[COLUMN] In The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls, the Coens are a House Divided | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

These are divisive and highly polarized times. As The Book of Matthew argued (and as Abraham Lincoln later famously quoted) “a house divided against itself will not stand.” With Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls, the Coen Brothers offer their own exploration of this idea.

Over the past few years, many beloved filmmaking duos have decided to go their separate ways, with the individual members stepping out on their own to do their own thing: the Wachowskis, the Safdies, the Farrellys. It’s interesting that so many of these break-ups should be happening within such a compressed period, particularly for teams of directors that have been working together for decades. There is something in the air.

To be fair, these schisms may simply be a reflection of how the industry has changed over the past decade. It is harder to make movies than it used to be, and the traditional methods of production and distribution have shifted and eroded over recent years. Of course, it’s impossible to generalize. These break-ups may simply be a creative version of “the seven-year itch.” Either way, there is something poetic about these separations coming at a time when America is incredibly divided.

The Coen Brothers had worked together so long that their sensibilities were somewhat fused in the public imagination. The pair gravitated towards modern neo-noir movies that blended classic tragedy with absurd comedy, often focusing on the unintended consequences that accrue from the actions of criminals who are never as smart as they imagine themselves to be. Although the pair drew heavily from mid-century American cinema, their filmography has only grown more relevant over time.

The Coens seemed to predict the terrifying ridiculousness of Trump’s America. In June 2017, Jeet Heer argued the black comedy of the duo’s Burn After Reading “resembles every day in Trump’s Washington, where the line between blundering idiocy and malevolent conspiracy is increasingly blurred.” Ross Douthat cited Burn After Reading as “an essential motion picture for the Trump era” and described the classified documents affair as bleakly comic “in the vein of the Coen Brothers.”

Perhaps it makes sense that the duo would break apart as reality caught up to them. Reportedly, it was Ethan Coen who had the idea of a separation. According to Joel, after the pair completed The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018, Ethan told his older brother, “I think I’m going to change it out and do some other things for awhile.” Working alone was something of an adjustment for Joel, who compared directing The Tragedy of Macbeth solo to “having one eye put out.”

From a strictly academic perspective, there’s something undeniably appealing about watching a member of a larger team embark on a solo effort. Even if the results are underwhelming, they are often informative. It becomes a lot easier to trace specific influences or motifs within a larger body of work when one has a firmer grasp of the sensibilities of each individual member. In some ways, The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls are a study in contrasts.

Both films are undeniably Coen-esque. They each feature a number of actors carried over from earlier Coen Brothers projects. The Tragedy of Macbeth features Joel’s wife, Frances McDormand, as Lady Macbeth, alongside Brendan Gleeson, Harry Melling, Ralph Ineson and Stephen Root from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Drive-Away Dolls features a cameo appearance from Matt Damon, who had featured prominently in the pair’s adaptation of True Grit. Carter Burwell scores both movies.

However, the films undeniably appeal to the individual interests of each brother. Joel was always the more traditionally cinematic of the pair. Although Ethan was a co-director, Joel was credited as solo director on the duo’s first ten films due to the Directors’ Guild of America guidelines. While Ethan studied philosophy at Princeton, Joel studied film at New York University. He enrolled in graduate film school at the University of Texas. He dropped out after a year, but forged strong connections in the emerging Austin indie film scene.

The Tragedy of Macbeth came to Joel through his wife, Frances McDormand, who asked him to direct a stage version of the play. Joel decided to adapt the play for the screen, because he felt more comfortable in that medium. Shakespeare’s text appealed to Joel because he recognized familiar elements in it. “It’s amazing how this play prefigures 20th-century pulp noir tropes,” he noted, drawing a clear connection between “the Scottish Play” and his own filmography.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an impressive piece of formalism. It is rigorous and stylized. Perhaps because he is working from a firmly established source material, Joel Coen embraces a very abstract sort of filmmaking. “Think German Expressionism, think Nosferatu, think lots of chiaroscuro,” explained gaffer Mike Bauman of the guidelines for the film. “And keeping the set design very simple, like here’s two walls. Clean, sparse. Do the rest in lighting.”

There is not a lot of levity in The Tragedy of Macbeth. Even the play’s bawdiest scene, involving a rowdy night porter (Root), becomes an exercise in formalism. The camera follows the character in long takes as he monologues, rather than cutting on laugh lines. It is too much to describe The Tragedy of Macbeth as humorless – there’s a black comedy in Lady Macbeth’s (McDormand) growing impatience with her husband, Macbeth (Denzel Washington) – but it’s not exactly “ha, ha” funny.

If The Tragedy of Macbeth is wound too tight, then Drive-Away Dolls continuously threatens to unravel. Much like his brother, Ethan’s solo directorial effort was a collaboration with another long-term creative and personal partner, his own wife Tricia Cooke. The project is undeniably personal to both of them, with the pair talking openly about their “non-traditional marriage” that also informs the sexually-liberated lesbian road-trip adventures of Drive-Away Dolls.

