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/.
