Review of the film "The Tragedy of Macbeth" - the great Shakespearean tragedy through the eyes of Joel Coen.
Incredibly beautiful, but devoid of corporate humor and somewhat lifeless horror adaptation of the famous play.
After defeating the troops of the Norwegians and the Irish, two Scottish generals, Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and Banquo (Bertie Carvel), walk across a blood-drenched and fog-covered battlefield. The witches they meet willingly predict the future: the first is promised the title of tan, and a little later, the crown; the second is told that he himself will not rule, but his descendants will become kings. Indeed, almost immediately the envoy informs that Macbeth has been given the title of Cawdor Tan for his military merits. Once the first prophecy has come true, the second one will also come true: the hero and his faithful wife (Frances McDormand) decide to speed it up a bit, so they plan to kill King Duncan of Scotland (Brendan Gleeson).
Even now, when The Tragedy of Macbeth has already been released in the US and is about to be available on the Apple TV + streaming service, it is still hard to believe that Joel Coen directed it, and for the first time without the participation of brother Ethan. You can, of course, invent for a long time the reasons for the breakup of the fraternal tandem and the choice of atypical material, but now it is much more interesting to think about how the new film fits into the filmography of Cohen Sr. and a series of previous adaptations of Macbeth.
In retrospect, it seems that echoes of Shakespeare's play have always been found in Cohen's filmography - at least the legendary line "life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, but devoid of any meaning" can serve as a leitmotif of his work. There, after all, it is also full of idiots, some kind of fuss, aggression, and most importantly - there are no moralizing lessons. It is no coincidence that the underrated comedy "Burn After Reading" ends with the hero's forced conclusion that they "learned not to do it again." On the other hand, there is also feedback. Macbeth is, after all, a typical Cohen character: such an honest hard worker-family man, to whom fate threw a chance to improve his situation - you just need to cross the law once and get your hands dirty. The only difference is that he does not live in the USA of the 20th century, but in medieval Scotland.
In general, if you wish, you can find a few more echoes with past films by Cohen at the level of motives: again parental anxiety (“Raising Arizona”, “Fargo”, “Inside Llewyn Davis”; judging by Joel’s interview, this is one of the reasons for creating the film) or plot about the characters of the past and their uncertain future (he was awaited with apprehension in No Country for Old Men, The Common Man and the same Inside Llewyn Davis, and with trepidation in Fargo and The Big Lebowski). Simply put, The Tragedy of Macbeth only at first glance sticks out like a thumb in Joel Coen's filmography, but if you accept it as a Coen film, then even the final denouement with the last prophecy (Macbeth is promised that he "will not be killed by a woman born", but in the end, he is beheaded by Macduff, who confesses that his mother had a caesarean) looks Cohen ironic and causes laughter.
Another thing is how The Tragedy of Macbeth looks against the background of previous film adaptations of the play: before Cohen, Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa offered their versions, emphasizing the psychologism of the original source and the expressionism of film language (the first made a medieval noir, the second a film about samurai, full of mysticism); later - Roman Polanski and Justin Kurzel, who preferred naturalism and blockbuster scope. Cohen's version is obviously closer to the interpretation and visual style of the first duet, but from the second it adopted a cynicism close to the modern viewer and necessary: all this bloodshed is not only ugly, but also meaningless.
It would be a mistake to call The Tragedy of Macbeth an ordinary film - it is more of a cinematic play, constantly reminding the viewer that he is watching a very crude fusion of cinema and theater. On the one hand, Bruno Delbonnel's impeccable cinematography, inventive editing, and an uncomfortable thriller/horror soundtrack by Carter Burwell; on the other hand, a hermetic and lifeless stage space with a minimum of props and a theatrically unnatural acting (the eternally calm Denzel Washington does it best), which in the role of the witch Katherine Hunter completely goes into the category of performance.
The result of this symbiosis is not always successful: this is a very stylish movie, which without discounts should be called a technical masterpiece, but it often loses the viewer - it gives him time not to take a breath, but to look away and think about his own. It seems that he lacked the script participation of Joel Coen, who changed only a couple of lines in the original source due to the age of the central duet of actors and rather acted as a kind editor, slightly reducing the text of the play without losing content. The result seems to be the good old "Macbeth" - the same tragedy about metamorphoses, fatalism and paranoia, which, alas, without the author's zest, is destined to be the object of eternal disputes about why and who needs another straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare in our time.
This article was sponsored by Russell Notides
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