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Macbeth - Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand
Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in 'The Tragedy of Macbeth'
Before cinema, the imagination of the great playwrights sometimes exceeded technology’s limits. Think of Goethe’s Faust (how to stage the phantasmagoria of Walpurgis Night?) or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In his first movie apart from brother Ethan, Joel Coen deftly harnesses the technology of filmmaking to a memorably terrifying adaptation of Shakespeare’s departure into the supernatural, The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Coen surely looked over this shoulder toward Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) and visually, the sinister goings on during his version suggest Carl Dreyer’s unsettling Vampyr (1932) and even F.W. Murnau’s unearthly Nosferatu (1922). In some ways Macbeth is ideal for cinematic adaptation. It’s a relatively short Shakespearean drama needing few cuts to fit the normal length of a feature film. The “Weird Sisters,” the trio of witches who are the story’s catalyst, demand something more than three women in black pointy hats declaiming their spells. The cheap way to represent them would be through the hackneyed computer imaging of Marvel supervillains. Coen is far more imaginative.
Casting is crucial. Denzel Washington is marvelously understated as Macbeth, the feudal lord whose lust for power grows unchecked, and Frances McDormand is spooky as Lady Macbeth, egging him on. They play their parts believably, as do the supporting cast, by underplaying, refusing to over act or dramatize—by keeping it chill. They speak their lines like real people (who happen to speak an English far more emotionally lavish and expressive than the language of today).
In adapting Shakespeare, Coen refused to dumb down a play where the sound of the words, and the rhythm of their delivery, is almost as vital as their meaning. After a few minutes, the poetic momentum of the dialogue in performance glosses over the specter of unfamiliar words or unusual phrases. If you don’t know the meaning of “skipping kerns,” no worries. The human drama is riveting without recourse to a dictionary.
The evil witches known as the Weird Sisters are the first voices heard. They appear as ravens circling and descending from a cloudy sky. The First Witch (Kathryn Hunter) materializes on the ground in humanoid form, contorting her body as if made of something other than flesh and bone. At first encounter with Macbeth, she stands behind an eerie pond, two shadows falling from her, reflecting her sisters on the water’s surface. Later, the Weird Sisters direct Macbeth from the rafters of his castle, perched high above like scavenging birds.
Nursing a grudge against his king, Macbeth’s vaulting ambition is encouraged by the Weird Sisters as well as his wife. Lady Macbeth’s motives are evident. She wants to be queen. But the evil represented by the witches has its own agenda, reveling in Macbeth’s brutal tyranny knowing well that he will be undone (but leading him to believe in his own invulnerability).
Shakespeare set Macbeth in Dark Age Scotland, transformed by Coen into a twilight zone where the sun is a feint smudge on the cloudy sky. The Tragedy of Macbeth is filmed in black and white, in compositions of light and shadow; the limited color scheme blanches out distractions from the characters and their dialogue. Coen’s Scotland is a place of night and fog, where death and deception unfold in abstract castles of hard geometric surfaces and impossibly long corridors. Coen’s adaptation forges the plot to a sharp point. Danger and madness follow—and greed is magnified—after Macbeth crosses the line from envy to action as unwarranted ambition leads to murder and murder to tyranny.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is screening at the Oriental Theater
