Ltransformation was required. From devoted soldier to homicidal maniac. It cannot be said that it was taken for granted. Loading on solid shoulders of Denzel Washington the burden, Joel Coen makes the first of many good choices in Macbeth, his first solo film (on Apple TV + from January 14).
Denzel as the austere Scottish nobleman, having returned tired from the military campaign conducted on behalf of King Duncan, he seems ready for a retreat from the public scene. Difficult choice to make, then and in the highlands, as in the palaces of power of today.
All the more so if the imperative solicitation to takeover of power at any cost, comes from his partner, Lady Macbeth, the role of Frances McDormand, the director’s wife here also as a co-producer, she certainly had been waiting for a lifetime (and 4 Oscars).
Denzel Washington is Macbeth.
The fatal encounter had taken place right on the way back from the front. Macbeth and his faithful comrade in arms Banquo come across the witches, Kathryn Hunter, one and three, between contortions and reflexes. Destiny is written for Macbeth and Banquo’s progeny.
And it is precisely from the omen that it derives the escalation of horror (that crescendo that probably imposed the original title on Joel Coen as a whole). In the expressive folds of Denzel Washington, versatile actor capable of moving from great biographies to bombastic action films. But even the subtleties and whispers can be read the irrepressible drive to evil and the pain that derives from it.
And if Lady Macbeth is responsible for having triggered the mechanism, and for having laid the foundations for her own and others’ perdition, to the inevitable consequences he will then have to hand over his wisdom.
Frances McDormand is Lady Macbeth.
Two North American protagonists on the podium, but in the second and third roles the author calls a cohort a bevy of outstanding English and Scottish actors, by Brendan Gleeson (Duncan) to Harry Melling (Malcom), from Alex Hassell (Ross) to Bertie Carvel (Banquo).
No towered castles for the film, shot entirely in Los Angeles, but rough modernist scenes by Stefan Dechant, with corridors and courtyards used to host only chiaroscuro shadows entrusted to the black and white of Bruno Delbonnel, as many tributes to Orson Welles, who col Macbeth he measured himself, and to the German Expressionists. The beds have no canopies, but share the severity of the military camp beds and even the laid tables have the essentiality of a death row.
Tragedy for Welles and Polanski
The entire castle and surrounding moorland provide minimal stress, as they would in a theatrical staging. And maybe that’s it Joel Coen’s intent, to make cinema and theater together.
A preventive response to those who wondered what need there was for a new reduction from the perhaps more pessimistic and darker tragedy of the Bard. The latest in order of time dates back only to 6 years ago, Justin Kurzel was directing and the killer couple was made up of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. But the ambitious Scotsman had long ago stirred the appetites of the great, from Welles to Roman Polanski, from Akira Kurosawa to Bela Tarr.
Laurence Olivier also tried that, after ringing Henry V, Hamlet And Richard III, assumed that the financiers would not deny him a fourth Shakespearean chapter. It wasn’t like that. Sin of presumption.
Writer and director Joel Coen and his wife, Frances MacDormand.
Each of the author’s versions was the daughter of its time: if the splattered one by Polanski (1971) is the first in technicolor, those of Orson and Kurosawa, shot in 1948 and 1957 respectively, were marked by the horrors of the previous two decades (Kurosawa’s adaptation, made during the American occupation of Japan, was set in the violent Middle Ages of the Sengoku period).
To want to evaluate timing and consistency, the Coen brothers’ filmography is a sometimes sublime string of ambitious and immoral characters, vile and nihilistic individuals who live above their talents and, in a worrying percentage, deeply stupid.
Traits that the director of Minneapolis distributes among the first and second rows of the small army that struggles on the scene: a long trail of blood descends from the crown down to the lowest levels of the hierarchy, to the assassins, to the servants, to the lackeys. And a flock of crows rises over the hill. Omen of future misdeeds. And as many damnations.
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