The Massachusetts Medievalist on the new "Macbeth" (alert: spoilers!)
The Massachusetts Medievalist has watched the new Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand-- director Joel Coen has created a visually stunning film that provides some engaging interpretive choices, even for a Macbeth veteran like me.
First of all, Washington and McDormand are stupendous. I always begin classes on Macbeth with a question like: "Shakespeare doesn't tell us how old the Macbeths are, so what do you think? How old is Macbeth in your mind?" Michael Fassbender was 37 when he starred opposite Marion Cotillard (2015) and Patrick Stewart was 70 in the 2010 stage version that became a BBC/PBS film, so there's a wide range of possibility here. Washington at 67 gives us a Macbeth who has paid his dues but is still at the top of his game. McDormand, 64, is older than many Lady Macbeths, and the black-and-white filming does not shrink from the lines on her face. I found it refreshing that there was no attempt to make her sexy (see: Kate Fleetwood opposite Stewart) -- this Lady Macbeth is a long-time partner to a man she loves so much that she is willing to manipulate him to the greatness she is sure he deserves. It's chilling.
Coen is very aware of himself in a lineage of Macbeth directors, and his black and white filming with spare, theatrical sets almost redeems Orson Welles' hideously bad 1948 film. Like Welles' atrocious project, this Macbeth has no interest in portraying a "realistic" setting -- the stylized hallways and cavernous rooms are obviously sound stages, spring boards for Washington's hypnotic voice and McDormand's deeply expressive eyes. As the final skirmishes of Act Five unfold, the architectures of Dunsinane and Birnam Wood merge in a visually arresting combination where the pillars of the hall meld into the trees as Macbeth toys with Young Siward, who was born of woman.
Coen also makes us look at the play's violence in a way that Shakespeare's script does not - while the original calls for violence off stage and reported afterward, in this film we see Macbeth stick a knife in Duncan's throat, we see him kill the hapless guards. We see his henchmen kill the Macduffs, throwing the young boy into a tower's flaming stairwell. The violence is intimate, personal, and the more horrific for it.
Very surprisingly, it's Ross who sticks with me the most as I mull over the film in the days after. In a more usual Macbeth experience, Ross is one the many interchangeable Scottish lords hanging around and advancing the plot. Here, Alex Hassell deserves his third billing right under Washington and McDormand. Coen's and Hassell's Ross, whose costume and movements visually echo those of the Witches, is newly fair and foul. He is both the third murderer when Banquo dies and the messenger who warns Lady Macduff that assassins approach. It's implied that he has pushed Lady Macbeth to her death, complicating our understanding of her as a suicide. He has a relationship with a vaguely-supernatural figure (whom we meet singing a bit of Feste's song from Twelfth Night, oddly enough). Ross, not Macduff, presents Macbeth's head and crown to Malcolm at the end. Most crucially, he has the opportunity to kill Fleance but doesn't - and we find out in the closing scene that Ross has sheltered Fleance with the Feste-like singer. They ride into a huge flock of cackling ravens as the credits begin. Coen has cut Macbeth's fourth vision -- where he sees the line of Banquo's descendants as crowned kings - so this closing scene is unsettling, dark, foul and fair, with relief that Fleance is alive and apprehension at the symbolic ravens.
Ultimately, Coen's Macbeth made me want to gather with friends and colleagues and students and talk and think in detail about this excellent movie, to enthuse about its stark and compelling presentations, to remind ourselves that we watch theater and movies because we connect to each other through them. The pandemic has taken much of that connection from us, and I yearn to get it back.