The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)

[diamonds]

I know it's only a minute-long teaser, but this sure looks ponderous.

Given how McDormand and Coen have discussed it as a propulsive thriller with "a real suspense and a real ticking clock," I'm tempted to chalk that up to A24's typical marketing style more than anything.

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, they sure did wanna make this look like The Lighthouse

[Mr Sausage]

Some of the staging reminds me of Lang's Die Nibelungen. And then some of it looks like Fulci's Conquest.

[hearthesilence]

I know it's only a minute-long teaser, but this sure looks ponderous.

Given how McDormand and Coen have discussed it as a propulsive thriller with "a real suspense and a real ticking clock," I'm tempted to chalk that up to A24's typical marketing style more than anything.

This is a bit off-topic, but a friend once invited me to to this seminar (around the time Room became a hit) that included A24's marketing, and what was kind of hilarious was how they talked about marketing Spring Breakers. Basically they wanted the biggest opening weekend possible and kind of knew what type of marketing would do it, but they also knew it would probably lead to massive backlash by ticket buyers who felt misled. It made sense why they would go ahead with it, even though it meant tanking their audience review scores - big openings mean more markets asking for distribution.

With that in mind, I don't know why you'd want to make a suspenseful film look ponderous!

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Perhaps the exemplar of that approach is Long Day's Journey Into Night, which opened on New Year's Eve in China and was marketed as a romantic escape to ring in the New Year with your sweetheart. On day one it made $38 million—almost three times the combined grosses of all Jia Zhangke movies, and just a few million short of what The Grandmaster earned over its entire run—then crashed by over 95% on day two. Its user rating on Maoyan (the most mainstream of Chinese movie sites, where Free Guy is currently sitting at a 9 out of 10) is 2.6.

[bad future]

This is a bit off-topic, but a friend once invited me to to this seminar (around the time Room became a hit) that included A24's marketing, and what was kind of hilarious was how they talked about marketing Spring Breakers. Basically they wanted the biggest opening weekend possible and kind of knew what type of marketing would do it, but they also knew it would probably lead to massive backlash by ticket buyers who felt misled. It made sense why they would go ahead with it, even though it meant tanking their audience review scores - big openings mean more markets asking for distribution.

I’ve long suspected this is why A24 seems to give all their horror movies wide releases as opposed to the slow platform rollouts the rest of their films seem to get. The type of moviegoer who’d feel burned because they just wanted to see any normal horror movie on opening weekend is probably also a demographic less likely to pay attention to studios or distributors, so it keeps working. Cool to know they’ve actually spelled out that calculus, but I (further) digress…

[yoloswegmaster]

Reviews are trickling out and they are very positive, which is surprising to me since it was revealed that it was rejected by the Venice Film Festival.

[hearthesilence]

Reviews are trickling out and they are very positive, which is surprising to me since it was revealed that it was rejected by the Venice Film Festival.

I guess that makes sense - the Coens are very polarizing filmmakers. Think of how many of their celebrated masterpieces have been equally and thoroughly trashed by their detractors (mostly the usual skeptics, but also those on the fence about them).

[Monterey Jack]

The Big Lebowski was treated with general disdain when it came out ("The Coens followed up Fargo with this...?!"), and now it's arguably their most beloved movie. Same thing with No Country For Old Men being followed up by Burn After Reading.

[Monkey Ballz]

Has there been any evidence that one brother might be more responsible for one type of film or another?

[Never Cursed]

