Joel Coen’s Monochromatic Macbeth
Article – howard davis
Man that is born of a woman, hathbut a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. – Job 14, King James Version of The Bible , 1611.
“Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
– Job 14, King James Version of The Bible, 1611.
“… neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
– Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, 1867.
Now that all the Oscar nonsense is done and dusted for another year, it is worth revisiting the movie for which Denzel Washington was nominated as Best Actor in a Leading Role. It was Washington who tried to calm down Will Smith with the truly Shakespearean advice “At your highest moment be careful, that’s when the devil comes for you.” Having slapped Chris Rock in the face, yelled at him to “leave my fucking wife out of it” (twice), and refused to leave the ceremony as requested, Smith then went on to beat out Washington for Best Actor for his performance in the equally Shakespearean-titled King Richard. The Bard of Avon may not exactly be turning in his grave at all these A-list shenanigans, but he will almost certainly be smirking up the sleeve of his lace doublet.
Joel Coen has followed three of the world’s greatest film-makers who have previously tackled Macbeth. Orson Welles produced a black-and-white version in 1948, released just as the House un-American Activities Committee was ramping up its persecution of supposed communist subversion in Hollywood. In many ways, it is a sequel to his 1937 antifascist version of Julius Caesar, which he subtitled “The Death of A Dictator.” E. Pearlman, in his survey Macbeth on Film: Politics, noted that “Shakespeare’s poles of monarchy and tyranny have been replaced by a right-wing worldview which can admit nothing other than dictatorship or disorder.” Ten years later, when Japan was still occupied by American soldiers, Akira Kurosawa mapped out much the same territory in Throne of Blood. Set in Japan’s violent Sengoku period when armed and dangerous samurai roamed the country at will, it was also shot in grainy monochrome and explored the corrosive effects of untrammelled militarism in the service of imperial ambition.
While both of these earlier versions were clearly shaped by the events of the 1930s and 40s, Roman Polanski’s ensanguined Technicolor version was released in 1971, a year after demented cult leader and ex-con Charles Manson’s deranged followers had mistakenly butchered his wife Sharon Tate and their friends at the Beverly Canyon house they were renting. Following the direct instructions of Manson, who intended to spark an apocalyptic race war he termed “Helter Skelter,” four of his acolytes broke into the property and viciously murdered high school graduate Steven Parent, celebrity stylist Jay Sebring, screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski, Folgers coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time. Manson had previously scoped out the property at 10050 Cielo Drive when it was occupied by Candice Bergen and Doris Day’s son, the record producer Terry Melcher. Unknown to Manson, whose demo tapes Melcher had rejected, the couple split up in early 1969 and Melcher moved to Malibu. When Polanski’s co-screenwriter and British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan suggested he may have overdone the gore a bit, Polanski replied, “You didn’t see my house last summer. I know about bleeding.”
Polanski made Francesca Annis deliver her sleepwalking scene naked, erroneously claiming that no one wore pajamas in those days and earning the movie an X rating that crippled it at the box office. It was the first Playboy Production for the cinema, after Victor Lownes, the head of Playboy’s European operation, personally persuaded pornographer Hugh Hefner to underwrite the $1.5m budget, thinking it would bring a degree of respectability to their company. Lownes was infuriated when Polanski overshot the budget up by an additional $600,000 and the two inseparable pals fell out for many years afterwards. Final losses were estimated at $3.5 million. During the gruesome death scene of Lady MacDuff’s children, Polanski instructed a four-year-old girl on how to play dead, while smearing fake blood all over her body. When he asked the girl for her name, she eerily replied “Sharon.” Polanski later acknowledged that the movie’s gruesome bloodletting was also influenced by scenes he had personally witnessed growing up in the Krakow ghetto, specifically his memory of SS officers ransacking his house as a child.
