The Tragedy of Macbeth

 

Joel and Ethan Coen are motion picture royalty, having written/directed/produced innovative and enigmatic features for the past 40 years, often with Joel's wife, Frances McDormand. Joel Coen has recrafted Shakespeare's The Scottish Play and cast Denzel Washington in the lead role, with Frances McDormand as the Lady of the house.

Coen has edited the text, even though the original play is among the shortest by the Bard, and fully diversified the casting, all of whom deliver solid, classical readings. Coen has also enhanced the play's spectral elements, recrafting the tale as a phantasm in stark black and white on sets and locations that evoke both the staginess of Olivier's Hamlet (1948) and the surrealism of Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957). The result is an exquisite and invigorating reimagining of this familiar story of bloody ambition and madness. As one might expect, Washington and McDormand are terrific, but I also found the performances by Alex Hassell as Ross, the nobleman and messenger, and Kathryn Hunter as the witches, striking and highly memorable.