In the movie The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare, directed by Roman Polanski, there were many differences that could be seen when compared to the play written by Shakespeare. To a person who has never studied the play in depth, the movie does a great job in giving its audience the information they need to be able to follow the plot. Yet, one of the differences in the direction of the movie from the play is the way they portrayed Lady Macbeth. In the movie, we see Lady Macbeth to be more of the innocent kind and we sense she was victimized when she got involved in the plot with Macbeth.
If you just watch the movie, without the in-depth study of the play itself, you will not be able to see the way Shakespeare had intended the role of Lady Macbeth to be played. If you read the play, you can see that she was definitely the one who pushed her husband into killing Duncan and also doing all those nasty deeds. You can imagine in your head that she is an evil person with no heart, cold-blooded as a murderer who has just killed a newborn baby. You would visualize her to be a malevolent, scheme-planning, self-centred woman. All of this could be seen and inferred only after the first few scenes that involve Lady Macbeth in the play. Yet in the movie itself, we see Lady Macbeth in a lighter tone. She is not as malicious as Shakespeare pictured her, but rather she is someone who is weak. I always imagined her to be someone who is forcefully assertive and maybe even aggressive at times. .
Yet in the movie, I saw her as someone who wanted things done yet she was more docile and not even assertive at all. She seemed to be asking for favours more than she was ordering people around. This sense of weakness and softness in her voice, that we heard and saw during the movie, is what makes her seem fairly innocent. Innocent in the sense that she seems to be so caring for her husband that when she saw him breaking down after seeing the ghost of Banquo, she is the one to protect him from the guests.
