COEN BENDS 16th CENTURY REALITY

INTROSPECTIVE RETELLING BLURS ARTISTIC MEDIUMS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Joel Coen has produced a film about a famous play that incorporates elements of stage production and film fantasy.

Denzel Washington stars as Macbeth in the retelling of the William Shakespeare play, costarring Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth in the Tragedy of Macbeth (2021).

McDormand has come full circle in her career, having starred in the dark retelling of racial injustice in Mississippi Burning (1988) as the wife of the Deputy Sheriff of a Deep South town still running sideways, while Washington continues to round out his filmography with tragic anti-hero roles, this time as the tyrant Macbeth.

McDormand received her first Oscar nomination for the supporting role in Mississippi Burning, eventually picking up four Oscars as actor and producer. Washington has two Oscars.

Coen recreates the inner labyrinth of a 16^th Century Scottish stone castle for his sound stage. And in this way, the director keeps true to the original medium for the play, the Globe Theatre in London.

Chiaroscuro lighting is used on black and white film to create tone and atmosphere, along with a seeping mist and black swirling ravens to haunt the Scottish King’s court. 

Swaths of light and dark change the appearance of the medium from a film to a stage play to, at times, a graphic novel.

Macbeth has been remade several times for modern audiences, as well as the Shakespearean plays Hamlet and King Lear, sometimes within a contemporary setting. Shakespeare’s haunting description of the inner workings of the human consciousness allows for various retellings that resonate deeply with each proceeding generation.

In this tradition, Coen interprets Macbeth as an explanation for the rise of evil in otherwise genuinely honest and loyal souls. Coen’s interpretation suggests that just a drop of wrongdoing can bring about a rain of evil so overwhelming as to corrupt honest intentions and bring about the end of even civilized governance.

The camera follows Macbeth about the stone corridors and up and down the steep stone staircase symbolizing Washington’s mulling through Macbeth’s emotionally compelled thoughts.

Ultimately, Washington’s Macbeth decides that killing the king to become king was an act of insanity that could only be ended by a murder suicide.

Washington is not so brooding as Michael Fassbender overcoming a mind filled with scorpions in Macbeth (2015) costarring Marion Cottillard as Lady Macbeth. By dialing the tone back a bit, Coen creates less of a reach to the machinations of modern politics and the reasons for the slow pace of change.

Coen does his best to draw in the audience by filling their minds with symbolic scorpions during compelling opening scenes involving ravens, mist and three sister witches.

The witches foretell the tragedy of Macbeth that lasts for much of the film’s brisk runtime of 105 minutes, as Washington navigates the castle stone labyrinth of Macbeth’s mind.

Coen isolates the plot down to a few characters, thereby accelerating the narrative to suggest that the briefest moments of madness can have lasting and overriding consequences.

Washington performs Macbeth ascending the staircase of various psychological vices such as jealousy, envy, anger, and rage. The plot then reverses, and Macbeth becomes consumed by the consequential opposites such as self-consciousness, doubt, self-harm and fatalism as his rational mind descends the staircase into madness.

Washington never breaks out into one big soliloquy. The talented actor is instead confined to the stylized Shakespeare Coen has carefully chosen for a fast paced script designed for modern cinematic audiences.

The ability to play a spectrum of emotions of those emotions on both the good side and the bad side of humanism makes Washington one of the most compelling actors of his generation.

Coen shifts the audience attention back and forth between the spellbinding language of Shakespeare to the dark arts of black and white filmmaking, and then to the emotive acting of two experienced Hollywood actors.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is in keeping with Coen’s alternative content filmmaking in such films as Barton Fink (1991) and the Big Lebowski (1998) in which realism bends into a blend of fact and fantasy for the creation of entertaining surrealism on film.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is currently in theaters, and streaming in Canada on Apple TV+ on January 14, 2022.