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Archaic Maelstrom: Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in Joel Coen's »Macbeth« adaptation
Photo: Alison Rosa / Apple TV+
The Macbeth film adaptation has carved out a stately genre of its own: Shakespeare's tale of power hunger and decay has been set in a Pennsylvania fast-food restaurant, during a Chicago gang war, and in the Mumbai underworld;
great film directors such as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polański worked on the material over the decades.
Now he has managed to break up the most famous directing brothers in history: Joel Coen shot »The Tragedy of Macbeth« alone, without his brother Ethan.
After a short cinema run, the result can now be seen on Apple TV+.
Maybe Ethan was wondering if the world really needed another Macbeth film version, and that's an understandable question.
But maybe Joel was able to convince his brother with his film that at least
this
new variant was actually needed.
It's not the next idiosyncratic interpretation with garbage workers as a trio of witches and Macbeth as a gangster boss, but a kind of basic cinematic overhaul.
The piece looks as if it has been cleaned with a sandblaster, without the alienation of content, modernization and the overload of earlier cinema adaptations. With Joel Coen, Macbeth shines again in his darkest splendor, and one immediately understands why filmmakers can't stop adapting this material: because the early 17th-century play is something of the primordial material for all thrillers that followed in literature and film .
Coen came up with the idea of a Macbeth adaptation after seeing his wife, Frances McDormand, perform the role of Lady Macbeth in a Berkeley Repertory Theater production.
This experience also influenced the form of his film.
Instead of striving for naturalism or modernization, he shot entirely in the studio and had the French cameraman Bruno Delbonnel ("The Fabulous World of Amélie") capture the events in black and white images that appear reduced to the core.
German film expressionism, above all Fritz Lang's »Die Nibelungen«, is clearly the inspiration, but Coen even more achieves a synthesis of cinematic and theatrical staging.
His Macbeth is abstract and gripping at the same time, using the formal language of cinema and yet presenting the drama as if it were on a stage.
His own decision is also his decision not to trust in young actors, as is quite natural in the long Macbeth tradition, but to cast the title role with the aging star Denzel Washington and his lady with Frances McDormand.
So far it has always seemed to be a given that only a young nobleman, through greed and a misguided thirst for power, could lose his way in such a way that he murders his king and puts himself on the throne.
Superstars in top form
In Coen's treatment, is it an elderly, settled man who is burdened with guilt - or rather, whose fate is being ruled by unseen forces?
This is the question that Shakespeare's play has been asking for centuries, and which lends the parable an archaic, timeless pull that is re-emerged with full force in this film.
Age does not protect against cruelty, this is Coen's most visible personal interpretation. Otherwise he puts himself entirely at the service of this text, which still sounds so strange and elegant. The way Washington and McDormand combine their monologues and dialogues with a naturalistic way of acting, how they turn these characters into real people who face their misfortune with their eyes wide open and yet cannot defend themselves - that is phenomenal acting. And because modern technology makes it possible to watch films in the original with subtitles, the advice here can only be to not let these heights of language art pass you by.
This also and above all applies to the actress, who manages to outperform the two superstars in top condition.
Kathryn Hunter is known and admired for her stagecraft, especially in the UK.
She plays with her body like probably no other living actress, with distorted and twisted limbs, which reveal the innermost parts of her characters in expressive movements.
Here she is the three witches in personal union, and the famous beginning of the classic - »When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?« - interpreted in such a strange and creepy way has never been seen before.
The remake was worth it for this virtuoso act of knotting alone.
