Of course Macbeth is a Coen brothers movie. The Scottish play is essentially a caper: A criminal plot is hatched and executed, kind of like in Raising Arizona or Fargo. As in The Ladykillers — criminally overlooked, by way — the conspiracy goes off without a hitch just before the midpoint of the action, after which the pitiless hand of cosmic justice initiates a long and bloody rebalancing.
The Coens, like William Shakespeare, are believers that fate has moral status and even a strange sense of agency, which we can glimpse one bloody woodchipper or piss-stained rug at a time. In The Hudsucker Proxy, there is a moment in which a shockingly benevolent Godhead plucks a poor soul out of midair — that hallucinatory sequence in which young Norville Barnes just isn’t allowed to splatter on a Manhattan sidewalk, and the laws of time and physics reverse themselves in order to keep our world whole. In a strangely parallel scene in The Tragedy of Macbeth, the Joel Coen-directed Shakespeare adaptation that premiered in theaters last month and on Apple TV+ on Jan. 14, Macduff’s son is hurled from a high tower into a cloudy abyss of certain death. No hidden intelligence saves him.
Part of what makes the Coens’ work so enduring, and part of what gives it a Shakespearean frisson of mystery and gravitas, is their fascination with how and whether the hidden forces that choose to save or kill a falling child relate to one another. To paraphrase one of the most vexing lines in the Coen filmography: Does the coin really have any say? Here’s a similar question about the gods’ potentially nonarbitrary distribution of good and evil: Would Macbeth ever have become king if the three Weird Sisters hadn’t waylaid him on his way back from the battlefield?
The most jarringly Coenian moment passes quickly in this dour and austere Macbeth, a movie the eerily clean aesthetic of which is a near opposite to the mucky taverns and battlefields of Orson Welles’s Shakespeare films. Macbeth, played by a Denzel Washington who is clearly enjoying his brief reign as a mad tyrant, hatches a plot to kill Banquo and his son. The two men charged with this darkest of all tasks are wild-haired mumblers, and in the sharp black and white of the film, their faces are ridged like the lunar surface, a living record of an entire anonymous life conveyed in a few short seconds. We’ve met these guys before, in saloons in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs or maybe on the chain gang in O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen oeuvre is populated with minor supporting characters plucked from the realm of American myth: rock music-quoting rabbis, preaching gas station attendants, funeral directors guarding access to the beyond. The briefness of these figures’ screen time only heightens their impact, turning the Coens’ world into a pageant of familiar grotesques, a parade of brief visitors whose strangeness only makes everything more recognizable to us. Shakespeare uses his supernumeraries to suggest a similarly alluring line between the uncanny and the painfully human, like when a deranged monarch, one of literature’s bywords for monumentally craven ambition, sends two nameless workaday thugs to murder a child.
Macbeth’s virtues and shortcomings help render a verdict on one of the most important and original bodies of work in the history of American film. Even without Ethan involved, Shakespeare’s play becomes a mirror to the Coen brothers’ best and worst aspects. As a visually arresting, madness-filled, hallucinatory, and often highly moralistic inquiry into the machinations of fate that’s told through a vast spectrum of strange and intense personalities, Macbeth works for many of the same reasons the Coens’ projects usually work. But the Coens’ films often muddle as soon as they hit the human bedrock, and Macbeth is a case in point.
Any interpreter of Macbeth, whether they’re directing amateurs or Oscar winners, needs to decide whether Banquo’s ghost is an imagined manifestation of a guilty and deteriorating mind or an actual ghost occupying real physical space, a being the audience can see. Here, we have one of Joel Coen’s more glaring acts of difference-splitting. Coen depicts the murdered Banquo; meanwhile, the guests at Macbeth’s banquet see the king wrestling a large black bird of a kind that’s popped up earlier in the movie, in association with the three witches and therefore with the play’s larger themes of fate and free will. In an unsatisfying directorial evasion, the dead Banquo is both a function of Macbeth’s madness and a corporeal means of punishing a corrupted man. Making a choice here might have told us something about Coen’s view on the title character and the meaning of his downfall. A lack of a choice only tells us something about Coen.
There’s a similar confusion in Frances McDormand’s muddled portrayal of Lady Macbeth. McDormand brings a tone of bland insistence to the most complex of all Shakespearean women, scolding and mildly shaming her husband into murder. Is it just that Washington overpowers and outshines her? Washington nails the highlights: In his best interpretive choice, Coen sets Washington’s terrifying, even apocalyptic recitation of the “tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech on an enormous curving staircase, with the king contemplating the dead Lady Macbeth splayed below him. But Washington is as unconvincing as McDormand during the play’s wooden and conspicuously sexless rising action, muttering and even panicking past critical questions of motive and easing into the role only after Macbeth’s heel turn.
The fault lies with Coen — we’ve seen enough of his movies to know what they can and can’t do. The brothers’ chief failure is that they are uncompelling in depicting human subtlety. Miller’s Crossing is an endlessly quotable but inevitably mechanical affair; one can thrill to the exaggerated style of The Hudsucker Proxy while finding the thing heartless. The Coens don’t tell love stories very well or even at all — it’s drearily unsurprising that Joel couldn’t find anything interesting to do with the Macbeth marriage. Why expect otherwise?
The brothers’ movies tend to be more impressive the less deeply they’re thought about. For all its greatness, No Country for Old Men is still a kind of nihilistic metastudy of the predictable behavior of various moral archetypes when incentivized by a large pile of cash — only in Tommy Lee Jones’s final, cryptic monologue do any of the characters stand beyond or outside this Rube Goldberg machine of human path dependency, but by then, the movie’s over, and it’s much too late.
It’s no accident that the best Coen films are the ones that are most unlike the others: A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis eschew overstylized philosophizing to give us two very different and utterly credible images of human frailty. The Big Lebowski, the Coens’ supreme achievement and maybe the greatest American comedy other than Dr. Strangelove, is a metaphysical detective story the characters of which have all the slipperiness of actual people, which is part of the reason the film is inexhaustible. Macbeth is just a little too exhaustible — its mysteries reveal themselves too easily, like in much of the rest of the Coens’ work.
Macbeth exposes the serious limits of a great filmmaker, but the movie also constantly reminds us that a director doesn’t need to master every nuance of the human soul in order to create affecting works of art. Coen has always had a John Ford-like sense of the kinds of images, landscapes, and faces that work on film. Much of Macbeth’s dark momentum owes to Kathryn Hunter, a shape-shifter with a voice rasping from some hellish beyond. The 64-year-old, who plays all three of the Weird Sisters, is a stage legend in Great Britain whose screen credits are limited to a couple of cameos in the long-ago Harry Potter films. Coen wrings every drop of surprise from Hunter’s first and possibly only major screen turn, filming her in a tilt-a-whirl of high and low angles, probing her unreal visage from above and below as her body multiplies and merges with itself. Whatever their shortcomings, Joel Coen’s films are propelled by a wonder-inducing novelty that is almost never cheaply earned, effectively imitated, or easily forgotten. Sure, there are harder feats for an artist to pull off than that. But not very many.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
