The Tragedy of Macbeth [2021]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, this week we're kicking off the Scottish month with Joel Coen's immaculate The Tragedy of Macbeth. I must've watched this fifty or sixty times during the lockdown - I was Going Through It, and also it was a film well suited to falling sleep to, having few overly loud sequences* - and even still I was unable to wring the beauty from this.

God the sets and lighting on this are gorgeous. I've seen some behind-the-scenes footage and it was designed to all "be" black and white and impossibly harsh, brutalist, tall geometric forms.

Performances

Denzel's performance in this had me anticipating how good Much Ado '93 would be; shame on me for having expectations. Harry Melling blinks exactly once throughout the entirety of this movie. Kathryn Hunter is so delightfully weird in this. Frances McDormand, weirdly, may be the weakest of the principal cast, but even she is still Pretty Dang Good.

Should We Talk About the Play?

I'm just going to assume the audience here has read or watched this in full or part. If you haven't, correct this. My understanding is that it is a fairly representative version of the play with the main change being the exchanges between the Weird Sisters and Macbeth - that these, in the play, are more conventionally acted, whereas in the film, it lets Macbeth treat them almost as a metafictional move where he gets to ask an authorial demiurge that is the witches what he should do next.

The other big-ish swing change is the age of Macbeth & Lady Macbeth — in the play, while they don't have a child, they are still of birthing age, an heir could be made (despite insistences from the Sisters otherwise); in the film, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are both past the age at which that could happen, short of a legitimized bastard child or Macbeth divorcing, remarrying, and subsequently founding the Church of England [Church of Scotland? -ed]. It really doesn't change much for the film, crown still fruitless, sceptre still barren.

Lord of the Rings

There's not a good spot to talk about this but here since this is the "straightest" Macbeth adaptation we're doing, and I'm also reading/listening along (and slightly ahead) via Shelved By Genre's The Lord of the Year, we're going to do it here: Tolkien intentionally made a couple moments in Lord of the Rings to parallel what he saw were cheats in Macbeth. There's also a third parallel that is mostly in the film version of Lord of the Rings, probably not intended by Tolkien, but possibly the strongest of the three, being the least overtly-literal.

The first is the Ents marching on Orthanc being a much more literal riff on the forest travelling across the land; the second being the Witch King of Angmar being slew by Merry and Éowyn, with his specific prophecy being no man could kill him (which many in modern audiences rightfully view as 'corny as all shit'), being a correction on Macbeth's prophecy that he'd be struck down by a man not born of woman.

The dagger sequence here though, has a parallelism to the Jackson film version of Lord of the Rings with somewhat of an adversarial read of "Fellowship". During the council at Rivendell, you can read Frodo's action of volunteering to take the ring as him being in the throes of addiction to The Ring already**; Macbeth, like Frodo, is terrified yet enthralled with what he feels he must do, every step towards it heavy. It's performed masterfully here.

Next Week

Next week we're watching 2001's Scotland, PA. Thank you for reading along with My Year of Shakespeare. This one was a little late due to needing an editing pass before posting.