The Tragedy of Macbeth

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH   ***1/2

Joel Coen

2021

IDEA:  Upon learning from a witch that he shall one day be declared King of Scotland, the general Macbeth sets out to fulfill the prophecy at all costs.

BLURB:  Sculpted from fog, chiaroscuro, and brutalist lines, The Tragedy of Macbeth is an austerely existentialist chamber piece as sharp-edged and pitiless as anything in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. Although it may not boast the mordant humor, nor the colorful idiosyncrasies, that characterized the siblings’ work together, it’s no wonder why Joel was drawn to Shakespeare’s Scottish play for his first solo outing; after all, it’s ridden with all the deadly scheming, hubris, and ambiguous games of choice and fate that have long been favored pieces in his films’ eschatologically chaotic cosmos. Here, he’s marshaled a severe, transfixing audiovisual experience that decorticates Macbeth down to the angles of its sturdy skeleton, turning the already lean tragedy into a minimalist, primordial shadow play, delivered straight to the nervous system. One can object to how cavalierly Coen divests the narrative of its historical-political context, or fails to reframe it in a new one, but at the same time, his Macbeth is rather willfully atemporal, engraving into its lithograph-like images the evergreen forces of human folly that howl forth from an ancient past. It’s a resonance felt in the sonorous drumbeat and rumble of the film’s unnerving soundscape; in the stentorian paranoiac monologues of Denzel Washington’s king; and in the ubiquitous ravens and their analog in Kathryn Hunter’s witch, predicting or precipitating a destiny that becomes inescapable. Whether or not we really needed the umpteenth version of this tale of sound and fury, Coen has proved to be an apt fool to tell it.