Orson Welles was 33 when he cast himself as Macbeth in his 1948 screen adaptation, Jeannette Nolan 37 as Lady Macbeth. Jon Finch is 28 in Roman Polanski’s version, Francesca Annis 26. The point being that Joel Coen’s casting of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the titular roles, 66 and 64 respectively, is a decision that lands with timely force and intention. In Coen’s hands, Shakespeare’s plot of murderous usurpation seems almost a pretext, a backdrop against which this adaptation’s most poignant aspects emerge: its pervasive sense of dread, the feeling that we are living in the middle of something in its final throes.
From his first scene with the Weird Sisters, Washington’s Macbeth looks worn, hunched, heavyset—his face seems to have the look of a very modern anxiety. He takes in the Weird Sister’s prophecy as a burden. Joel Coen, for whom the Tragedy of Macbeth is his first solo venture without his brother Ethan, makes an interesting inversion of the source text in one scene; Coen takes a line uttered by King Duncan in Shakespeare’s text, “There’s no art/ to find the mind’s construction in the face,” and gives it to Macbeth with a twist, who mutters under his breath, “Is it not art to find the mind’s construction in the face?” If King Duncan’s point had been that you can’t tell what is from what appears, for Washington’s Macbeth, appearance is the thing—appearance is the base on which everything stands, and he’s spent a lifetime crafting it. McDormand’s Lady Macbeth too is utterly captivating: even when the camera cuts to a predictable close-up for her delivery of the classic monologue, “unsex me here/And fill me… of direst cruelty,” it doesn’t feel contrived. McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is brimming with steely vengeance; she’s been unsexed for some time.
Production for the Scottish Play began before the pandemic, then went on a three month break starting in March of 2020. It seems that the decision to shoot entirely on a soundstage wasn’t due to the conditions of the past year, but must have made shooting during this time more manageable. The stage and sound design have a prominent role in Coen’s adaptation, like characters themselves. The cross-hatched, angular shadows that lie across the stage’s uniformly concrete architecture gives a sense of severe abstraction; the ruffling of trees or drops of water too sound like the thuds of a hammer. No lamps or candles in the film; only a diffuse grey that mimics “natural” lighting, a constant hue of otherworldly twilight. Clear shades of Bergman here; the film’s technical elements lend to it a feeling of being outside time, like a dream sequence. It can’t help but feel allegorical.
Which brings us to the question that any Shakespeare adaptation rightly elicits, but especially one coming from Joel Coen, who has a full career behind him: why this play? Why now? What we’re all wondering: what is its political message? And when an audience member asked the inevitable question at the film’s world premiere, Coen predictably replied that it isn’t about anything in particular. This is the transcendent power of Shakespeare he said—it’s timelessness, its endurance through history. But endurance isn’t the only model to think about how a work stays relevant. Literary critic Wai Chee Dimock writes in “A Theory of Resonance” that it’s actually the way a work resonates outward, “becomes unfixed, unmoored, and thus democratically claimable” that allows it to be taken up in new and different contexts.
Rather than ask how Coen’s adaptation of the Scottish Play is relevant to our current moment, let’s assume that it is and work our way to how it is so. Joel Coen’s first solo outing is about ambition grown long in the tooth, patience past its due, a sense of dread that feels pointedly contemporary. The Coen brothers often played with the tension between the natural and the arbitrary—for example, violence that occurs according to some reason or logic, but also seems to happen at random. There is a glimmer of such a thread in Joel Coen’s venture here, but it’s faint. It will be interesting to see what aesthetic emerges in Coen’s future individual projects.