a murder of crows
by Douglas Messerli
Joel Coen (screenwriter and director) The
Tragedy of Macbeth / 2021
Any director who might wish to film
Shakespeare is inevitably doomed simply by the history of the play, any
Shakespeare play, and the various ways that its audiences, actors, directors,
scholars, and so many others are convinced from either experience, interpretation,
or mere personal preference about how the production should sound and look.
Given the absolute richness of the Bard’s munificent contributions to mankind I
might imagine that by this time we should all be open to the widest varieties
of interpretation and representation, knowing as we do the long history of
Shakespearean theater and film.
But
with every new production critics of all sorts, so-called professionals, and
amateurs alike inevitably dive into the fray with their critiques. For Joel
Coen—often toying, along with his brother Ethan, with being the bad boys of
serious cinema—to take on one of Shakespeare’s most language-bound dramas Macbeth
without even the help of his script-writing other seems more than audacious.
And then to almost claim the authorship of the work—the credits read “Written
for the screen as directed by Joel Coen,” based on the play by William
Shakespeare—is nearly impudent, as if he were asking for all the pent-up
emotions of so many individuals who feel that they alone might imagine the
perfect production.
Richard Brody of the New Yorker jumps right into the cauldron of
shaming, in his very first paragraph beating him down to the size of a man he
imagines with the largest of egos:
“Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is
the kind of movie that a hero of the Coen brothers, Preston Sturges, mocked
eighty years ago in his great film Sullivan’s Travels, about a famous
comedy director who strains after relevance by turning his attention to a
super-serious social drama. Macbeth, however, is more than a serious
drama; it’s a ready-made showcase for inspired actors, and Coen’s cast is
filled with some of the best. It’s a special form of cinematic torment when
great performers are stuck in a misbegotten production, because the intrinsic
pleasure of seeing them is overshadowed by a sense of waste, of artistry
neglected by directorial willfulness or vanity. Denzel Washington, as Macbeth,
and Frances McDormand, as Lady Macbeth, fit their performances to the movie’s
narrow view of Shakespearean cinema, which reduces grandeur to petulance and
poetry to decoration. The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style
that isn’t achieved—and that undercuts the mighty import of the play.”
Basically, Brody argues, Coen’s Macbeth is centered upon its
theatrical set at the expense of all else, particularly the language.
There is no doubt that the architecture of Coen’s film is most certainly
awe-inspiring, but not at all, it seems to me, as an attention-getting device
or to create a presence larger than the actors and even Shakespeare’s language.
What Coen has done in emptying his fog-hidden Scottish fens and glens of nearly
all but its intruders and stripping the concrete castles of nearly every piece
of furniture, tapestries, and personal objects is to create a stunningly abstract
stage on which we might attend to character and language alone.
And yes, he has cut down the Shakespeare play to get to the grit of the
story and language. Coen’s Macbeth, unlike Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)
is not about warfare but about a man and a woman so possessed by a notion of
fate, foretold almost like the promise of a lottery ticket by a shapeshifting
crone (all three witches played in this case by the amazing performer Kathryn
Hunter) who enigmatically proffer Macbeth the role of the King and his fellow
soldier Banquo (Bertie Carvel) a future of producing later rulers of the
country for which they have just done battle.
In
Coen’s version of the play, those two predictions quickly come to wipe away all
other realities from his purview, particularly the fact that he might be simply
celebrating for his wartime feats and his sudden title of the Lord of Cawdor, focusing
instead on his plotting with his wife how to rush into the future by murdering
their royal guest, King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson). It is as if the possibility
of power has made him suddenly mad, an affliction which perhaps any generation
can recognize in their own leaders; the only difference between Macbeth and
someone like Donald Trump being that the Lord of Cawdor is still a man of some
conscience and recognizes his own treachery, which later damns both him and
Lady Macbeth to a life in their prison of guilt.
Say what you will about Coen’s paring down of space and action, about
his shift away from mimesis and logic, the abstract world which the characters
now inhabit lets us totally attend to the true core of the work, its language.
Given that few of these actors are trained in Shakespearian elocution, I
would nonetheless argue that they mostly give remarkably credible readings of
the play that for many contemporary viewers surely must still sound, despite
the director’s and actor’s attempts to move the language from set speeches into
the realm of everyday conversation, like they are speaking in a foreign
language.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian captures quite nicely what Coen
has achieved:
Director Joel Coen...has delivered a stark
monochrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness. With Shakespeare’s text
cut right back, it’s a version that brings us back to the language by framing
the drama in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies
and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy-white fog.
.... And McDormand is of course Lady Macbeth here,
a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own
sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan.