Sadly I thought this was mostly a failure. The reliance on sets and artificial backdrops make for some impressive images (and production stills), but not only are these elements poorly integrated with the needs of the production as a film (the actual editing and blocking of the actors within the sets are pretty bad, particularly in the fight scenes - hope you’re glad you sprung for the cute co-editing credit, Joel!), they’re the most visible element of the film’s exhaustingly distanced approach to the source text - why this director would visually translate one of Shakespeare’s most approachable and straightforward tragedies into cryptic arthouse nonsense is beyond me. Comparisons to The Lighthouse’s serious parts on a tonal level are decently apt, but that film wasn’t afraid to use its artifice and colorful language to accentuate moments of ridiculous comedy and surrealist horror; next to such an expressively earthy movie, the Coen feels pompous in its guardedness. There are a couple standout sequences, especially those taken from the play’s third act, that gel with the film’s malaise, but everything from the play that might provide some levity or tonal respite is neutered - the porter soliloquy, one of my favorite comic passages from Shakespeare, is performed in full, but drowned out entirely by ominous knocking sounds in a misguided attempt to make the scene more “intense.” Why do this? The performances are all over the map, with Washington’s Macbeth being the most impressive (he even occasionally carves out space to make a joke or two) and Kathryn Hunter’s witches being the single worst interpretation I’ve seen of the role, a reduction of everything mysterious and frightening about the characters into generic mental illness and physical grotesquery. “Reductive” is an apt descriptor of the production as a whole - in trying to make the film feel as imposing and distant as the source text is from a modern reader, Coen has sucked out all the play’s living juice.

[knives]

Everything I’ve heard makes this sound akin to Welles’ rendition. Is that a fair comparison?

[Never Cursed]

Haven’t seen the Welles, but based on what I know of it and around 15 minutes of it that I just watched excerpted, it seems like they’re very similar in terms of the physical qualities of the films (with a similar focus on sets and a title/credits font in the Coen that seems to ape the Welles deliberately), but different in terms of what they do with them. Certainly the opening and the Banquo’s ghost sequence in the Welles soar a lot higher than in the Coen (and I like most of the stuff in the Coen that has to do with Banquo!). My amateur opinion is that Welles probably was probably much, much better at finding a philosophy to adapt the text through than Coen is.

[hearthesilence]

Has there been any evidence that one brother might be more responsible for one type of film or another?

Didn't Ethan have a bigger hand with the visual elements like composition and Joel have a bigger hand with the actors? In which case, Never Cursed's comments makes it sound like Ethan's absence may have been a bigger blow than expected, at least in terms of integrating the visuals with the needs of the production.

[Never Cursed]

The film’s issues don’t principally fall along those lines; the central problem is the smugly distanced approach that Joel took to the adaptation of the play, an attitude which many of the Coens’ detractors have accused both brothers of bringing to many of their films. (For what it’s worth, I’m somewhere in the middle with them).

[Noiretirc]

Is there really any need for more of the famous Shakespearian Tragedies, not just Macbeth?

Yes.

[Michael Kerpan]

Noiretirc -- Agreed

[Roger Ryan]

...(the actual editing and blocking of the actors within the sets are pretty bad, particularly in the fight scenes - hope you’re glad you sprung for the cute co-editing credit, Joel!)...

Can't comment on the specific editing of this film since I've yet to see it, but Joel and Ethan Coen have primarily been the editors of their own films going back to their debut Blood Simple. Only occasionally have they relied on others in this department. The choice of the "Reginald Jaynes" moniker in place of the usual "Roderick Jaynes" is undoubtedly an acknowledgement that Ethan was not involved.

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, I'm not saying that the Jaynes moniker(s) are new or anything

[beamish14]

Has there been any evidence that one brother might be more responsible for one type of film or another?

Didn't Ethan have a bigger hand with the visual elements like composition and Joel have a bigger hand with the actors? In which case, Never Cursed's comments makes it sound like Ethan's absence may have been a bigger blow than expected, at least in terms of integrating the visuals with the needs of the production.

That's interesting. I don't think they operate quite like an Allen/Albert Hughes split where each one has very delineated roles like that, but I'm not sure of how they operate during preproduction. It's pretty miraculous that they're known to never argue on sets or even really have divergent points of view.

Ethan is the one who has dabbled in a lot more outside of films, having had plays, a book of poetry, and an excellent collection of short stories published, so his sabbatical/retirement from films isn't a total shock.

[Drucker]

Caught this last night and mostly agree with Never Cursed. There are flashes of the Coens' charm and humor, but overall the film is mostly a slog. I understand the comparisons to the Welles' film, mostly due to this film having a "minimalist" feel. The sets are made up of skeletal interiors, and mostly comprised of outlines of buildings and structures. I was fascinated with Harry Melling as Malcolm. His use, and especially his eyes stuck out to me as something very Coen-esque, but the film does not quite do anything more with it than just allow for the appearance of that type of character.

I'm glad I caught it in theaters, but will be surprised if I'm thinking about it much again in the near future.