Both Kurosawa and Polanski deliberately situated their movies in a medieval time and locale. Kurosawa constructed his castle exteriors at great cost and labour in the fog-bound and stunted landscape of Mt Fiji, while Polanski insisted on filming for four gruelling weeks in Snowdonia National Park using only available natural light. A camera operator nearly died on the first day of shooting when a fierce wind blew him into a crevice. Undeterred, Polanski remained determined to include a bear-baiting sequence, but the first animal they used was too timid and kept running away from the dogs, while the second was uncontrollable and raked a member of the crew with its claws. Polanski then opted to employ a stuntman in a bear suit, who feared his padding would not be sufficiently protective and insisted that only one dog be set loose. Polanski nonetheless instructed the handlers to release three dogs, causing the stuntman to cower in terror and scream at him to call them off.
In contrast, Joel Coen was uninterested in recreating a realistic, sheep-smitten Highland landscape, opting instead to shoot his version entirely on a Hollywood soundstage in order to instil the proceedings with a sense of suffocating claustrophobia. The outside of the castle is never shown and there is not a single exterior shot, save for an element of the last shot in the film. Instead, production designer Stefan Dechant created highly stylised sets and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel employed stark lighting and distorted perspectives that evoke German Expressionism and the film noir world of Hollywood in the 1940s. According to Delbonnel, almost all of the costumes and sets were black-and-white, except for a couple of dresses worn by McDormand. He also had shadows painted directly onto the sets to provide an otherworldly look entirely “untethered from reality.” Although the whole film was shot in grayscale, the colour temperature varies throughout the movie, depending on the scene. It was shot in a nearly square format, similar to the Academy aspect ratio favoured by Welles and Kurosawa, with the complex tonal patterns from complete blackouts to blinding whites subtly mirroring the shades of meaning in Shakespeare’s text.
In an interview for The Wrap, Decant pointed out that Coen never wanted to lose track of the fact that the text was created for a theatrical experience – “We were using Shakespeare’s text to understand the psychology of what was going on and, at the same time, abstract the environment … We also talked about the line in the play, “I have not seen a day so fair and foul.” The days and night are not much different in this world, they would kind of bleed into each other. That led us to think about the film’s the point of view. Like when you see ravens in the sky in the opening shot, you’re not sure if you’re looking up or down at them … Joel wanted the audience to be confused about what point of view they had. That’s part of the play … It’s a murky environment and we wanted the imagery to remain pretty clouded.”
There are also several scenes with staircases in the castle where it is unclear whether they are running up or down, like an MC Escher print. Dechant said, “One of the artists we looked at was a turn of the century set designer named Edward Gordon Craig. He made very abstract stage settings, with cubes and long folding horizontal screens. One of his designs is actually called ‘The Steps.’ We looked at a lot of his sketches [as well as] some photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. One of them is called La Casa Barragan and it just shows two walls intersecting and a square tower behind it, slightly out of focus and in black-and-white. That became one of our touchstone images.”
While Kurosawa showed the trees moving through the fog, Coen felt that showing the whole of Birman Wood on the move had never been captured successfully on film. When Macbeth flings the enormous castle windows open, a whirlwind bursts blowing with it an avalanche of leaves, a uniquely cinematic way of illustrating how the wood literally comes to Dunsinane and thus fulfilling one of the witches’ most enigmatic prophecies.
The words ‘knock’ and ‘knocking’ occur nineteen times in his play and Craig Burkey’s sound design employs the insistent rapping on doors to greatest effect after MacBeth puts a finger to his lips as Duncan awakes and slides a stiletto into his jugular. Thomas de Quincey considered the recurrence of this motif at such a pivotal moment as indicating “the human flesh has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that has suspended them.”
Polanski cast actors who were in their twenties in the lead roles, with co-screenwriter Tynan supporting his decision, commenting that you can’t “have Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed by sixty year-olds. It’s too late for them to be ambitious.” Coen clearly disagreed, employing “the Yale and Juilliard mafia” (as Washington put it) to assemble a superb cast with extensive theatrical training. Coen required his actors to read different roles for each read-through and the company rehearsed for an unusual three and half weeks, so they knew not only their own roles, but the entire play backwards. Washington and McDormand (who had been playing Lady Macbeth since high school) are both in their sixties, yet their “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on th’ other” remains undiminished. (Even MacDormand, however, cannot match the thrill of seeing the young Helen Mirren live on stage deliver the lines “Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” while clutching at her crotch).
