Men I Disrespect

The gangster film of Macbeth furthers my belief that there are no good adaptations of Macbeth. The acting, the tone and the genre of the film, and the excessive nudity all make this film a disorganized mess of a classic play.

John Tuturro is terrible in the film. I never once believe that this man is a threatening mobster. Maybe it’s because I have seen him only in comedic roles, but I just can’t take him seriously. [The actress who plays Lady Macbeth] is decent, but she plays insane before Lady Macbeth even goes insane (but in a different version of insanity). Stanley Tucci and Peter Boyle are usually good, but Tucci is underused, and Boyle doesn’t seem the threatening type. He seems more of the Marlon Brando type of mobster, one who has other people do things, not doing them himself. With miscasting, the characters are unbelievable.

Then there is the tone of the film that tries to force certain plot points in the play into the gangster genre. The witches are played by a weird old lady, her son or something, and then an ugly, thin man who doesn’t really talk. They are fortune tellers who Macbeth just happens to stumble cross. The predictions that they make in the end to let Macbeth know when he will die try so hard to be exactly how they appear in the play. Rather than just letting it naturally be just a gangster film, it tries hard to push the idea that this is Macbeth. 10 Things I hate About You or She’s the Man are movies that let Shakespeare's plot bend and meld slightly into our world but mostly had very little in common with the actual play. This film pushed Macbeth really hard, trying to hit every main plot point in an exact modern term without even using the language of the play.

The other major problem is the fact that there is so much nudity. Tuturro is always naked in his scenes with his wife and we always see him naked. There is a random sex scene that they have in one of their interactions. There is no service to the story and just makes the audience want to laugh. It takes away from the seriousness of the film and causes a lot of akwardness.

With a series of miscasting, forced plot elements and nudity, Men of Respect is a disorganized film that tries too hard to be something. It forces at the audience, which ruins the experience and the film and the play with it. It may appeal to those who like the gangster genre (which I am not), it may not. I honestly don't know. But to me it seemed too hard to be a cool gnagster flick but failed utterly.

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