The Tragedy of Macbeth — directed by Joel Coen. Costume Drama. 1 hour 45 minutes Black And White 2022
★★★★★
The Story: A victorious general hears a prediction that he will be king and his wife convinces him to take the necessary steps — which produce dire consequences.
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“The Tragedy Of” — what a title! Do the words mean we are meant to care about Macbeth from the start? You bet your life it does.
And you’d better bet your life or you won’t recognize what this movie of The Tragedy of Macbeth is about. It’s about someone who bets his life.
When Mike Todd died in an air crash, he was on his way to sign Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to make a movie of Macbeth. It was said to be Olivier’s greatest role. You will no longer wonder why theater folk never quote it or mention the play by name but refer to it only as The Scottish Play. Worse than bad luck — to theater folk sheer misfortune is always attached to the title and its contents.
Well, the Oliviers never made it, but Olivier did say this. He said that Mrs Macbeth was stupid. He meant that she was a Park Avenue bitch who got above herself by wanting her husband to become CEO Of The Corporation he was a mere field manager for. Olivier said that the tragedy of Macbeth was he fell victim to that inclination in humans of: “I know this won’t work, but I’m going to try it anyhow.”
The thing about Macbeth is that he is not by nature or inclination an executive. He is a soldier. His wife wants him to have a title that will give her a title, but she has no sense of whether he is right for the job. He isn’t and won’t be. Like Jackson, Eisenhower, Grant or Washington or, in another way, Donald Trump, he is out of place as an administrator. And we never see him as a competent king. Only as someone who wants to hold onto the title once it is his.
Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. One thing this means that its story is brisk enough to play itself. Unlike Hamlet and King Lear it never threatens to be diffuse. But the role of Macbeth is nonetheless hard to play. And the reason for this is that once the cho-choo train of the play gets going with the assassination accomplished, the play tends to just carry the actor along — but after that it’s very hard for the actor to stay upright in the role and in the present. The conflict for him, once his wife is satisfied, is all offstage in England or Ireland. This means that the actor playing Macbeth can just ride it out. Or indulge the talent in his guts with those fabulous speeches.
Yes, Hamlet’s conflict is also internal. But, unlike Macbeth’s, Hamlet’s conflicts are always also on stage and right on front of his nose: with his father, his uncle, his mother, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and finally Laertes. All Macbeth’s enemies are fantasies. The only conflict King Macbeth is actually faced with is the Laertes figure of MacDuff at the end.
Some Macbeth actors fall asleep. They nap under the counterpane of their technique. Or their performing personality. This means they, when they sometimes wake up, must catch up, like Jason Robarts Jr. whom I saw do it with Siobhán Mackenna. John Colicos overplayed it, which meant he is always way down the track chewing ham to drag the engine forward, even with Carrie Nye, a little blonde flower, touching as Lady Macbeth perhaps because less shattered by the play than by Colicos’s explosion of scenery chewing. Geraldine Page got herself up like Ellen Terry in a wig with a huge red braid down the back but underplayed the role because she was playing it with a husband, an actor, Rip Torn, far less talented than herself and who hadn’t a clue. Orson Welles got in the engine and drove the train. Paul Rogers and Coral Browne were overblown provincials one discovered interloping the stage of the Wintergarden.
After Duncan’s death, the Macbeth train drives itself. And Denzel Washington tends to lag. When he catches up and jumps on board, he plays it as it lays, at least when he wakes to the fact that he has fallen asleep in the role, which is to say that Macbeth has fallen asleep — which, in Washington’s case, is not a conscious decision to be unconscious, but an unconscious one. Is Macbeth’s besetting sin that, outside the battlefield, he is terribly lazy? Or is it because he has nothing kingly really to do?
Perhaps the problem is that Denzel Washington does not have the vocal foundation for Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays to be seen by thousands at a time in an outdoor theatre without microphones. The voice production they were written for, in, as, and require, has two effects. The actors who have it may become audible even of a whisper and they may become present in the parts, because the role may arise from deep in their being.
But maybe the problem is that after the assassination, the role of Macbeth seems to be something that is merely happening to the actor. Why? Maybe because once Macbeth is out of his depth as murderer, the role loses its dramatic force because missing on-stage conflict. Once he gets on the slide and must go down — doesn’t only great Gravity run the show?
How, without dramatic opposition is one to act, then, the major part of the play? Does the play then not become a case study of human dissolution? Or a program of gorgeous monologues? Or a series of set pieces? Or a catalogue of predictable lost causes?
Denzel Washington’s Macbeth is not deeply lodged in his body. He is vocally ordinary. His is filmspeak technique. The actors rehearsed the play a good while before they performed it for camera, but never before a large audience. It needs from him depth of attack. He needs to dive into it and rise from it.
The role of Macbeth is that of a person who thinks he must fight, kill, and cheat fate to hold his job. The trouble is he is not fit for the king position to begin with. For, while as a general Macbeth has legitimately killed many people and knows how to do it, he is not an assassin. He is a soldier. He would never consider killing the president — but his social-climbing wife convinces that his role as a male means he must become one. Besides the witches have foreseen him as king. But Washington’s vocal level is a choice inapt to such a massive situation. Denzel Washington is not hammy, but the role of Macbeth is not a slice of Nebraska bacon either.