When Washington’s swarthy King looks directly at McDormand and asks “Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make love’s known?”, she gives him first a questioning, then a devastating look that suggests, “We agreed on a plan and now you’re going off-script. Get a grip!”. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro (many of whose ingenious insights are abridged in this review) observed astutely that, “What Coen and his stars manage so deftly here is locating an otherwise undefined moment in the play when the Macbeths, until now of one mind, begin their inexorable drift apart. As the cocreator of Blood Simple well knows, plans go awry and relationships unravel once blood is spilled.”
Nor is it an accident that Coen extended his black-and-white template to encompass the casting, with Washington and McDormand providing another opposing polarity in an unsettling period when the murder of George Floyd had recently sparked rioting and nationwide protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. He also cast black actors Corey Hawkins and Moses Ingram as the Macduffs, telling an audience at the NY Film Festival premiere that not only “is there diversity in the casting, but there’s also diversity in the dialect,” with Irish brogues mixing freely among a wide range of British and American accents. Such colour-blind casting adds extra significance to the moment when Macbeth, frustrated at being passed over by Duncan, mutters to himself, “Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
While Welles and Polanski opted to employ voice-over soliloquies, Coen’s actors recite them aloud, usually while in motion. McDormand reads Macbeth’s later in which he shares the witches’ prophecy that he shall be king while pacing down a long corridor, which is reciprocated by Washington, who asks “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” as he grimly strides to Duncan’s bedroom. Speeches that in the stature part of group scenes assume the quality of soliloquies spoken directly to the camera, inviting the audience to focus on the words and the speaker’s degree of sincerity. Coen is also attentive to significant gestures, such as McDormand pulling out a tuft of hair that comes away in her hand to reveal with a single subtle image both the mental and physical toll she is under.
The witches have always proved to be a directorial challenge – how to make them appear genuinely maleficent without verging on the ridiculous. The supernatural elements must be credible if Macbeth is considered as a fatal Aristotelian tragedy, but it is hard to make them believable if its narrative arc is attributed to human agency. They dominated Welles’ film from beginning to end, while Polanski played their role down, acknowledging their demonic aspect, but firmly locating the source of the tragedy in human arrogance before their inevitable fall. Coen cannily constructs a more ambiguous angle, casting the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter as all three witches. In the opening scene, she contorts herself into the shape of a black bird, cackling away like the omnipresent crows or ravens circling above who are clearly her familiars. Coen is more interested in how humans are responsible for their own fates and implies that the supernatural elements or the play, from the dagger that haunts Macbeth to his visions of Banquo’s ghost, are either the projection of a perfervid imagination or the result of drug-induced hallucinations.
Hunter, who was cast as the Fool in a 2010 RSC production of King Lear, also plays the bearded Old Man in a manner that evokes Lear on his blasted heath. The audience is left to wonder whether this another shape-changing transfiguration or if she is simply doubling the part. After Duncan’s murder, Ross visits the Old Man’s hut where Hunter delivers lines that underscore life’s pain and tribulation are taken from the Fool’s ditty in King Lear, which was written immediately before Macbeth. Robert Armin, the actor who first spoke the lines in King Lear, had himself recycled them from another Shakespearean fool – Feste in Twelfth Night. As Shapiro notes, whether the lines are delivered by a witch, a destitute old man, or a fool, “the message is the same and familiar to admirers of the Coen brothers’ films – ‘Life is dark. Get used to it’.”
