Joel Coen's 'Macbeth' — Julian Girdham

Macbeth may well be the text I know best of all, having taught it for decades, and the comments here are part of the conversation I have been having with the play since the 1970s. I would be very interested in its impact on a viewer who knows little or nothing about the text, for whom this is their first experience of the story.

It’s cheering that three such massive talents as Joel Coen, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand have come together to give us another take on the play, and contribute to keeping alive Shakespeare’s presence on the big screen. This version is billed as The Tragedy of Macbeth (based on the play by William Shakespeare), allowing itself a little leeway from the original text. In fact it is very faithful both to the language of that text and the spirit of the original, with only a couple of deviations, as well as some pruning (the longest scene, IV III, in England, goes straight to the arrival of Ross).

One of the things Coen does well is wrap us in intensity, carrying us headlong along through this dark world. This is probably a truism for all theatre, but with this play relentless intensity is essential (Hamlet and King Lear offer us more moments in which to breathe). Coen’s version, coherently presented through stunningly lustrous black-and-white cinematography (Bruno Delbonnel), envelops us in a claustrophobic stylised architectural universe, a mélange (sounds a mess, but it really works) of de Chirico, Escher and monochrome Caravaggio. Suggestively, everywhere there are doors, windows, arches, corridors, in a castle unsoftened by decoration. The scenes on the heath are shrouded in mist, out of which characters appear, their faces zooming startlingly up to the camera: Washington’s peppery beard, Kathryn Hunter’s Auden-esque lined face as the witch, Malcolm’s fresh and guileless expression. The English scene comes as a contrast, set in a corridor this time of trees and plentiful leaves, suffused with sunlight. The film can shortly be seen on Apple TV, but do see it if you can in its natural habitat, a darkened cinema on a large screen (with a full audio system to do the superb soundtrack justice), rather than your friendly distracting sitting-room.

It is Washington and McDormand (who apparently played Lady Macbeth as a teenager) who will draw in most visitors. Their age makes no difference: it is entirely convincing that here is a couple who are finally seizing their chance after so long, and that then their lives turn to dust. They work well together, particularly just after the murder, when Washington slumps beside her, already a broken man, throwing my mind to Jan Kott’s statement that ‘the act of killing changes the person who has performed it; from then on he is a different man living in a different world’ (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1965). Washington delivers some lines beautifully in that gorgeous voice, though one of the few weaknesses of the production is that he fails to make the most of the longer speeches, particularly the first two soliloquies including the crucial ‘If it were done’, about which I have written here. In the dagger speech, he is stronger, helped by the staging as he walks along a corridor/cloister towards a shining dagger hovering in the gloom, which turns out to be the handle on a door from which the Porter later emerges. McDormand, whose role is famous but more limited, is consistently excellent, her disintegration signified by her steadily unravelling hair (at one point she pulls out a whole clump).

There are lots of memorable moments:

starting with the twisting double-jointed Kathryn Hunter as the sole witch (multiplied occasionally in a special effect). Olwyn Fouere was also similarly outstanding as a single witch in the superb Selina Cartmell production at Dublin’s Empty Space in 2008.
First one, then another, then three birds of prey cut across the clouds as the film starts (and at the end there is a Hitchcockian explosion of them alongside a - no-spoiler - suggestion nowhere in Shakespeare). Some may find the symbolism too obvious.
Unlike in Shakespeare, we see the murder of Duncan ‘live’, as Washington crouches over the sleeping Brendan Gleeson, and puts his finger to his lips before steeling his expression and dispatching him quickly (my fault, but I was distracted by being reminded of the bearded Gleeson as Knuckles McGinty in Paddington 2). An echo: earlier, Lady Macbeth had woken smilingly to see her husband looming over her on his return from battle.
Another echo/doubling: after the murder Washington smashes the water he is using to clean his hands to the floor; at the banquet, he does the same to the wine.

The only real change to Shakespeare’s story comes in the figure of Ross (the saturnine Alex Hassell with Spock-like ears), here the embodiment of villainy in what looks like some sort of snake-skin black clothing. In the original, he appears regularly at crucial moments, seemingly popping up when anything dreadful happens (notably in the Macduff family story) but with little personal agency. Here, Coen takes his role well beyond that, particularly in moments involving Fleance and Lady Macbeth.

Overall, this pacy, visually-gorgeous production is well-worth seeing, and takes a deserved place alongside Welles, Polanski and Nunn/McKellen/Dench.

(END)

Other responses worth reading:

James Shapiro is always essential reading: in the New York Review of Books, he gives context, and states that the film, which could seem an exercise in nostalgia for midcentury cinema, is also a repudiation of a different kind of nostalgia: the American fantasy that things were once different and better, and will be again—a fitting message for our perilous and equivocating time.
Richard Brody goes full out with his hatchet in the New Yorker, and gives you a contrary view: a neat and clean medieval drama, a sanitized “Macbeth” in which the absence of ornament and tangle, the sharp and rational focus on clear action, is the mark of rigorous earnestness. Yet Coen’s straining for seriousness and yearning for importance breaks through to the other side with the howlers of unintentional comedy. Lots here I don’t agree with, like the suggestion that the sets overwhelm the actors (see Austin Tichenor below for Folger).
A.O. Scott in the New York Times says that building a cinematic space in which the language can breathe — in which both the archaic strangeness and the timelessness of the poetry come to life — demands a measure of audacity.
Justin Chang in the LA Times has ‘A Recommendation in Five Acts’: When the actors step forth from these gloomy expressionist shadows, they often plant themselves center-frame and speak directly to the camera — a choice that feels rooted in both an older era of filmmaking and the earlier traditions of the theater.
Zoe Enser from the English teaching world: There is a lot of potential for using some of this adaptation with students in the English classroom, not least the fact there is a lot to chew over and bring back to the text to explore. However, I would be approaching with caution as there is enough commonalities to embed some quite key misconceptions.
For Folger Shakespeare, Austin Tichenor writes that this is a brilliant interpretation that’s my favorite kind of Shakespeare: it combines the artifice of theater with the techniques of film, especially the use of the close-up, where the thinking behind the verse gets as much attention as the verse itself.