Shakespeare’s plays have been modified, mutated and mangled in all manner of wild, wonderful and wacky ways, on the stage and screen: modern settings, cross-gender casting, larkish animation and much, much more.
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| Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble: Macbeth (Denzel Washington) is about to learn that an apparently promising prophecy carries nasty consequences. |
Even by the unusual standards of some that have come before, director/scripter Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth is quite outré.
The film’s look is simultaneously gorgeous and disorienting. Stefan Dechant’s eye-popping production design is an opulent blend of 1920s German Expressionism and imposing Gothic sensibilities, saturated with a 1950s film noir atmosphere courtesy of Bruno Delbonnel’s gorgeous monochrome cinematography. Buildings and individual rooms have impossibly distant ceilings, with quirkily geometric windows that cast striking lights and shadows.
The result is unsettling and even hallucinatory: quite apt, given the nature of this grim, blood-drenched story.
Carter Burwell’s moody, often ominous orchestral score similarly adds much to the film’s macabre tone.
Casting is intriguing; Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are much too old for the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, although their advanced years do further emphasize their characters’ frustration over having failed to produce an heir.
There’s also the matter of Coen’s bold decision to considerably enhance the role of Ross, generally a minor supporting character, but — as superbly played here by Alex Hassell — transformed into a Satanic key player, trickster figure and master manipulator. He frankly blows Washington and McDormand off the screen.
The story begins as Scottish generals Macbeth, his good friend Banquo (Bertie Carvel) and their army have successfully defeated the allied forces of Ireland and Norway. En route to rejoining King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson), Macbeth and Banquo wander onto an ominous heath and encounter three witches.
All three of these supernatural beings do — or sometimes don’t — inhabit the single body of actress Kathryn Hunter, whose contortionist abilities and feral malevolence are extremely unsettling. She may be the creepiest witch ever brought to the screen, and her varying appearances are quite creative: most strikingly, a single body with two reflections in a pool of water, thus becoming three “selves.”
The witches grant both Macbeth and Banquo oblique prophecies, the former informed that he’ll become “Thane of Cawdor” and then “be King hereafter.” When Duncan subsequently rewards Macbeth for his battlefield valor by naming him Thane of Cawdor, he realizes the witches spoke truth … and immediately craves the king’s throne.
And this, crucially, is where Coen’s film lets us down. Washington’s noble bearing and dignified speech up to this point — he brings regal strength to Shakespeare’s prose — are wholly at odds with Macbeth’s abrupt slide into grasping ambition and avarice. Washington simply doesn’t sell the shift, not even with McDormand’s even more ruthless hectoring, when Lady Macbeth senses fleeting uncertainty in her husband.
When Duncan and his entourage subsequently visit Macbeth’s castle at Inverness, he and Lady Macbeth hatch a crafty plan to murder the king and pin the blame on his two chamberlains. Macbeth duly slides a dagger into Duncan’s throat, but doesn’t quite follow his wife’s (theoretically foolproof) scheme; troubled by this mistake, and subsequently overwhelmed by guilt and paranoia, Macbeth — now assuming the throne — orchestrates several more murders, in an effort to conceal his involvement in Duncan’s death.
And Macbeth starts by hiring two cut-throats to kill Banquo and his young son, Fleance (Lucas Barker), when they ride out from the castle on the evening of a royal banquet to honor the new king.
This always has been a hard sell, even in the most faithfully staged adaptation of this play: Duncan may have been ruler of the land, but Banquo is Macbeth’s best friend. Once again, Washington — and Coen’s script — simply can’t justify Macbeth’s heinous decision.
Things do become easier to accept from this point forward, however, as various sidebar characters — notably Duncan’s sons Malcolm (Harry Melling) and Donalbain (Matt Helm), and, later, MacDuff (Corey Hawkins) — realize that Macbeth has gone ’round the bend, and needs to be dealt with.
But not until after Macbeth has a second encounter with the three witches, and becomes further emboldened in his cruelty and lust for power, when they fatefully promise that “no one born of a woman will be able to harm you” (one of Shakespeare’s most ingeniously crafty twists, when we reach the story’s climax).
Ross, meanwhile — all but concealed in a long black cloak, and seeming to glide, rather than walk — inserts crafty asides, suggestions and warnings into numerous ears, making us wonder if he’s in league with the witches (an intriguing thought, that). Hassell’s bland, subtly mocking line readings are impressively sinister.
Ultimately, Coen’s film is far more successful visually than narratively. The final long shot of Lady Macbeth, at the foot of an impossibly tall set of stairs, is far more striking than any of McDormand’s speeches, which tend to be too shrill. Macbeth’s silent, late-night murder of Duncan — and his later thrashing sword duel with MacDuff — are more powerful than Washington’s frequent declamations.
To paraphrase the Bard himself, this film “is a tale … full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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