Breaking the spell

Joel Coen’s Macbeth only misses the poetry, but that is everything

Macbeth is a tough nut. Not that the big film directors who’ve tried it — Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski, and now Joel Coen — haven’t acquitted themselves pretty well. All those films convey the qualities that we associate with the play: Its ancient, un-Christian morality; the bleak medieval setting, all furs, stone, iron, and rags; and above all the existential isolation of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth has along with it the specifically dizzying kind of visuals we’ve seen him make time and again with his brother Ethan. And, as the Coens often do, the film also has a trick up its sleeve, and a good one. What it is missing is a dimension that is perhaps unreachable by these means, and only available when play-makers specifically indulge it at the cost of everything else.

I noticed while watching Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth something that had never sunk in with me before: there really aren’t any interesting characters in the play besides those two. (The performance of the witches by Kathryn Hunter is justly celebrated, but these are not characters and Hunter plays them as forces or special effects rather than people.) The other characters get some chances to roar and mourn, but there’s nothing in them a viewer would wonder about. And not even Stephen Root can make the Porter funny.

No, there’s just these two; she exists to instill ambition in him, and he exists to fulfill it. Coen, Denzel Washington, and Frances McDormand make that very plain by keeping their early plotting simple and almost businesslike. There’s no Roman Polanski sexy-time to suggest Lady Macbeth cock-teases him into murder; neither does he seem to be whipped into shape by her attacks on his manhood, even by the “pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out” bit. (What did happen to that kid?) They simply discuss and agree, like a successful middle-class married couple, and one of the things they agree on is that sometimes he needs a push.

There is none of the stereotypical Shakespearean fustian in the acting. For nearly an hour Washington doesn’t even seem especially excited, really — his “If we should fail?” has no dread; he’s just a general considering battleground scenarios. Once he’s killed his way onto the throne he livens up, but even then he doesn’t so much as raise his voice until things start to go to shit. McDormand is neither harpy nor temptress, just a smart woman backing her sometimes maladroit man. When Macbeth thinks on his feet, as when he explains why he killed Duncan’s guards, she looks both nervous and eager to see whether he’s pulled it off. In this production more than most it feels to me that Lady M is living entirely through Macbeth, and that maybe she goes mad because she knows he’s going to.

I understand the approach and can imagine good reasons for it, but I suspect it’s really because Coen wanted to express a vision of Macbeth through means other than the words. He clearly has ideas, including the expected visual ones, such as ravens that start as omens but become emblems and then vortices of evil.

There is also a major matter of reinterpretation that makes Coen’s vision plain. (You can skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t like spoilers.) The character of Ross is usually one of the hearty stage-dressing Scots who first accepts, then denounces Macbeth — the sort of Shakespearean supernumerary people seldom remember. Coen cleverly notices that Ross is never around when it’s time to take a side against interest, and from this posits a Ross who plays both ends against the middle. He does the butchering of the former Thane of Cawdor to get in good with the new one; he does his lines with Duncan’s wife, but his departure right before her and her children’s murder is clearly not a coincidence; he even joins the First and Second Murderers at their Banquo-killing task. This Ross knows something the Macbeths don’t, and that (for better or worse) Shakespeare didn’t consider: That ambition is a force unto itself that lives and lurks, always waiting for its next victim, and after Macbeth it will be someone else.

A clever idea; but a limiting one. I think it at least partly explains why the acting is so restrained. When we are spooked by Macbeth, it always has something to do with the dirty doings in the play, and these Coen has fully invested with the cold creeps. He has fixed it so the visuals, the atmosphere, and the plotting carry the weight.

But the greater weight was always meant to be carried by the poetry. And the poetry is not about an external force, represented by ravens or anything like that, that lures men to evil: It’s the evil in man himself, evil that he serves without fully knowing why (and the machinations of a minor character are not the reason), evil that is at once everyday and incomprehensible.

This comes out of the words. Washington and McDormand deliver the famous speeches with an obvious, clear understanding of the text, but without any sense that they are delivering incantations. And they are incantations. What they summon is practically beyond the plot of the play. It’s black magic. (This is why actors are superstitious about calling it “The Scottish Play” rather than by its name — the property invites superstition. You should be afraid to handle it, like a nuclear bomb or a sacrament.)

I see in practice, for example, why the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech is practically thrown away by Washington; the small, prone, twisted figure of Lady Macbeth at the foot of the stairs, like a bug on a windshield, is very eloquent. But it’s just not as eloquent as that speech. Very little is.

I can hardly fault Coen — when you’re that good at mise en scene (and you have the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel carving the images in black-and-white ice), I can see why you’d want to put it all on that. But Macbeth without the poetry is just sound and fury.