McDormand has always had an agitative streak in the Coens’ movies-whether in Blood Simple, Fargo, or Burn After Reading, she can’t quite let things go, no matter the consequences. In effect, Lady Macbeth must keep up the noble facade of her traitorous husband, who she’s pushed into a minefield she’s ill-equipped to steer him through.
They echo through a labyrinthine castle, the architecture-never seen from the outside-exaggerating his soldier’s scrambled decay into madness. Though his smile isn’t as wide, there’s a similar wax and wane in the decibels of his soliloquies throughout The Tragedy, in which he chews up the iambic pentameter in hushed fears and then, once the scorpions and visions invade his mind, into chaotic tempers. Much of his career has been buttressed by strong, commandeering men, whose confidence erupts through his signature smile, even in anxious times, which smoothes over the whispers that erupt into his sturdy speeches. Of course, that reckless ambition eventually sours and frays at the seams, a careful crumble that Washington vulnerably and forcefully descends. Near the end of their lives, after enduring so many hardships with little reward, this pair would rather go down swinging. Once Macbeth learns of his prophecy to assume Scotland’s throne-to murder King Duncan (Donald Gleeson)-the blood-soaked machinations for its fulfillment swivel between desperation and apathy. Unlike previous entries featuring younger Thanes of Cawdor, this is a movie indebted to its salt and pepper and weary protagonist, with a wife wary of the alarm clock and the political forces at work. The answer here seems to be a simple one: Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, two theatrically-trained titans whose age and world-weariness stoke the urgency that Macbeth and his Lady so desperately feel when royalty eludes them. The primary question for adaptations-especially with Macbeth, which has been reinterpreted more than two dozen times on the screen-is why? Sometimes it is to modernize––like the Rock ‘n Roll fast-food oddity that is Scotland, PA––or, if you’re Welles, it’s to recite one last play with his remaining bellicosity. As though inspired by Orson Welles, whose 1948 version shares a similar duality, he constructs a kingdom in abstracted black-and-white and a squared aspect ratio, surveilling his play from ceilings and steep ledges and pushing into the faces of his shadowed protagonists, perhaps searching for answers they don’t have. Like Hunter’s alternating corporal and spiritual performance, Coen navigates this particular Shakespeare tragedy between the staid nature of the stage and cinema’s multidimensional freedoms. Gravity eventually attracts those three ravens, which plummet to earth and re-form themselves into the contorted shape of a witch (Kathryn Hunter), whose menacing words, Gollum-esque movements, and haunting tripartite reflection cast a doomed spell on the movie and its ambitious hero. Indeed, like these flying prophets incant the Scottish play’s opening meters, fair is foul, and foul is fair-and within the cloistered halls and barren walls of this lean, stripped-down, resonant adaptation, everything eventually reveals its two-sided nature, its light and its dark. Or is it really looking down upon them? Moments later, the clouds dissipate to reveal the charred ground beneath, a bird’s-eye view of disorienting perspective. Their altitude suggests the camera craning its neck, peering up at the foreboding winged figures circling through the white sky. “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” premieres in select cinemas this winter and globally on Apple TV+ on January 14th 2022.The first image in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is of three ravens hovering through foggy and filthy air. A Scottish lord becomes convinced by a trio of witches that he will become the next King of Scotland, and his ambitious wife supports him in his plans of seizing power.Īlong with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand the film co-stars Bertie Carvel, Alex Hassell, Corey Hawkins, Harry Melling, Brendan Gleeson, Kathryn Hunter and Moses Ingram. Of all of Shakespeare’s plays it is Macbeth that is one of the most popular with the most recent being Justin Kerzel’s version starring Michael Fassbender but there’s also been a spectacularly bloody version from Roman Polanski too way back in 1971 So we recently ran a piece HERE about the future of the Coen Brothers in terms of their future as film makers and now we have the first solo film from Joel Coen with the release of The Tragedy Of Macbeth trailer.ĭenzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in Joel Coen’s bold and fierce adaptation-a tale of murder, madness, ambition, and wrathful cunning.
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