The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021 | USA | 105 minutes | Joel Coen)
The works of William Shakespeare have proven to be endlessly resilient, having survived the centuries since their first productions to be fodder for high school drama clubs as well as in performances by the finest actors in temples of theaters around the world. Translated and reshaped to speak to global cultures and shifting sociopolitical structures, they’re a surprisingly malleable foundation for dramatically interpreting the changing times. If the masterful HBOmax adaptation of Station Eleven is any indication, they might just survive us all as the primary text of the straggling survivors of a pandemic-ravaged planet.
And so it is, in the midst of our own slow-burning pandemic, that Joel Coen has chosen a film adaptation of The Scottish Play for his first stint as a solo-credited director. In a way it is unsurprising that after decades of making films with his brother that found the Shakespearean drama among the base instincts, small-minded greed, and ordinary human foibles he would turn to the Bard’s most compact tragedy. But it is somewhat amazing how straightforward and seriously he plays the political thriller about an ambitious warrior with an even more ambitious wife who conspire to take the throne through bloody regicide.
Baz Luhrman turned Romeo and Juliet into a hyper-saturated nineties teen rock drama. Michael Almereyda envisioned Hamlet as a 2000s era commentary on corporate corruption and surveillance culture. Coen’s Macbeth, on the other hand, is rendered as a reverent community theater production. Here, though, the “community” is a cast of our era’s most celebrated actors of the era, with the title couple portrayed by a pair of actors (Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington) with five acting Oscars between them whose performances here will certainly put them in the conversation for a couple more nominations.
Adhering closely to the text and shot in crisp black and white on a Los Angeles soundstage, this production evokes the feeling of hyper-serious perfume ad from the nineties. Stefan Dechant’s production design is a feast of sharp angles and sparse geometries that’s more a playground for camera angles than an immersive environment for actors. Combined with the rich textiles and symbolic patterns of Mary Zophres’s costumes, the sparse sets evoke a feeling of an artsy collective’s earnest staging of a cherished play amidst a renaissance faire. Many of the soliloquies are direct-to-camera, the actors having mastered the arcane dramatic rhythms well enough to sound more natural than cryptic. The language remains the star here, adorned with a sparse score and a pointed sound design in service of conveying the lust for power and escalating madness.
Aside from aging the Macbeths into regret-soaked late middle age, the primary innovation of this adaptation is the collapse of the three prophetic witches into a scintillatingly weird performance by the celebrated stage actor Kathryn Hunter. It is in her outstanding performance that the film contorts most markedly from reality, both through her remarkable physical presence as well as dreamlike camera effects that find her ravenlike presence first tempting Macbeth with the promise of power and later haunting him with the consequences of his vile actions.
It is her brief and potent appearances that leave one wishing that the rest of the production had embraced more in the way of strange inventiveness. It’s a play that has sustained multiple film adaptations and even a long-running and wildly popular immersive film noir theatrical experience. So while Coen’s film hits all of the expected marks with aplomb – McDormand gets to ominously sleepwalk and scrub invisible blood stains, Denzel’s sanity dissolves into a fatal bit of swordplay, and a handcrafted woods does indeed march – it’s a bit of a disappointingly flat journey through sparely decorated sets and tricky language to get there. By no means a tale told by an idiot, it’s nevertheless a story whose telling could have used a little less devotion and a bit more in the way of sound and fury during its hours on the stage.
The Tragedy of Macbeth, still playing in local theaters, is now available on AppleTV+
Header image courtesy A24