Old Yorker

  • The Tragedy of Macbeth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joel Coen (2021)

    As with Spielberg’s West Side Story, some people are asking:  why another movie Macbeth?  A main reason seems to be that Frances McDormand fancied a go at the female lead.  As she explained in an interview with Deadline on the eve of her husband’s film’s premiere at last autumn’s New York Film Festival, McDormand played the role on stage for the first time at Berkeley Rep just a few years ago and is ‘really glad I didn’t do it until then’.  Now sixty-four, she’s an unusually mature Lady Macbeth.  She’s partnered by Denzel Washington, who is two years her senior.  Yet their performances alone justify this latest adaptation – and they are far from the whole show.

    Joel Coen has abridged the play skilfully.  The film runs a streamlined 105 minutes; nothing vital seems to have been sacrificed.  Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is black and white; so, as already indicated, are Coen’s actors.  There’s no strain in this colour-blind casting because Delbonnel, the production design team headed by Stefan Dechant, and costumer Mary Zophres help Coen create an ahistorical context:  this Macbeth is taking place in a past that seems a mythical past – and, to some extent, a cinematic past.  The film’s visuals and atmosphere bring to mind – as well as, once or twice, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) – works by Ingmar Bergman and Fritz Lang[1].  Perhaps also thanks to this setting ‘untethered from reality’ (IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio), I had no problem either with the mixture of American, British and Irish accents in the cast.

    Justin Kurzel’s mostly dire Macbeth (2015) got off to a bad start by showing how the title character and his wife had come to be childless.  Without resorting to ‘backstory’, Coen, through the seniority of his stars, gives a novel edge to the Macbeths’ reaction to the witches’ prophecy:  Denzel Washington’s grizzled stalwart is initially incredulous but nonetheless excited by the idea of a late-career breakthrough to Scotland’s top job.  Unlike his self-directed acting in Fences (2016), Washington’s performance here is theatrically compelling without being stagy.  He doesn’t luxuriate in his fine voice; he varies and judges volume expertly.  He and Frances McDormand achieve a satisfyingly unstable balance of power between their characters.  The sleepwalking scene, in which she creates an increasing impression of being watched, is certainly McDormand’s highlight.  These top-drawer naturalistic actors, as well as delivering their lines, exchange private facial signals in ways that confirm it’s a film you’re watching – yet the combination of words and looks never amounts to tautology.

    Except for the dodgy eyebrows he’s been given to wear, Bertie Carvel is a splendid Banquo – his line readings are thrillingly precise.  As Duncan, Brendan Gleeson isn’t, of course, around for long but it’s long enough for him to register powerfully the horror of waking up to find oneself being murdered.  In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), the Coens exploited Harry Melling’s eccentric appearance; this proves a little distracting for Malcolm, though Melling’s acting is fine.  Moses Ingram is an effective Lady Macduff – more effective than Corey Hawkins, who makes her husband a little dull.  The cast also includes, among others, Alex Hassell (Ross), Miles Anderson (Lennox), Stephen Root (the drunken porter) and Ralph Ineson (the ‘bloody man’, promoted from sergeant to captain).  The outstanding achievement in the supporting roles, both in conception and execution, is Kathryn Hunter’s witches – she plays all three, one at a time but with a trio of figures occasionally seen as shadows or reflections in water.  Hunter immediately demonstrates her exceptional physicality:  in her first appearance, one of her legs is twisted around an arm, and this isn’t CGI.  The shape-shifting and Hunter’s protean, disturbing vocals compound a sense of the weird sisters as a psychic projection.

    The Coen brother’s title – how odd it feels putting that apostrophe before the ‘s’ – verges on the pretentious but keeps just the right side of it by resisting ‘Tragedie’.  There are moments, though, when the director overreaches himself in his image-making.  I didn’t get why, other than for spectacular purposes, Lady Macbeth’s corpse was discovered by her husband at the foot of a flight of stairs.  Birnam Wood’s approach to Dunsinane is impressive, with Malcolm’s troops holding tree branches above their heads and metamorphosing into a moving forest; it’s a bit much when Macbeth opens a castle door and the leaves blow in, a shower of giant confetti.  Even so, these flying objects nicely anticipate The Tragedy of Macbeth’s startling last shots.  Ravens are in evidence at several points of the film but never in such numbers as at the very end – an explosion of black onto a white screen, though their sounds go through you like chalk on a blackboard.   An unkindness of ravens is putting it mildly.  These ones are deserving of the collective noun for crows.

