Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is an expressionist Shakespeare adaptation
NEW YORK » In Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Oscar Isaac’s folk musician is trying to make it on his own, without his longtime partner. He travels to Chicago to audition for Bud Grossman, who gives the damning judgment: People need time to get to know you, he says, “buy you as a solo act.”
“The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s first time directing without his brother, is going much better for him than it did for Llewyn.
An intoxicatingly expressionist Shakespeare adaptation dense in fog and shadow, Coen’s “Macbeth” is a solo debut from a filmmaker whose visual virtuosity has never been so starkly drawn in sound and fury. The movie has been hailed as one of the finest film Macbeths — a legacy including Orson Welles’ powerhouse interpretation and Akira Kurosawa’s feverishly atmospheric “Throne of Blood” — and an unexpected detour from a filmmaking life previously always defined by brotherhood.
“I spent 40 years looking over at
Ethan after each shot or looking at him if there was a problem, and, so, I missed him because that wasn’t there,” Coen said in a recent interview. “On the other hand, Fran was there as a producer bringing a different skill set that was in some ways absent from things we’d done earlier — especially in the context of this particular movie because of her experience in the theater.”
“The Tragedy of Macbeth” (streaming Jan. 14 on Apple TV+) stars Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Francis McDormand as Lady Macbeth. The project was driven partly by McDormand, who had longed to do the play with her husband directing, possibly on the stage. Coen eventually relented, but he could only imagine it as a film — stripped down and stylized, abstracted in black and white and composed in a nearly square academy-ratio frame.
“The ambition was to do it very much as a movie in terms of embracing what the medium gives you stylistically and psychologically and formally, but trying not to lose the essence of the play-ness of the piece of literature,” Coen said. “From the very beginning, we weren’t interested in doing a realistic version of the play. We weren’t interested in a rent-acastle version.”
As much as the film is a departure for Coen, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” isn’t really a solo act. Along with working with actors like McDormand, Washington and Kathryn Hunter (a stunning witch), the film was built through collaborations with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and production designer Stefan Dechant.
Coen and Delbonnel, who shot “Inside Llewyn Davis” and the Coens’ previous film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” first met almost three years ago, spending a week in a Swiss hotel going over ideas and references. In that conversation and others, they grasped at things like Edward Gordon Craig’s stylized early 20th century stage design, Carl Dryer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Hiroshi Sugimoto’s chiaroscuro photographs and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.”
Some of the intense conversation that Coen might have exchanged with his brother, he had with Delbonnel, poring over sketches and taking contemplative cigarette breaks. Their connection, Delbonnel said, is in questioning everything.
“Joel and Ethan were always questioning whether it was the right way to do something,” Delbonnel said. “There is no right way, but the right way for the movie. We both think Kurosawa was a genius.”