Coen’s Macbeth: His Turn to Wear It

A24/IAC Films

I’m a sucker for a half-decent Shakespeare film adaptation. I discovered the grandiose and faithful Kenneth Branagh Hamlet in Middle School at the Townsend Public Library and I’ve watched it a couple dozen times over the last 25 years. A couple years later, I was in high school when the Ethan Hawke Hamlet came out and though I never liked it better than Branagh, I mean, it had Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. They managed to stage the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in a Blockbuster. This was also around the time of the similarly modern-set O (more Julia Stiles). And if nothing else can be said about it, Romeo and Juliet (“the Claire Danes version”) remains the only Baz Luhrmann film I can watch for more than ten minutes without running screaming from the room.

On the traditional side of things, I enjoyed the old Marlon Brando Julius Caesar despite its mid-century style and pace being a little difficult for me at the time; on the other end of the spectrum, I’m on record declaring 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew) the greatest teen film of all time (worth noting, it also has more Julia Stiles). But all of this was over twenty years ago, and I can’t recall anything much in the way of bard adaptations that’s caught my attention in recent years.

Enter Joel Coen’s bold, dramatically high-contrast black and white Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, streaming exclusively on Apple TV+). If my historic affinity for high-profile Shakespeare films were not enough, I’m quite drawn these days to tales of power and its attendant corruption. (Probably stems from character flaws of mine.) Any inertia that I sometimes allow to get in the way even of the films I want to see was dispelled in this case by my curiosity to see Joel Coen’s first film directed without his brother Ethan – that, and the fact that Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are never bad in anything.

For my first, aborted, attempt, I was in bed in the dark at around 11:30 at night. I was instantly hooked by the compelling audio-visual experience of the opening scene; one of our cats was similarly transfixed, sitting oddly upright and staring, unblinking, at the screen. It must have had something to do with that high contrast black and white – maybe cats like that? But though I wasn’t immediately about to slip out of waking consciousness, the cat’s posture suggested strongly (and correctly) that this was a film demanding proper attention be paid. Though I habitually keep bizarre hours, I knew I wasn’t capable at that moment of doing justice here.

(For the record, for the second, successful, attempt, both cats joined me downstairs in front of the big screen, displaying the same oddly hypnotized behavior, which definitely begs some questions.)

Given my unhealthy attraction to power tales, I’ll admit I was ready to be taken in. The title character, Macbeth (Washington), fresh off a big military victory and after an encouraging-ish conversation with some prophetic witches and the urgings of his ambitious wife (McDormand). sees his moment to make his move and makes it, seizing the crown through murder and exile and overall force – as such things are done – before the entropy inevitably sets in, the backlash, the reaction, and he loses it all. Same as it’s happened since time immemorial. The whole plot of this play is summarized in a few lines of dialogue from The Wire (season 3, episode 6). Marlo Stanfield, the up and coming West Side Baltimore drug kingpin seeking to unseat the reigning Avon Barksdale, is talking with his advisor Vinson:

Vinson: He’s gonna have to come back at you. You know they ain’t gonna stop at this.

Marlo: I don’t want it to stop. Barksdale weak today. And they ain’t workin’ with the ammunition I got.

Vinson: No doubt you carryin’ a full clip. But what you gon’ do when you sittin’ at the head of the table? Once you there, you got to hold it down.

Marlo: Mm. Sound like one of them good problems.

Vinson: Prison. Graveyards. Full o’ boys who wore the crown.

Marlo: Point is, they wore it. It’s my turn to wear it now.

That’s what this story is. It’s Macbeth’s turn to wear it, and he doesn’t really concern himself with the “good problems” of how to hold it down. He won’t be immune to Vinson’s warnings about the long line of past boys who wore the crown – and who among us is? That’s the story, and I’m here for it. It gets me where I’m at right now.