    6 January 2022

    [1] For an erudite, fascinating close reading of the film, particularly its spatial qualities and meanings, I thoroughly recommend the ‘Bardathon’ blog piece by Dr Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham) – https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2021/12/30/the-tragedy-of-macbeth-dir-joel-coen-a24-films/.

     

  • The Humans

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Karam (2021)

    Stephen Karam’s one-act play The Humans played Off-Broadway in late 2015, moved to Broadway early the following year and won numerous accolades, including the Tony for Best (new) Play of 2016.  As well as writing the script for this screen adaptation, Karam directed, too – all the more striking when he didn’t direct the play on stage and hadn’t made a film before.  The Humans begins with exterior shots of a New York apartment block – from the ground looking up, and up.  Changing camera angles create a disorienting effect and make the towering building formidable.  Karam and his cinematographer Lol Crawley then move inside the apartment, where all the following action, save for a few subsequent shots of the street outside, will take place.  The writer-director is evidently determined to avoid staginess and succeeds, but at a heavy price.  The camera movement is conspicuous.  The lack of light, made worse by the apartment’s dodgy wiring, is ominous.  The combination upstages the title characters, who are often shot from a distance or in shadow (almost to suggest the ghosts of people who once inhabited the place).  As a result, for this member of the audience anyway, they were sometimes hard to see and hear.

    The Humans is obvious, for all that.  Erik and Deirdre Blake (Richard Jenkins and Jayne Houdyshell, the only member of the Broadway cast in the film) arrive from Scranton, Pennsylvania (Stephen Karam’s native city) for a Thanksgiving dinner at the Lower Manhattan home of their younger daughter, Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), and her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun).  Accompanying Deirdre and Erik is his mother, Momo (June Squibb), who has advanced dementia.  The Blakes’ elder daughter, Aimee (Amy Schumer), is also at the gathering.  Brigid and Richard haven’t been in their apartment long – the place is hardly furnished or decorated, except for the dinner table and some fairy lights put up for the occasion.  When, early in a film, someone enters a room and pensively runs their hand over a crack in the plaster, it’s a safe bet that the gesture portends relational fissures etc to be exposed in due course.  This is just what Erik does on arrival at the apartment, and just what happens over the course of the remaining hundred or so minutes.

    There are some nice bits of humour, mostly deriving from the generational differences and family traditions that Karam highlights.  But The Humans turns into little more than a series of revelations of the characters’ flaws and miseries, chosen to illustrate typical stresses and challenges de nos jours.  Deirdre is obese and Weight Watchers isn’t helping.  Aimee, as well as suffering from ulcerative colitis, has recently lost her job with a law firm, and her girlfriend.  While Brigid is a composer manqué, Richard is a long-serving mature student, who has suffered from depression.  The confessional baton is passed from one character to another (except, of course, for Momo, who needs round-the-clock care that her son and daughter-in-law can’t afford).  On the crucial anchor leg is Erik, who has been unfaithful to Deirdre, and lost his job and pension into the bargain.  As is only to be expected, Richard Jenkins plays his part with particular distinction but the acting from all six cast members is close to impeccable.  It’s hard to say much more about them than that, though:  their roles are too clearly and narrowly defined for the actors to surprise.

    Characters in The Humans sometimes talk about their dreams and what images in those dreams might signify.  This interest in symbols makes you wonder why none of them seems to notice they’re trapped in an emphatically significant setting – a bleak house where lights fail, where disconcerting thumps and juddering sounds are repeatedly heard from somewhere in the bowels of the building.  There’s even an ominous, unidentified figure glimpsed in the dark outside.  By the closing stages, it’s inside that darkness reigns:  another electrical failure leaves Erik whimpering fearfully as he struggles to make his way out of the apartment to join his wife and mother in the cab that will take them on their way home.  He finally makes his exit into a sliver of light, closing the door behind him to leave the screen pitch black.   This puts the seal on Stephen Karam’s glumly predictable film.

    3 January 2022

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