The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021) Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand
I suppose I have to get woke — and used to the political correctness which now sees African-Americans playing mediaeval Scots in Shakespeare. And I think that's fine in experimental theatre off-Broadway and the school play in the local high school. But I personally don't think you can - or should - do it in a serious film based on one of Shakespeare's serious plays. ... That's one thing.
The next thing is that Americans are pragmatists. The characters in the Scottish play are not. They are fatalists. They struggle with might and main against what must be, but they finally fundamentally accept it. Denzel Washington looks and speaks like someone who's out for whatever opportunity might turn up. Far from being Oedipus Tyrannus, he's just a grifter who happens to try the wrong sting in the wrong situation.
But the main thing is the text. Shakespeare isn't about sets and cinematography - though you can add those. It's a bare stage with some hopefully intelligent very good speakers who understand the language they're intoning. In this film, many of the scenes are done in a (real) whisper - (not a stage one). The words are gabbled telegrammatically. The meaning is sacrificed in the same way that a mannerist singer presents a song as all about them instead of about the song itself. I'm pretty sure that at one point Macbeth commends the horses to the riders' backs instead of the other way around, and the scriptgirl didn't notice. No-one seems to be aware in the slightest that the lines of the play are poetry. They're in verse, they scan, they rhyme. This is not a play by Sam Shepard.
The acting/casting. Some of the cast (Brendan Gleeson, for example) work like they have actually been in a real theatre, even if only in the audience, while some - again Denzel Washington is the best/worst example - are giving us cinema acting, which is type casting + personality, and has very little to do with getting into a character. Denzel is a hip, street-wise dude out of Spike Lee and John Dewey, and has no idea what's going on in either Macbeth or Macbeth.
Denzel wondering why he has to wear this christmas cracker crown
Review of the film by 'Ethan Coen'.
Thanks to a friend who summed up the film thus: "McDormand looks and acts like a cleaning-lady."
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 25 January, 2022 | Now: 4 February, 2022