The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
dir. Joel Coen
Rated: R
image: ©2021 A24
“There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don't cha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”
That’s the incomparable Marge Gunderson, as played by the equally incomparable Frances McDormand, near the tail end of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 black comedy crime masterpiece Fargo. She’s expressing her dumbfoundedness to a killer about why he would commit brutal acts of violence for a little bit of money. Substitute the money for a crown, and Marge could have turned up in The Tragedy of Macbeth to express the same dismay.
The greed, duplicitous plotting, double crossing, and murder in Fargo make that film feel like a Shakespearian tragedy, so, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Coens would tackle the Scottish play, one of the Bard’s most famous and celebrated works.
Only, for the first time in their filmmaking lives, The Tragedy of Macbeth isn’t a collaboration between the Coen brothers. After nearly four decades of making movies together, The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first solo film by Joel Coen. His stripped down, almost ascetic, version of the Shakespeare work is, simply put, a masterpiece.
After victory in battle against a would-be usurper to the Scottish throne, Macbeth and Banquo, King Duncan’s top generals, encounter the three weird sisters, or witches. They speak prophecy to the two men. Macbeth shall be Thane of Cawdor, the title of the traitorous man he and Banquo have defeated and captured.
The sisters tell Macbeth he is destined to be King, but also proclaim that Banquo shall father a line of kings. Macbeth’s thirst for power – but more so, it’s his wife, the Lady Macbeth, and her ruthless ambition for her husband – causes him to misinterpret these prophecies, leading to unimaginable violence and his ultimate downfall.
Joel Coen, who both directed and adapted the screenplay, has turned Macbeth into a starkly beautiful, and brutal, horror film. The terror begins as we are introduced to the three weird sisters as they circle in the sky in the form of menacing crows.
In human form, the three are one. Using a wildly inventive visual design, one witch stands before Macbeth and Banquo with a large puddle of water in front of her. The reflection she casts, however, is that of her sisters, one on each side of her, creating an ominous triangular shape.
Famed British stage actress and theatre director Kathryn Hunter sets the tone immediately as the sisters with her guttural intonation and near-contortionist physicality. She writhes on screen like a serpent; each line of dialog that she barks burrows its way into the deepest recesses of your subconscious.
The set design, art direction, and cinematography of Coen’s Macbeth come straight out of the tradition of the greatest works of 1920s German Expressionist film. So many images here would be right at home alongside stills of perhaps the greatest achievement of the German Expressionist era, director Robert Wiene’s 1920 masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
The sets in Macbeth, like Caligari, are stripped down to their bare essentials. They feel at once like something you would see on a stage – the filmmakers achieved a look “untethered from reality” by shooting entirely on soundstages – yet the lines and angles are often heightened and exaggerated, like half-remembered scenes from your last nightmare.
Virtuoso cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel – who shot two other Coen brothers pictures, including the impossibly gorgeous Inside Llewyn Davis – complements Coen’s visual aesthetic with his spare and stark black-and-white photography inside a claustrophobic and boxy 1.19:1 aspect ratio, a look akin to the days of silent film.
As important as the visual design is to the overall success of the film, the groundbreaking casting and phenomenal performances in The Tragedy of MacBeth are every bit as central to the lasting impression that it leaves.
The iconic Denzel Washington gives an unhinged, disquieting lead performance as the power-mad Macbeth. No stranger to the works of Shakespeare, Washington has appeared on stage in numerous of the Bard’s works, including Othello, Coriolanus, and Richard III.
His Macbeth is imbued with every shade associated with the tragic figure: hubris, villainy, self-doubt, remorse, and ultimately madness. In his hands, the famous soliloquys – the ones you remember from your high school English lit class, like “Is this a dagger I see before me?” – are fresh and new and exciting. Washington’s astonishing talent reveals itself in the fact that he can telegraph one, but often more, of those qualities in the slightest of looks or with the faintest smile.
He’s aided in that task with Coen’s visual style for the film. Macbeth is a movie of closeups; every glorious one engulfs you. Seen on the big screen, you feel the camera being mere inches away from every face, which highlights the tiniest change of expression.
