Men would rather chop off their own fingers than go to therapy. If you’re even a little familiar with internet meme culture, you’ve likely seen one of the hundreds of “men would rather [insert stupid or awful thing here] than go to therapy” memes, which chides the male sex for our almost absolute refusal to solve problems by talking through them.
Instead, we usually opt for violence or other reckless behavior that often leaves us worse-off than when we started. The characters in playwright and director Martin McDonagh’s latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin (pronounced Innish-E-rin), would do well to have the little bit of snarky wisdom posted to their Facebook page by a friend. McDonagh set his film in 1923, though, so his characters needn’t be bothered with any modern critiques of toxic male behavior.
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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 Cohen. His stripped down, almost ascetic, version of the Shakespeare work is, simply put, a masterpiece.
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Joel and Ethan Coen have put their inimitable stamp on just about every film genre there is. Their movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs isn’t even really their first attempt at an anthology. They previously turned in a segment in two different anthology collections. The first was for the film Paris, je t’aime, where each story is set in the City of Lights. The second was a three minute short for a film commissioned as a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, called Chacun son cinema.
Scruggs, however, is all Coen Brothers, from start to finish. The film contains no out-and-out clunkers, but, as is the case with most anthologies, the whole is a bit uneven.
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