Written by Jesse Hassenger
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: AV Club (December 22, 2021)
Joel Cohen's interpretation of Macbeth as a Scottish play may not be unprecedented, but it's one of the best films of the year.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
During the filming of 18 feature films, the brothers Joel Cohen and Ethan Cohen were among the most distinctive filmmakers in the American visual language.
They didn't always hold the same positions — in films before 2004, Joel directed the tube and Ethan was the producer, but the script usually had both of them signed, and neither officially acknowledged that they were regularly involved in editing (and received an Oscar nomination!). They took a pseudonym, Roderick Jaynes.
But one would say that the brothers both work more or less like a synchronized artistic brain. What happens if they don't work with each other?
Their masterpiece Drunken Folk Song feels as if this has been considered in its text. Today, Joel Cohen's The Tragedy of Macbeth may temporarily offer a startlingly strange answer: replacing Ethan Cohen with William Shakespeare.
Joel Cohen was fairly close to Shakespeare's text, and he cut it down, slightly altering it, but not much. Shakespeare will always be called a genius playwright, and it would be rude to simply see him as an obstacle, as a serious challenge joel had to overcome in the process of directing.
However, given Shakespeare's immense fondness for creative, lengthy texts, revisiting Cohen's classics does, in a sense, make Cohen feel constrained, and in many ways, his Macbeth is like an experiment with clear mouths.
In this experiment, whether intentional or unintentional, Joel replaced his younger brother Ethan with his own partner, three-time Oscar-winning Francis McDormand. She worked the film with Joel and played Lady Macbeth, while Denzel Washington played the husband of the famous Lady Macbeth.
It can't be said that this was an unprecedented move, or a rewrite of the text, because this is already the biggest change in the film: in this film, Lord macbeth and Madame are an older couple, and they will soon never get any honors again.
Because of their age, and their strange pragmatism, both Washington and McDormand are experts at showing reason—even when talking about the details of the treasonous murder of King Duncan (Braidan Gleason). McDormand's interpretation of "take all your courage out" feels insidious because it's not intimidating, it's not even particularly aggressive. It's a firm proposal, and beneath the surface is dangerous and stubborn manipulation.
Just seeing McDormand and Washington's analysis of these famous passages makes Macbeth worth preserving for posterity, accompanied by Denzel Washington's dramatic masterpiece The Fence. But Cohen's independently directed work has its own artistic style.
For the script, he didn't make much of a textual change, but instead made visual adjustments to the play by subtraction: Cohen removed the color, returned to black and white for the first time since The Absent Man, and let the actors perform in a blunt, sometimes almost abstract sound environment. Even the three witches who started the story with prophecy were played by an actor — Catherine Hunter alone contributed three gruesome visually hallucinogenic performances.
Bruno del Bonnell's outstanding photography technique makes the black and white picture exceptionally clear, and shows many details, such as the white hair and beard of many of the characters in the film (especially Washington). The result is that the film looks both stage-like and expressionist.
There's a simple scene inside a tent, decorated with shadows cast from the outside by trees, and then the camera smoothly transitions from canvas to the walls of the castle. In the famous "Double and Double, Labor and Labor" scene, the witches sit on the rafters above Macbeth's head, and the floor beneath his feet is filled with mist, making it look like the whole room has become a crucible for the witches.
While the scenes are visually exciting, there are also scenes that clearly don't embody Cohen's past magic — the element of what he calls "told by an idiot" that has previously translated some of the film's voices and anger into black comedy or even farce.
It may be unfair to say that any film with the word "tragic" in its title is a criticism that they lack joy, but Stephen Root, who plays such a small role as a concierge, only takes a minute or so to evoke the charm of a Cohen-esque actor, yet much of Macbeth's Tragedy is too elegant and fashionable to show that charm.
Cohen has been accused of keeping a cold distance from his creations in past films, and after years of overused tactics, that accusation may eventually continue.
But to prevent Macbeth's Tragedy from becoming Cohen's self-deprecating imitation of Shakespeare, a slight, expressionless indifference may be necessary; the link between the film and Joel's previous work is already clear, without the need for the actors to grimace. If Sheriff Maggie in Ice Storm were there, she might say that Lord Macbeth and Lady Macbeth had conspired to kill a group of people for the sake of a little power.
This predestined inevitability is also in line with some of the coen brothers' gloomy works. Joel seems to have been born incapable of picking a sense of surprise out of Macbeth's late-middle-aged decay. The film industry has long been rife with bloody, power-hungry maels of all ages, making it hard to discern where Joel would go next if he continued to make films on his own without working with Ethan. Now, he has begun to sing new old words, reshaping an old classic song into a lucid dream.