Drive-Away Dolls is worlds removed from the careful craft of The Tragedy of Macbeth. Indeed, the film has an appealing Looney Tunes energy that works in large part due to its disjointedness. There are relatively few clean scene transitions in Drive-Away Dolls, with most new scenes announcing their arrival with a comic sound effect and a bold wipe. It’s chaotic and unfocused, and the film repeatedly threatens to unravel during its breezy 84-minute runtime.

Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t entirely cohere, but it’s undeniably exciting. It’s a road-trip movie about two young women (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) who find themselves embroiled in a game of cat-and-mouse involving a plastercast dildo modelled on the penis of a prominent Florida politician (Damon). As Adam Nayman mused in his review, if nothing else, Drive-Away Dolls confirms which Coen Brother “was responsible for Burn After Reading’s immortal homemade dildo chair.”

To a certain extent, it’s possible to look at The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls and better understand what each half of the Coen Brothers brought to their filmography. Joel seems to be the more classical of the pair, the more meticulous in his storytelling and wry in his humor. Ethan seems to be the wilder and more eccentric of the pair, the one least afraid of embracing goofiness or cartoonishness.

However, it’s also interesting to consider what unites the films. If The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls make it possible to separate “a Joel Coen film” from “an Ethan Coen film”, then perhaps they also extend the audience’s understanding of what “a Coen Brothers film” actually is. Despite their very different styles and tones, there’s a significant overlap between The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls. These are both very aggressively political movies.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an adaptation of a classic play, but Joel’s adaptation felt particularly timely. The film was released just a year after the events of January 6th, in which a mob attempted to upend the peaceful transition of power in the United States. As such, the themes of violence and tyranny had a stronger resonance than they might otherwise. Of course, Joel denies intentionality, stating that he wasn’t trying to “update the play and put it in modern Trump-era America.”

However, a number of adaptational choices only deepened this sense of contemporary relevance. As production designer Stefan Dechant noted, the entire film was built around the ideas of “black-and-white, Academy ratio [1.37:1], German Expressionism.” German Expressionism comes up repeatedly in discussions of the adaptation, a style of movie-making that was brought to the United States by Jewish European exiles fleeing Nazi persecution, like Fritz Lang or Otto Preminger.

Critic David Fine argued for the importance of German Expressionism in “delineating postwar Germany society and the German soul—its humiliating defeat in the war, its high inflation and unemployment, its riots, strikes, and civil violence, and, in larger terms, the tyrannical abuse of power.” It is a school of filmmaking that captures a nation in decline, slipping into brutish fascism. Given how scholars of German history talk about contemporary America, this feels pointed.

Joel leans into M.F. Libby’s interpretation of Ross (Alex Hassell) as “an ambitious intriguer, a man of some ability but no moral worth, a coward, spy, and murderer”, increasing the play’s ambiguity and uncertainty. As James Shapiro argues, for all its formalist nostalgia, The Tragedy of Macbeth “is also a repudiation of a different kind of nostalgia: the American fantasy that things were once different and better, and will be again — a fitting message for our perilous and equivocating time.”

Drive-Away Dolls is more overt in its politics. It involves two lesbians driving to Florida in late 1999, shortly before the state would decide a generation-defining Presidential Election. Marian (Viswanathan) is recovering from a break-up with an ex-girlfriend who worked on Ralph Nader’s campaign. The plot is driven by an embarrassing sex scandal involving a family-values politician, Senator Channel (Damon), a consequence of the 1960s sexual liberation “coming home to roost.”

However, the divisions in Drive-Away Dolls are often more personal. Marian needs to get over her ex-girlfriend. Her best friend, Jamie (Qualley), is trying to get away from her own ex-girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). Over the journey, Marian and Jamie find themselves growing closer. As tends to be the way in Coen Brothers films, most obviously Fargo, there is also a pair of heavies, Flint (C. J. Wilson) and Arliss (Joey Slotnick), who seem trapped in a toxic and deteriorating relationship.

Although neither film is set in contemporary America, both The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls speak to a nation that seems to be unravelling in real time. Each film adopts a different approach to the same underlying anxiety, the sense that something is fundamentally broken, that it has been for some time and that it may be beyond repair. It’s interesting that both Coens should arrive at this idea separately, and speak to it in very different ways.

Ethan Coen is reportedly working on an entire trilogy of movies with Tricia Cooke. Their next film, Honey, Don’t! is reportedly already filming in New Mexico. However, there are also reports that Joel and Ethan are working together again, and have written what Ethan describes as “a pure horror film.” Perhaps there’s hope. What was divided may yet be reconciled. What fell apart may come back together.