Indeed, Hanh Bui's remark on Banquo's son can be applied to almost all of the children in the film: "[f]rom the moment he appears on screen, Fleance bears constant witness to life's hardship, insecurity, and death" (Bui). In this essay, I argue that in Kurzel's Macbeth the only hope for the future of the nation is its children, but they are a finite resource threatened by a militaristic and power-hungry patriarchal culture. I contend too that women are shown to be the victims of the state; as men compete and strive to shape the nation in their image, women are often collateral damage. However, women, in the form of the witches, are also revealed to be the best guardians of the state. While the film implies that the only safe place for a woman is on the margins, and the only safe role that of observer, this paradoxically is how the women can actively protect their interests and shape the nation's future. Ultimately, Kurzel's Macbeth presents the viewer with the birth of a nation; yet, with its mothers and its children endangered, it is a parturition fraught with grave difficulties.

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Considering Macbeth's subject matter and the popularity of the horror film, Kurzel could have used horror conventions in his portrayal of the witches and children. Two recent film adaptations of the play successfully draw on horror to present their witches as infernal bloodthirsty nurses (Goold, 2010) and disturbingly sexualized teenage goths (Wright, 2006) (Kapitaniak), while several stage productions have presented the witches as uncanny children. Moreover, in the earlier 1996 TV film Macbeth on the Estate, children were everywhere, and the witches were delinquent pre-teens, just as violent as their adult peers. By contrast, the children in Kurzel's Macbeth are not figures of fear or suspicion; they are unambiguously human and are unmistakably vital, loved members of the family.

The value of children is clear from the film's opening images: an overhead shot shows a toddler's corpse atop an unlit pyre. The child's parents, the Macbeths (Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard), step forward to perform their goodbyes and funeral rituals. Lady Macbeth weeps as she places flowers in the boy's cold hand, while a stoic Macbeth puts stones on his eyes and crumbles earth onto his chest. As Louise D'Arcens observes, the funeral stages not only parental grief, as the whole village has gathered to grieve: "Here the death of a child is cause for public, communal mourning that is as much concerned with loss of lineage as it is with emotional anguish" (D'Arcens). Amongst the mourners, Banquo clutches young Fleance to him. From a distance, the witches look on and, notably, there are five members in this multigenerational family. The Older Witch holds a Child Witch in front of her, the Younger Witch cradles a baby, and the Middle Witch stands to the side.¹ The blocking of these characters illustrates the importance and integration of the children in their family, and it is repeated later in the film. Children are foregrounded once again at the Battle of...