The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
(Denzel Washington as Macbeth)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
There’s beauty to be discovered even in the midst of bloodletting. That disquieting paradox suffuses director Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Coen (working here without brother Ethan) also wrote the adaptation of Shakespeare, and he doesn’t diminish the original’s starkness and strangeness. He plays them up, but with a modernist minimalism. Ice predominates, not fire.
Most striking are the German expressionist black-and-white compositions. Cinematographer (and longtime Coen collaborator) Bruno Delbonnel shines angular blades of light on figures in repose, caught whispering, spying or conspiring. Driven figures – even the good guys – scheme within deep shadows.
In this forlorn setting, both murder and righteous revenge are bloody acts, and Shakespeare’s ominous atmosphere swallows up everyone. Nearly every exchange, even when witnessed by an occasional cluster of onlookers, feels hushed, overheard, either hurled as a vengeful oath or flung like a curse.
The story, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and one of his shortest plays, unfurls with scary mercilessness (the movie runs an expertly proportioned 105 minutes). Within a riven medieval Scotland, the schemers-in-chief are Macbeth (Denzel Washington), who at the opening is the noble, esteemed Thane of Glamis, and his restless wife, Lady Macbeth (France McDormand), who seethes with an ambition her husband initially seems to lack.
Right after he’s become a victorious warrior, Macbeth is thrown some serious shade about his destiny and how much of it is in his hands. As he and his fellow general, noble Banquo (Bertie Carvel), make their way home from their battlefield conquest, they’re confronted by three witches. (All three “hags” are portrayed by one actress, Kathryn Hunter, whose image in this and subsequent encounters appears as a single figure that morphs into three distinct conjurors, each ominously foretelling the future.)
The witches prophesy that Macbeth will soon become Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter.
And exactly as foretold, at court Macbeth’s triumph in battle wins him praise as well as the title of Thane of Cawdor from King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson). Macbeth basks in these newly won honors, while his discontented wife begins calculating how to seize even more power.
We know the play, so we understand that their downfall is only a matter of time. But Macbeth has always been a problem play as much as a tragedy. What’s puzzling, and never really explained, is how the couple’s ambition is fed. The mere fact that Macbeth might advance, and those three strange roadside crones have prophesied as much, somehow proves more than enough to send Lady Macbeth into vehement conspiring. And she starts at the top. Murder the King, she assures Macbeth, and the crown will surely be his.
Critics and scholars have wondered ever since the play was first performed (sometime after 1606) before England’s King James I (also King James VI of Scotland) exactly how and when ambition became so deep-seated and all-enveloping within this ultimate power couple.
Of course, Coen doesn’t even faintly propose answers that Shakespeare doesn’t. He commits himself to making the play’s bleak premises wriggle and sear onscreen.
And oh, how they do. In addition to the two leads, the supporting cast shines. Hunter’s turn as the witches isn’t made convincing simply with camera tricks. She gives haunting vocal coherence to the weirdly ambiguous prophecies. Corey Hawkins makes a fierce, fine Macduff, who, after his wife and children are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen, enacts revenge coldly and implacably. Alex Hassell as Ross smoothly knits together scenes of exposition, like the revelation to Macduff of the murder of his family, as well as accounts of ghastly betrayal, like the horrific murder of Banquo and the lucky escape of Banquo’s son Fleance.
Two fiercely consistent priorities of Coen’s make this Macbeth work. First is the casting of Washington and McDormand (Coen’s wife, who’s also played the role onstage), clearly opting to make them an older childless couple desperate for a last chance at “glory”, which ends in disaster. Since both characters are older, both actors underplay, stressing the couple’s weariness and the need to make their marriage not just a bond of love, which it demonstrably is, but a triumphant political partnership, which it monstrously isn’t, ending in moral catastrophe.
Washington gives his lines a lean, thoughtful forward momentum, almost entirely without bombast. Even the famous tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech is delivered with a kind of sad, end-of-life resignation as opposed to its usual rendition as a forlorn cry for enlightenment that won’t ever come. At court he’s commanding but more methodical than dictatorial. If he’d waited his turn to become King, might he have been a good one? There’s no way of knowing. Fatal vision, as he describes the dagger that killed Banquo when it seems to appear before his eyes, blinded him, shattering any such hope.
(Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth)
McDormand gives a note-perfect performance. Her Lady Macbeth is rabid with ambition but is wily enough to coolly manipulate her husband’s wavering will, and to steady his nerves when he falters. When she tells him to screw your courage to the sticking place, we don’t doubt that she knows exactly where that place is, and it proves true that Macbeth relies on her nerves of steel to find it for himself. She’s regal in bearing before the court, tender when alone with Macbeth, and convincingly lost when she slips into sleepwalking madness. McDormand’s line readings are impeccable, and she endows Lady Macbeth with easeful wickedness and perverse willpower on her path to mental and moral collapse.
The movie’s other major success is in its visual splendor. Delbonnel’s black-and-white reductionism, within a compact, almost square, screen ratio, lends the action a profoundly conspiratorial, even “noirish”, edge, like fate hurtling forward.
It exquisitely complements Stefan Dechant’s severe, architecturally elegant production design. There are hardly any furnishings. Vast rooms, vaulting staircases, oddly shaped windows admitting sometimes glaring, sometimes ghostly light, all combine to give an air of both ambition and suspicion, or, as Shakespeare has it, both the flower and the serpent underneath.
Mary Zophres’ spare but telling costumes catch the light through subtle variations in texture and embroidery, like the stars in the King’s robe (worn by Duncan and, later, Macbeth), or the delicate flowers we see sewn into the gown worn by Lady Macduff (Moses Ingram) just as her life is about to be ended.
Scenes merge and bleed into one another, shrouded in fog or a wavering uncertain light, whether from sun, torch or candle. Scotland is a land steeped in fog and filthy air at the beginning of the tale and, despite some honorable bravery shown, right through to the end. We never see a horizon. Primal instincts older than nations or kingships seem to undermine everyone, offering little in the way of stability or control.
Making such engulfing uncertainty visually compelling is Coen's clearest, boldest success. He’s openly suggesting, with Shakespeare, that forces for good may achieve a temporary victory, but there’s no promise of safety or an assured future for anyone. He ends on a truly frightening note, with a shattering burst of black birds filling the screen, loudly, eerily, screeching, their beaks surely capable of drawing blood.