Macbeth is Denzel Washington, who portrays the Thane as already
exhausted by his great triumph in the King’s cause at the very beginning, a
moment at which he might be expected to look forward to retirement. Washington’s
signature rolling swagger looks careworn, but his Macbeth submits to both the
duplicitous supernatural promises and his wife’s demands like a soldier taking
his orders. And then, angry and paranoid, he escalates his fanatical rule with
a series of pre-emptive murders while McDormand’s Lady Macbeth retreats into
horror and despair.
To
be honest, as much as I loved both McDormand’s and Washington’s performances, I
found them at moments working somewhat out of their range. McDormand is perfect
for the dark and detailed plotting, the cynical vision that paves the way for
Macbeth’s increasing paranoia, but is not as good working at the full shrill
pitch that her anger with her husband’s shockingly public admissions he makes
under the spell of darkest moments of his growing insanity. Her own guilt,
Washington is his best at performing in a low register of carefully
inflected niceties that betray an unimagined world of chaos, but as a tyrant
forced to madly bark out his orders to kill Banquo and his eldest son Fleance,
and later to demand the immediate death of Macduff’s wife and children, he too
moves out of his natural range.
But then both of these actors are so brilliant that even when possessed
by unthinkable language pouring from their tongues, we believe that they truly
have been possessed by the evil spirits of which the black ravens give constant
evidence. “Something wicked” has truly come their way and nothing they can do
can any longer contain it. Power not only has completely corrupted them, but
contorted them to unrecognizable beings whose behavior is no longer quite credible.
Brendan Gleeson plays the too trusting King Duncan quite expertly, and
if Harry Melling as Malcolm seems, at moments, a little ill-at-ease and even
diffident in his role, so too is the future King, who Macbeth originally
dislikes with good reason. Malcolm does not demonstrate a kingly mien, and does
show the wisdom of his father, even though it is he who finally wins through
the struggles of Macduff (Corey Hawkins) and the alternating betrayals of Ross
(Alex Hassell).
The
Times’ Scott goes even further in his praise of the cast.
“And Coen’s version is, above all, a triumph
of casting. By which I mean: Denzel Washington. Not only him, by any means: the
ensemble of thanes and wives, hired killers and servants, witches and children
is pretty much flawless. Kathryn Hunter is downright otherworldly as all three
of the shape-shifting, soothsaying weird sisters. Stephen Root, in a single
scene as Porter, lifts the grim, forensic business of regicide and its
aftermath into the realm of knockabout farce. Alex Hassell plays Ross as a perfect
paragon of courtly cynicism, always obliging and never to be trusted. Bertie
Carvel’s Banquo and Corey Hawkins’s Macduff carry the burden of human decency
with appropriate feeling.”
Hawkins is particularly moving in his lamentations of the murders
Macbeth has inflicted upon his family. And the only major action of the film
comes in the form of his revenge of those murders with Macbeth’s almost willing
participation. By this time Macbeth is tired of living in the tyranny he has
created not only for others but for himself.
But
even that battle seems, in Coen’s telling, almost incidental. The real heart of
his film lies in the personal relationships forged between individuals, the
love of Duncan for Macbeth and Banquo, the perverted love story of the Macbeths
themselves, Macduff’s relationship to his wife
(Moses Ingram), and finally, Ross’s strange protection and, at work’s
end, seeming adoption of Macduff’s spared son Fleance, the child wonderfully
realized by Lucas Barker. In each of these intense relationships there exists
both deep love and betrayal, often simultaneously. Coen’s version, more than
any other of productions I’ve seen of Macbeth opens up the question of why the
betrayer of all the individuals, Ross, saves Fleance and carries him off at
work’s close, particularly since he knows less than anyone what the witches
have foretold. The final ride of Ross and Fleance into the deepening shadows of
sunset is not in Shakespeare, but a creation of his own making, a kind of
terrifying salvation of the throne. What is he, in the meantime going to do
with this boy? The sudden blast of hundreds of ravens straight out of Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds does not seem to suggest the good omen the boy’s
salvation should have represented.
Coen’s Macbeth may not be the Macbeth you’ve encountered previously, but it is a disturbing and profoundly moving version of Shakespeare nonetheless that deserves comparison with the cinematic Macbeths created by Orson Welles (1948), Kurosawa (1957), Andrzej Wajda (1962) Roman Polanski (1971), Rosa von Praunheim (1971), and Justin Kurzel (2015)—and perhaps even the never realized, although planned and scripted version by Laurence Olivier. Of all of these, Coen’s is certainly the most beautifully realized work thanks to this director’s visual genius and the stunning cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel.
Los Angeles, January 7, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January
2022).
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