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.”