But independent of my perverse inclinations, the cats (who, not coincidentally, are named Avon and Marlo) are quite right – the opening scene is just as arresting the second time around, and it’s not just the striking visual style. Coen’s highly original approach to his presentation of the play’s famous witch trio is not merely clever and new, but manages also to be both legitimately creepy and somehow plausible. As if, yeah, I mean, that’s probably what three fortune-telling witch-sisters really would have looked like in ancient mythical Scotland; it’s almost as though one feels Coen has discovered a truth about these characters rather than merely created a new interpretation about them.

The performances of the film’s ordinary humans (the rest of the cast), though less creepy and more subtle in impact, is just as critical to this adaptation’s success. That one is unable to take one’s eyes off Washington or McDormand whenever they appear in the frame was always a foregone conclusion, but the less expected but no less dazzling contributions of the supporting cast mean the stars are not required to carry the entire affair on their shoulders. I’m forced to confess that I’m familiar with none of them, to my knowledge, but I’ll say now that Brendan Gleeson provides a perfect doomed king, while Corey Hawkins is riveting as Macduff. Across the board, Coen’s direction of his cast nails perhaps the most difficult challenge in any bard adaptation: making Shakespearean dialogue seem intelligible through tone, expression, and body language. Not only do they all pull this off, but at times the delivery goes beyond intelligible and almost seems normal, allowing one to almost forget that this is only slightly modified seventeenth-century speech.

Of course, one never forgets that we are watching a filmed adaptation of a play. That comes back to the film’s visuals and truly speaks to Coen’s greatest and most significant triumph here. It’s not just that the dense blacks and gleaming whites that comprise every frame and every shot are majestic and pleasant to watch – and they are. But the contrast is so high that in many of the outdoor scenes, both the sky and the ground appear a stark white (or, in some cases, both are black). The characters loom against the bare background. Indoor scenes are sparse and minimal, perfectly framed. A balance is thus struck, one I’ve never before encountered, in which there is no shame whatsoever and no attempt to hide the fact that this is staged, that we are watching a drama play out on a stage, while at the same time we denied none of the advantages of film – a broader field and deeper horizon than a stage, a better, more three-dimensional set (even if minimal), and the ability to change angle and distance.

All of the other adaptations I’ve loved in the past were, regardless of how faithful to the text they were or not, movie versions of a play. In his first solo foray, Coen brings us something different, possibly something altogether new, in the experience of something that feels at once both play and film, and does so in a way that is not distracting or otherwise detracting from the experience of the viewer. Even as our director playfully offers up innovations of medium, we are still sucked in at a more basic level into this power drama, just as we love to see the rise and fall of Henry Hill or Sam Rothstein. It’s delicious and fun and doesn’t slow down for a moment.

This may itself be the film’s only weakness. Where Scorsese likes to take around three hours to regale us with tales of stolen pinnacles and just declines, Coen condenses a five-act epic into an hour and forty-five minutes. Greek tragedies often depict characters fulfilling preordained roles, wholly at the mercy of fate, whereas the tragedies of Shakespeare are less, well, black and white, often the product of recognizable human failings. The breakneck pace of Macbeth carries us with it by force, beginning to end, mostly to our delight, but what we lose from it is any sense of any choices made by our characters, that they have very much agency at all, and in this way it feels a bit more Greek than Elizabethan. It’s not that we don’t understand the character’s motivations, which are made quite clear, it’s that we don’t get any sense that any of the characters wrestle with their roles or choices, rather than just willingly allowing them to play out.

Personally, I wanted a little more here, something I feel could have been done with as little as thirty more minutes of runtime. But in the context of everything else in this film having so obviously been done deliberately, I cannot believe that this too was anything other than a deliberate choice on Coen’s part. Given my appreciation and respect for all of his other choices with his handling of Macbeth, I think I’ll set my private inclinations aside and let him have it.

Incidentally, this is also a common critique of the character of Marlo, that he is more of a force of nature (or fate) than a recognizable human with agency and choices. And perhaps that’s really how it is sometimes; sometimes, people just want to hold that crown, even if only for a little while, even when they know how it will end.

Grade: A-