Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Joel Coen’s first solo outing, The Tragedy of MacBeth, is more striking as a cinematic creation than as an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous and popular tragedies. This isn’t to say that it fails as a Shakespeare production, however.

One of the best parts is Denzel Washington’s performance as Macbeth. I was fascinated by how Washington bends the text to his will, playing Macbeth as another Denzel Washington character, namely one of his powerful villains in the line of his bad cop in Training Day (2001) and his Harlem drug kingpin in American Gangster (2007). In Acts 4 and 5 in particular, Washington emphasizes Macbeth’s paranoia and unhinged self-confidence, energizing his portrayal with volatility, bravado, and actual prowess in combat. 

Less successful but still worth witnessing is Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth. McDormand is better in her early scenes, when we see her calculating how to persuade her husband to do evil in order to (in her eyes) be great. McDormand is less convincing when portraying Lady’s Macbeth’s later madness. Occasionally throughout the film, McDormand lets her speech drop into grating normalcy, particularly at the ends of lines of verse. 

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the individual leads, however, the casting of both Washington and McDormand, each in their mid-sixties, adds a dimension to the play that I hadn’t really considered before. Instead of portraying Macbeth and his wife as adults in the prime of life (or even youthful, as in Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation), Coen makes them grey-haired and well past middle-aged. As Coen explained to Peter Bradshaw in an interview in The Guardian, McDormand, who is Coen’s wife, actually spurred him to take on the project. Casting McDormand and Washington meant, however, they had to change the line in Act 1, scene 7 in which Macbeth tells his wife: “Bring forth men-children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males.” Instead, they changed the line to “should have composed nothing but males.” In the original play, they are supposed to be of childbearing years, even if they don't actually have children. The change in age lends Macbeth and his wife’s desperate ambition a different hue, expressing a last grasp at what they thought they had always deserved. 

The supporting cast is also generally up to the task. Brendan Gleeson plays a sympathetic King Duncan. Alex Hassell makes Ross one of the more memorable characters in the movie, with suggestions that Ross is plotting his own ascent behind the scenes of Macbeth’s actions. Aren pointed out to me that Ross’s costume also resembles, and thus associates him with, the Witches as well as the ravens. To name just a few more players: Ralph Ineson is well-cast in a small bit as a bleeding-out Captain, and Corey Hawkins captures Macduff’s immoveable quality. Stephen Root also shows up as the Porter and generates some laughs. Although few of the actors stand out for supple handling or nuanced delivery of Shakespeare’s dialogue, most convey a decent sense of the emotions and personality behind the poetry. They don’t act like Shakespearean actors, but at the same time none seem totally out of their depth (as some actors did, for instance, in Joss Whedon’s 2012 update of Much Ado About Nothing, which Aren reviewed for the site). 

It’s worth noting here that this adaptation’s racially colour blind casting isn’t an innovation, but has actually been done before in several film adaptations of Shakespeare, going back at least to Kenneth Branagh and his use of Denzel Washington in Much Ado About Nothing in 1993. It is not only nice to see Denzel return to Shakespeare, but also to see him take on one of the great tragedies.

However, in spite of the generally fine acting, Coen’s film is impaired by overwrought visual aspects and some character tics that, in my view, get in the way of Shakespeare’s play and, especially, his poetry.

For example, unlike most reviewers, I was disappointed by the portrayal of the witch (or should I say “witches”? Is she more than one person in this version?). Kathryn Hunter’s performance has arresting moments, such as her disturbing contortions and certain Gollum-like facial gestures, but other aspects are overdone. The moment where she flaps her arms and honks like a goose (or is she supposed to sound like a raven?) feels out of place, being too much in the vein of Coen brothers’ absurdist humour. Speaking about birds, the showcasing of ravens throughout the film takes what could have been intriguing visual imagery, if it were used sparingly, and mars it by reducing it to repetitive, even bludgeoning “symbolism.” 

Now, in spite of Washington and McDormand’s presence, the truth is that the real stars, in Coen’s mind at least, seem to be the sets and production design, in other words, the whole mise en scene of the film. But it’s not a total success, in spite of many impressive features. Inverness Castle is presented as an imposing yet open space, with extremely high ceilings and barren walls. The lack of detail in the settings, while visually stunning at times, sometimes conjures the kind of overly theatrical attempts at symbolism that also plague Coen’s use of the ravens, and, later on, the walking forest. The film is preoccupied with its own artifice, which likely won’t help ground the text for viewers unfamiliar with Shakespeare. And although Coen uses the camera at times to close in on the characters (and viewers), the film’s sets, in my view, don’t contribute much to generating the close tension of a murder thriller, which is the genre Coen says he wanted to bring out in the play. 

The film’s academy aspect ratio and black-and-white cinematography have invited comparisons to Orson Welles’s cinematic forays into Shakespeare, namely Macbeth (1948), Othello (1951), and Falstaff a.k.a. Chimes at Midnight (1965). The comparisons only go so far, however, as Welles’s Macbeth was marked by little funding which necessitated shooting on leftover sets, and Othello is actually distinguished by its use of quick cuts and on-location shooting. Nevertheless, confidence in conforming the text to their cinematic visions marks both Welles’s and Coen’s adaptations: sometimes this approach is effective and sometimes it isn’t. But it keeps them interesting as adaptations at least.

While the sets in Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth convey a certain artful presentation of the play, the acting tries for naturalness. The combination recalls more than a number of stage productions of Shakespeare I’ve seen, rather than my favourite film adaptations. Coen’s effort especially lacks the clear confidence with the text itself, that is, the language and its delivery, that Olivier and Branagh each brought to their adaptations of Shakespeare. In the end, this is another noteworthy version of Macbeth, but still not a great one.

7 out of 10

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, USA)

Directed by Joel Coen; screenplay by Joel Coen, based on the play by William Shakespeare; starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Brendan Gleeson, Alex Hassell, Kathryn Hunter, Corey Hawkins, Ralph Ineson, and Stephen Root.

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