The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021) (Patreon)

"It's the Scottish play, whaddya need, a roadmap?"

Joel Coen's take on Macbeth was one of the few major-auteur films from 2021 that I still needed to catch up with, and although I didn't exactly set out to skip it, I always seemed to find something better to do. That's because I had certain suspicions about it based on the stills and clips I encountered, and for the most part those suspicions were borne out. There is something frustratingly inert about this Shakespeare film, and it strikes me as an odd choice for Joel's first overtly Ethanless outing. 

With its imposing, almost Albert Speer style sets and icy black-and-white cinematography, Macbeth is exceedingly literal, drawing on the iconography of previous directors (especially Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier) who've tackled the Bard. But those filmmakers were working to invent a spatial language for bringing theatrical material to celluloid, exploring what photography and editing can do to deepen the basic themes and tone of the play. Here, Coen just seems to be paying second-hand homage to those earlier films, resulting in a leaden, self-important fetish object.

First of all, Bruno Delbonnel's digital cinematography has a metallic sheen that, whether intended or not, plays into the stiff, reflective black tones of HDTV. Co-produced and streamed by Apple, The Tragedy of Macbeth looks very much like a film that was never designed for the inside of a movie theater. This combines with some aggressive CGI -- the swarm of crows, the gathering of storm clouds -- to produce a screen-bound flatness that belies Coen's attempts at cavernous Medieval architectonics. The result, actually, resembles high-ticket video art, designed to contour itself to the electronic potential of pixels rather than foregrounding the content of the image. 

And why Macbeth? It could have been any Shakespeare, and Coen doesn't appear to have any specific read on the play itself. I have not actually decided how I feel about Denzel Washington's performance, but as Walter Sobchak might say, at least it reflects an ethos. Washington's mellifluous African-American cadences provide a warmth and immediacy to Shakespeare's language, whereas pretty much everyone else, McDormand included, is functional at best, rendering the material as above-average theater in the park. At any rate, the tone is off, and whether one prefers Washington or the uninspired, more traditional readings, becomes a matter of mere opinion.