Just as we hear the multiplied ‘nevers’ of old Lear upon the rack and observe Macbeth’s death at the hands of Macduff, we feel, as Aristotle told us, something like relief, a cathartic slackening of the importunities of pity and the tension of terror, a space perhaps for the flooding in of clear light. But Shakespeare also managed to include the different pain of grief in the resolution of his tragedies. The worst suffering in King Lear comes at the end, the accident after the resolution, the unacceptable. It is possible, critics have argued, that Lear dies in the illusion that Cordelia has returned (“Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there”), that his heart, like Gloucester’s, bursts smilingly in the illusion of return.
Hamlet also contains grief in its tragedy. His sluggish, aimless, protracted, and inactive suffering could as easily be ascribed to the workings of grief as to the more usual (and not incompatible) unacknowledged fear and desire for the Mother. Hamlet only really comes to life in a startling way when he enters the world of death. It is not without reason that nineteenth-century portraits of actors always depicted him clutching Yorick’s skull, on the edge of the grave into which he jumps and from which manages to re-emerge with a new identity – “This is I, Hamlet the Dane!” Hamlet finally declares himself king. The primitive identity he lost and found was inseparable from that office or role. The best grasp of Hamlet’s experience still begins with the fact that his father was a king and he had to be one, too. And all this with less than an act to go …
Shakespeare pulls a similar bait-and-0switch at the end of Macbeth with the character of Ross, one of several unremarkable characters who drift through the play and appears in eleven scenes, mostly as a device either to ask for news or share it with the audience. The idea of expanding his role can be traced back to MR Libby, a Canadian schoolteacher who published Some notes on Macbeth in 1893. He argued that Ross was “an ambitious intriguer, a man of some ambition but no moral worth, a coward, a spy,” and asserted with little evidence that he was the unnamed Third Murderer whom Macbeth instructed to ambush Banquo and his son Fleance. Polanski followed this line of dubious reasoning to justify the invention of a new ending and Coen is no exception, stating that he wanted to see if the idea “could be pressed further.”
Like Polanski, Coen cast Ross as the Third Murderer, but rather than getting rid of Fleance, he spares the boy’s life, not out of any sense of beneficent mercy, but simply to hedge his bets. Alex Hassle plays Ross as an inscrutable manipulator who visits Lady Macbeth just before she, her children, and their entire household are massacred. When he glances out of the window and sees the assassins approaching on horseback, he excuses himself with the lines, “Cruel are the times, when we are traitors, And do not know ourselves.” His sense of self-preservation contrasts sharply with her servant who, in another scene invented by Coen, overhears Macbeth’s plans and rushes to warn her, but is unable to prevent her murder. For Coen, only the treacherous and morally unprincipled of this world manage to survive and thrive.
While the witches prophesy that Banquo will be father to long line of kings, the play ends with Duncan’s eldest son Malcolm succeeding to the throne. Coen concludes his movie with Ross holding Macbeth’s severed head in one hand and his crown in the other, which he passes to Malcolm, saying, “Hail, King of Scotland.” He could well have ended it there (as did Shakespeare), but Coen has one last job left for Ross, who returns to the Old Man’s hovel where Fleance is sequestered and pulls him onto his horse. They are last seen riding towards the cameras before they disappear in a dip in the road. The way the scene is shot, we expect to see them reappear as the road rises, but before the film’s final and abrupt blackout, the audience is unexpectedly confronted once again by a ‘murder’ of maddened crows, filling the screen with their barbaric shrieks. As Macbeth observed earlier in the play, ”Light thickens and the crow makes Wing to th’ rooky wood.”
In an obvious hat-tip to Hitchcock, Coen’s cacophonous crows suggest that Malcolm’s imminent coronation will settle nothing. As in the Coen brothers’ entire cinematic universe, much more violence, horror, and pointlessly destructive conflict is yet to come. This carefully constructed film not only combines a very contemporary re-imagining of Shakespeare’s drama with a brilliant homage to film noir, but is also a repudiation of the dangerous nostalgic fantasy that things were better ‘once upon a time’ and will be so again at some point in future. As Shapiro concludes, this is indeed “a fitting message for our perilous and equivocating time.”
Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url