Directed by: Joel Coen
Starring: Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Alex Hassell, Bertie Carvel, Kathryn Hunter
Rated R, 105 minutes
In the early days of film, back when Civil War veterans were the same age as baby boomers are now and Los Angeles was just starting to come into its own, the center of the budding movie industry was Europe. Frenchmen like Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers were expanding the storytelling possibilities of moving pictures, while the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov started to lay down a theory of how film editing conveys meaning. In Germany, meanwhile, Expressionists like Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene were developing a visual language for film that established the medium’s potential to depict a reality not quite our own.
It is to this last group of pioneers, the German Expressionists, that Joel Coen’s (“No Country for Old Men”) adaptation of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy is most heavily indebted. “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” a starkly imagined black-and-white rendering of the Scottish play, matches the heightened poetry of Shakespeare’s dialogue with dramatic visuals that call to mind that early period of film, when striking and angular sets bore only passing resemblance to reality. Long removed though we may be from Shakespeare’s era, his verbal acrobatics more foreign to our ears with each passing year, the visual language of Coen’s adaptation translates the psychological horrors of Macbeth’s tragedy with perfect clarity.
Take, for example, the many rooms of Macbeth’s castle, sparsely furnished (if furnished at all), the light filtering in from unseen windows to cast their occupants and corners in deep shadows. Like a Bauhaus nightmare or an M.C. Escher drawing come to life, rooms lead to other rooms with a confusing geography, disorienting us as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth descend into madness. In one scene, Macbeth wakes in an empty room and discovers the entire floor has been transformed into the three witches’ cauldron. Even outdoor scenes are reduced to the absolute essentials, their backgrounds uniformly shrouded in fog, letting in only the occasional glimpse of a castle in the distance.
It’s a fitting and focused treatment of this old tale of ruthless ambition. Macbeth, spurred on by a prophecy and by Lady Macbeth’s urging, kills the king, assumes the throne, and then sets about disposing of any who suspect him of the crime. In this unforgiving and unadorned landscape of Coen’s imagining, it reads as a morality play about power’s cruel grip on the mind, a warning to any that would seek it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the adage goes; “The Tragedy of Macbeth” never diverts its gaze from that truism.
Ironically, the performances from its leads are subdued. As Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Denzel Washington (“Fences”) and Frances McDormand (“Nomadland”) eschew grand theatricality, instead portraying the ill-fated couple as partners to be pitied, schemers whose ambitions get the better of them from the start. Their quiet, muttering deliveries lend their awful deeds an air of disbelief, as if to illustrate that it’s not always the most bellicose among us who are capable of the worst acts.
Around them, an excellent supporting cast lends the film an air of mystery, as if cloaking the dramatic conflict in the same fog that obscures the land. Playing an amalgamation of several roles from the original play, Alex Hassell (“Cowboy Bebop”) shows up in key moments like an emcee for the tragedy, ineffably detached from the proceedings around him. Likewise, Kathryn Hunter (“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”), playing all three witches at once, contorts her body, face, and voice into shapes and sounds that punctuate the heavy atmosphere with dagger-sharp moments of strange clarity.
As with any Shakespeare adaptation, it’s tempting to search for clues that connect it to the present day. And it’s possible, of course, to find those parallels that suggest some condition of life in the 21st century that compelled Coen to make his adaptation. (“That a swift blessing may soon return to this our suffering country,” says a nobleman late in the film, a sentiment any of us could interpret immediately.) But Coen, throughout his long career, has never been concerned with specific readings, and that remains as true as ever here—especially so, given the timeless qualities of Shakespeare’s plays. By setting his adaptation in a world seemingly removed from time itself, Coen embraces that timelessness with a finesse few filmmakers, past or present, have ever possessed.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/21/22.