The Tragedy of Macbeth
/
Macbeth (Denzel Washington) watches as King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) greets Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth
As I noted a few weeks ago when ranking the Coen brothers’ films, I’ve been looking forward to The Tragedy of Macbeth. Not only is a Coen (Joel, flying solo) involved, Macbeth is by far my favorite Shakespeare. I’ve seen the full play several times. I’ve seen an excellent one-hour version performed by only four people. I’ve seen multiple film versions. So I’m glad to say that Joel Coen’s new film adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth is excellent.
I’ve wondered before whether I love Macbeth because it has many of the things that I like in a story—introspection, murder, revenge, a bold streak of the uncanny or supernatural, an eerie atmosphere redolent of unspeakable age, and a climax played out in a stack of corpses—or because Macbeth taught me to love Macbeth and to look for itself in any good story. Regardless, The Tragedy of Macbeth leans hard into the weird and uncanny elements of the play right from the beginning, with a contortionist witch prophesying to Macbeth and Banquo in the mist-gloomed aftermath of battle. Hailing Macbeth with a title he doesn’t possess, she predicts his rise to kingship and the future royalty of Banquo’s descendants and sets the plot in motion.
You should know the story, so I won’t belabor it. Joel Coen has done an excellent job of trimming the play to a brisk, fast-paced size (the whole movie, including credits, is well under two hours long) while still leaving in all the dynastic complications and the untidy genius of Shakespeare. Case in point: Stephen Root appears briefly as the drunken porter, a bawdy comic relief character whose one scene underscores the darkness surrounding it but that is often cut from more po-faced adaptations, such as the great-looking but overserious 2015 film starring Michael Fassbender. That scene doesn’t have to be there—certainly not in an hour-and-a-half version—but it’s good Shakespeare, and Coen transforms it into good film.
And while both condensing and remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s text, Coen still finds interesting things to do with the play and characters. Ross, one of a crowd of “Noblemen of Scotland” swelling the scene in the play, appears in surprising places, suggesting there is even more going on than the Macbeths’ scheming at the heart of the play. A final, wordless scene just before the credits, with Ross and another character unseen for a long time, also provokes questions—or at least the realization that killing Macbeth doesn’t mean the story is over.
But while the adaptation itself is well done, nicely tailoring the play to the dimensions of a film, it’s the visuals that really elevate The Tragedy of Macbeth. Stagey and sparse, shot in black and white and in the 1.37:1 full-frame aspect ratio of the era before widescreen, and chockablock with eerie images—ravens circling a battlefield, a single witch reflected twice in a pool, a ruined house by a twilit crossroads, a shower of leaves bursting through a window of Macbeth’s throneroom, the ramparts of a castle slashing through a sea of fog—the look of the film is key to its weirdness. I’ve seen the visual style here compared to German expressionism, but it reminded me most of film noir, especially in its use of contrast and sharp geometric compositions, and, in the film’s attention to faces in wide-angled closeup, the austere medieval vision of The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film in which vast landscapes and castles loom—but always in the background, always half-glimpsed through fog or shadow. Macbeth demands atmosphere, and The Tragedy of Macbeth drips with it.
The performances are excellent as well, with particularly good performances in small parts—a sure mark of a Coen’s touch. I liked Brendan Gleeson as King Duncan and Harry Melling as Malcolm, who make the most of their limited roles, and the aforementioned Stephen Root, who really hams it up as the porter. Alex Hassell’s Ross is also striking, an ambiguous presence whose intentions are often murky but who always seems like a threat. And Corey Hawkins is excellent as Macduff; when Macduff learns that his wife and children have been murdered, Hawkins’s performance moved me to tears.
Macduff: What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / at one fell swoop?
Malcolm: Dispute it like a man.
Macduff: I shall do so; / but I must also feel it as a man.
Hawkins’s Macduff also presents a credible physical threat to Macbeth when their final confrontation comes, and their one-on-one duel on the walls of Dunsinane Castle is tense and surprisingly brutal.
Which brings me to the standouts in the film: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the Witch.
Denzel Washington’s Macbeth didn’t actually impress me as much as it did many of the reviewers I read. His understatement early in the film gives the character a gravity and seriousness I liked, but he rushes through some of his lines as if challenging himself to finish his speeches in one breath. Odd, but a quibble. But Washington shines in every scene he shares with Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth. Hers is the best performance in the film, but their onscreen partnership is indispensable to them both. Their interplay, at once affectionate and a kind of harsh rivalry, full of loving confidences and cruel digs, feels real, especially once the hesitant, scrupulous Macbeth turns the tables on Lady Macbeth and becomes an even bigger and more frightening monster. This was the most convincing and chilling version of that transformation that I’ve seen.
And Kathryn Hunter as the Witch, or Witches—she’s impossible to describe. The bodily contortions, the rasping metallic voice, the seemingly half-bird physicality, the ambiguous manner and expression—explicitly remarked upon by Macbeth in the play—all make her the creepiest version of the Bard’s weird sisters that I’ve ever seen. And the film’s all-pervading atmosphere, that sense of the uncanny hovering over everything, both derives from and contributes to the Witch’s presence. She feels like a real menace, and in watching her you don’t just believe the supernatural elements of the play might be real, they must be.
I could go on. The Tragedy of Macbeth is wonderful, exactly the right mix of the stage and the screen. Like the other major streaming offering from the Coens—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix—I hope some benevolent outfit like the Criterion Collection will swoop in one day to save it from the streaming services. In the meantime, find a friend with Apple TV+, like I did, and see this film.