With regard to the diverse casting of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Washington has stated that “in my humble opinion, we ought to be at a place where diversity shouldn't even be mentioned, like it's something special." While that’s the ideal end point, and the direction in which it’s inexorably moving, I disagree that the culture has reached that point quite yet.
After all, Joel Coen himself caused a bit of a firestorm as recently as 2016 with his comments in response to criticism that the cast of the Coen brothers film Hail, Caesar! was overwhelmingly white: “You don’t sit down and write a story and say, ‘I’m going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog’ — right? If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how stories get written.”
Coen has seemingly had a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus revelation on the matter, which is incredibly welcome and laudable. His Macbeth, in addition to Washington in the lead role, features the talented Corey Hawkins – who costarred in 2021’s In the Heights as Benny – as Macduff, the man who finally ends Macbeth’s reign of terror. Actors of color are also featured in the roles of Macduff’s family.
I have to imagine that Coen’s wife and frequent creative collaborator, the aforementioned Frances McDormand, had some part in her husband’s transformation. (My wife has been instrumental in many of my own personal evolutions over the years.) McDormand gave a barnburner of a speech about diversity both in front of and behind the camera when she won an Oscar in 2018 for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. She closed the speech by calling for inclusion riders, encouraging stars to call for these special clauses in their contracts that ensured diversity was a priority.
McDormand is utterly superb as the conniving and dastardly Lady Macbeth. In one of those extreme closeups I mentioned earlier, the actress’s character wakes from a night’s sleep with a devious smile painted on her face before she even opens her eyes.
Say what you will about the Lady Macbeth archetype blaming and demonizing women for their duplicitous nature – Yoko didn’t break up The Beatles, y’all, The Beatles broke up themselves when they couldn’t figure out a way to act like grownups – the character has agency for days and sets the plot spinning by putting murderous steel in her mate’s spine.
McDormand rips it up in the role. From her initial endless scheming to her tragic spiral into remorse and guilt, the actress adds to her long and fruitful career of playing strong women with a purpose. McDormand completely transforms herself when the weight of Lady Macbeth’s sins starts to take their toll. (Her delivery of another of those high school English lit highlights – “Out, damned spot!” – gave me chills.)
From the stark beauty of its visual design, to the stripped-down efficiency of Coen’s screenplay adaptation, to the layered and nuanced performances – and I didn’t even get to frequent Coen collaborator Carter Burwell’s ominous score – The Tragedy of Macbeth is a triumph. Joel Coen has made another masterpiece here, a singular one in that he made it as a solo act.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Coen. Shakespeare. What more is there to say? Joel Coen brings his unique visual and storytelling sense to bear on an author’s work that’s been renowned for over half a millennium. Coen turns the tragedy into a full-on horror movie, and the results are incredible.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Shout out to the amazing Stephen Root, who turns up in one scene. The guy is a chameleon.
- Speaking of cameos, my X-Files radar went wild when Brian Thompson – aka Alien Bounty Hunter – popped up as one of the murderers Macbeth employs in his devious plot. Rae, of course, recognized him from an episode of Charmed.
- The real star of the show, though, is Bertie Carvel’s eyebrows. Carvel plays Banquo, and Rae felt so compelled by his impressive eye tufts that she took the sheet I was using to take notes away from me and wrote, simply, “EYEBROWS.”
- I’m about to get real with you about Shakespeare. Can we all agree that it’s essentially a foreign language at this point? (I’m fascinated when I think about what today’s English will sound like to people living 500 years from now, should humanity survive that long.) One of my favorite things about listening to Shakespeare is that, when it first starts, I’m scrambling to translate what’s being spoken in my head in real-time. But there always comes a moment (unfortunately this time around, it was almost three-quarters of the way in) when something clicks and I’m able to decipher what’s being said without much effort.
- This review is dedicated to the memory of Sandy Gifford, my high school junior/senior English teacher. There is nothing I would like more than to be able to talk about this movie with her.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this in the brand new second screen at The Texas Theatre. It was a decent turnout. In addition to Rae and myself, there were a dozen or so other people in the crowd. All were as enraptured as I was. The Tragedy of Macbeth is currently available in select theaters and streaming on Apple TV+.