[DarkImbecile]

I had basically the opposite reaction as Never Cursed and Drucker:

I'm far from a scholar of Shakespeare, but Macbeth is among my favorite precisely for the gloomy inevitability and ominous dread that hangs over (almost) the entire affair, which seems very much in line with the standard Coen structure of fatally flawed, myopic people stumbling down the cattle chute toward their fated ends. The expressionistic set design, sound choices, and cinematography Coen opts for feed into that unease, as do most of the performances (including Kathryn Hunter, whose interpretation of the witches I quite liked, to be even more contrarian), and — while there certainly isn't much emphasis on the humor present in both the play or the the Coen filmography — far from draining the play of its vitality, it felt to me like this adaptation tapped into its essence while stylistically staking out its own ground apart from the Kurosawa, Polanski, and Welles versions.

That said, there were a few notes that fell short, and — given my regard for her work and the character, one of the best in Shakespeare's oeuvre — maybe none more surprising than the feeling that Frances McDormand hit a single or a double in portraying the malevolence and decline of Lady Macbeth. There's nothing wrong with her performance exactly, but it also feels down-the-middle and lacking in the surprises or intensity one might've hoped she'd deliver.

[Brian C]

That said, there were a few notes that fell short, and — given my regard for her work and the character, one of the best in Shakespeare's oeuvre — maybe none more surprising than the feeling that Frances McDormand hit a single or a double in portraying the malevolence and decline of Lady Macbeth. There's nothing wrong with her performance exactly, but it also feels down-the-middle and lacking in the surprises or intensity one might've hoped she'd deliver.

I know exactly what you mean. She plays Lady Macbeth with a lot of the usual McDormand sternness, but not a lot else; I would have expected a McDormand take on the role to include a lot more wit and cunning. It's almost banal, as if every day you convince your husband to kill the king to take his place, just part of your normal wifely duties as a noblewoman.

Overall, I got a lot of enjoyable visuals from this film but not a lot of raison d'être - it's a serviceable Shakespeare adaptation but ultimately just another Shakespeare adaptation. Coen's made it sound like he re-invented the wheel somehow in interviews over the last year or so, but I just don't see a lot of novelty here. I got the distinct feeling that the genesis of the project was the visualization of the sets instead of having any particular insight into the play itself.

[geoffcowgill]

I haven't read/seen any of Joel Coen's interviews about this film, but in a sense he has reinvented the wheel with this adaptation by making the wheel square. He's taken a play that is driven by the reckless abandon of its protagonists' motives and fears and made a movie that is shockingly inert dramatically. As Brian says, there's a banality in McDormand's performance, but it's not limited to hers. The whole approach feels willfully perverse, and not in a fun or interesting way. It's as if Coen thought it would be a good idea to place the psyche of Billy Bob Thornton's character from The Man Who Wasn't There into the Thane of Cawdor, only one of the most emotionally fraught characters in literature. "Is this a dagger I see before me?" just isn't the same thing as musing on dry cleaning.

[therewillbeblus]

I don’t have much to add to the apathetic responses posted here: Never Cursed outlined the faults in adaptation thoroughly and Brian succinctly narrated my shrug towards any core meat that may exist underneath the pretty sheen. I consider myself a pretty consistent Coen-fan, often finding sideways-entrees of emotional resonance in their most distancing works, operating like speakeasys that have vulnerable, willing hearts bleeding behind existentially-aloof and aesthetically-objectifying numbing agents. So I was especially disappointed by how Joel’s choices of pronounced artificiality failed to leave space for a back door path to access the pulsing drama that’s intrinsically so accessible within one of the Bard’s most digestible works. I would have paid good money to see these stills in an art exhibit channeling Shakespeare’s play in a novel modality that way- and now that I write that out, this feels essentially what’s being tried here, and would be a far riskier and more rewarding use of tools. As a feature film, it’s frustratingly vacuous, especially in forsaking the juicy humanity of the text’s potential for psychological phantasmagoria in mise en scene that’s stimulating without inviting us into the substance of said psychological signifiers. At least with those stills sans text, there could be ample interpretation. Joel’s film squashes nuance and antes a Trojan horse of dessert filled with mostly air.