Denzel Washington brings other forces to Macbeth. His male presence, his bowed legs, his height, his looks, his heft, his vast martial arts training, his ability to wear period costume, his searching eyes, and our expectations for what a superstar such as him might offer — for whether he produces its effect or not, we assume he has done so. And this is understandable with this play in which for most of the play the part of Macbeth plays itself.
It may be the director’s choice, but Denzel Washington is allowed to play it more contemplatively, meaning that some of its big scenes are played with him sitting down — which they were not written to be. Washington is very good at contemplation, no one better, but contemplation is not the same as being to this degree upset. Indeed, Macbeth is a role in which the actor must never stop pacing the floor.
One person who is right for the job is Lady Macbeth as Queen. She is a quick, slick operator and a canny administrator. She is right about being Queen, wrong about her husband’s being King.
Arthur Miller said of Macbeth that there is a scene missing — a final scene between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. It is an interesting observation because Lady Macbeth does tend to disappear from the action that she has been instrumental in bringing into being. The play as written confirms the Macbeths’ marital separation by her absence from the stage. Before and after the assassination of King Duncan, in addition to being his wife, she is also Macbeth’s head nurse. After the assassination, she is not his wife, but only his nurse. But then the nurse herself goes crazy. Once she becomes Queen her roles run down, and she disappears from him even as spouse, he who is espoused only to remain supreme.
What first can be noticed about Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is her skirting of the monster-wife Judith Anderson brought to Maurice Evans’ Macbeth. Instead she dives under the role and brings us a woman whose own strength is disabused by its outcome in a series of the gruesome effects of it on her husband. She takes him to be as strong in the same way as she herself is. Her wishes in the matter are her undoing, and McDormand brings us a character so firmly rooted in the inevitability of her own strength that the derangement of her husband’s mind that her own strength causes deranges her own mind. As to madness, the Macbeths are simply contagious of one another. They are both incarnadined by their murder of the king, but, when she goes off the deep end, it is from a very high platform — which is to say that the actress does not begin the role, as many actresses do, playing Lady Macbeth already as a cold neurotic vicious bitch but as sexually warm and sane.
On the other hand, McDormand is never ordinary in the sense of every-day. It’s not McDormand’s nature as a human. Frances McDormand is always special. She knows how to bring queenly confidence from before even her first scene. Her confidence will result in a ghastly success. Frances McDormand — who would ever imagine her to be a movie star! Yet, who could ever doubt it. Our incredulity rivets us to her. For another contribution of Frances McDormand to the tragedy is that, unlike every other actress I have seen in the role, and I have seen a great many good ones, one believes from the start that Frances McDormand loves her husband.
Vocally, she is more at home with the text than Denzel Washington. On a deeper level, she is comprehensible always. Arthur Miller is wrong in thinking a scene is missing between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. Her death-scene exists in a single line, the sentence, “She should have died hereafter.” That’s all he has to say. So we never learn how she died, because Macbeth does the unthinkable — he never asks. Divorce knows no greater spectacle to demonstrate itself than the absence of this natural husbandly and human question.
My first reservation about this production came before I saw it, and that was the actors were too old. These parts are usually played by actors twenty years younger, but ripe enough so that the ambition for a life-long royal status would be understandable in them. But I was mistaken. These two are both in their 60s and both are grounded in the material, nonetheless. I witness that ambition is not age-specific.
Nor is the film race-specific. This results from the film being in black and white which has the effect of washing out race difference. That Denzel Washington’s face is masked in a grey beard washes it out also. And costuming remains uniform between the races, which tends to blend them. So my experience of this Macbeth did not bring any sense of race to mind as I watched, but only now as I summon the matter.
The film is enhanced by the physical production of it, which includes the music by Carter Burwell which never attempts music of the Middle Ages or the country of Scotland, but rather halos the action in the realm of its zeitgeist, which is its true locale, a possibility floating like a dissonant tune in our human potential, the music of this sin in the atmosphere of life itself.
The German Expressionist style of sets by Stefan Dechant does the same thing. We are never in some dank castle in Scotland and do not need to be and do not want to be. We are in the straightened corridors of truth itself or the vast chambers of state of a story, such that nothing distracts from us from the tragedy once the startling effect of each the set dissolves into what it more importantly contains.
Bruno Delbonnel’s photography works to the same end. We are never in the Highlands. We are always in The Mind Of Us All.
The costumes by Mary Zophres accomplish the same narrative clarity — they never existed in the Middle Ages. They exist only as a meeting ground for the veracity of this catastrophe.
All this enables us to fall into The Tragedy Of Macbeth without obstacles. Down we go, right into it. Pointless to hold on for safety. Clarity and Simplicity clear the space for us. Everyone knows about this story because everyone has its temptation in them.
Kill them. Kill them all. Until there’s no one but Me left standing.