January 13, 2022 17Shakespeare Noir
James ShapiroThe Tragedy of Macbeth
a film written and
directed by Joel CoenThose who have long followed the Coen
brothers and their cinematic universe
of criminals, nihilists, and overreach-
ers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy
of Macbeth a long- deferred reckoning
with Shakespeare, who has been there
before them. We don’t typically think
of Shakespeare as a writer interested in
crime stories, but he surely was, from
the earliest play in which he likely had
a hand, Arden of Faversham—a true
crime story in which a wife conspires
with her lover to kill her husband—
through Hamlet and Macbeth. There
are moments in The Tragedy of Mac-
beth when Shakespeare and the Coens
feel in perfect alignment, such as the
scene in which Macbeth suborns two
nameless murderers to kill Banquo.
The hapless pair see the pointlessness
and peril of saying no to him, and in
their anxious glances and resignation
seem to have walked onto the set di-
rectly from an earlier Coen brothers
film.
A half- century has passed since
Roman Polanski’s Technicolor and
blood- splattered Macbeth was released
in 1971. It was the third major post-
war adaptation of the play; the first, a
black- and- white version directed by
Orson Welles, came out in 1948, and
the second, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne
of Blood, also in black and white, in1957.^1 These postwar Macbeths were
marked by the horrors of the 1930s and
1940s, much as Shakespeare’s origi-
nal had been shaped by recent events:
it was written in the aftermath of the
Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt in
November 1605 to assassinate En-
gland’s Scottish monarch, King James
I. Welles’s Macbeth, made as the House
Un- American Activities Committee
was persecuting the Hollywood Ten,
feels like a companion piece to his 1937
antifascist stage version of Julius Cae-
sar, which he subtitled “The Death of
a Dictator.” As one critic has noted, in
Welles’s Macbeth “Shakespeare’s poles
of monarchy and tyranny have been re-
placed by a right- wing world view which
can admit nothing other than dictator-
ship or disorder.”^2 Kurosawa’s adapta-
tion, conceived while Japan was still
occupied by American soldiers and set
in the strife- ridden medieval Sengoku
period, explores the corrosive effect of
imperial ambitions and militarism.
The politics of Polanski’s Macbeth
are especially fraught. The scene in
which Lady Macduff and her children
are terrorized and then murdered by
killers sent by Macbeth owes much
to what Polanski had experienced as
a child in the Kraków ghetto. But the
immediate background for the mak-
ing of the film was the recent and bar-
baric murder of his wife Sharon Tate
and their friends by the Manson gang
in August 1969. When his collaborator
Kenneth Tynan asked Polanski whether
a scene in the film wasn’t too bloody, he
replied, “You didn’t see my house last
summer. I know about bleeding.”^3All of these directors were intent on
locating their story in a particular time
and place. Polanski insisted on shoot-
ing on location in Britain, in natural
light. Kurosawa built the set of the
castle exteriors, at great expense and
labor, in the stunted landscape and fog-
bound atmosphere of Mount Fuji. Both
Polanski and Kurosawa cared deeply
about re creating a specific, medieval
world. (Polanski made his Lady Mac-
beth deliver her sleepwalking scene in
the nude—since, he claimed, nobody
wore nightclothes back then—earning
the film an X rating that hurt it at the
box office.)
At much the same time that Polan-
ski’s film was screening in movie the-
aters, a fourteen- year- old in western
Pennsylvania was acting for the first
time, in a high school production in
which she performed Lady Macbeth’s
sleepwalking scene. A half- century
later, Frances McDormand has re-
prised the role in Coen’s film. Joel and
his younger brother, Ethan, have been
making movies together since their
childhood in Minnesota in the 1960s.
Their first commercial film, Blood Sim-
ple, was released in 1984, the same year
Joel married McDormand, who starred
in it and appeared in seven more of the
eighteen films the brothers went on to
make together. The Tragedy of Mac-
beth is the first film that Joel has made
without Ethan. According to their
longtime collaborator the composer
Carter Burwell, the reason for the solo
effort is straightforward: “Ethan didn’t
want to make movies anymore.”
Joel Coen, who shot the film on
a soundstage in Los Angeles rather
than on location, is not interested in
re creating realistic landscapes or in
situating his film in a specific past. Wenever even glimpse the exterior of the
Macbeths’ castle. In this sense, his film
is closer to the empty stage on which
Shakespeare’s play was first performed,
in 1606—the soundstage more of an
inventive space than a literal one. If
anything, the film lands instead on the
per iod that really fuels Coen’s imagina-
tion: the cinematic world of the 1940s.
With its stylized sets, stark lighting,
and playful use of perspective (are we
looking up or down at circling birds?),
his Tragedy of Macbeth signals its in-
debtedness to German Expressionism
and film noir. It is shot in black and
white in a nearly square format, similar
to the “academy ratio” used by Welles
and Kurosawa and familiar to fans of
midcentury cinema. The richness of
the film is stunning, its complex tones,
from blackout to blinding white, mir-
roring the shades of meaning in what
Shakespeare wrote.
The haunting soundscape, com-
posed by Burwell, is of a piece with its
visual effects—not just the music but
also the sounds of echoing footsteps,
dripping (water and blood), and, espe-
cially, knocking. The words “knock”
or “knocking” occur nineteen times
in Macbeth, and that sound effect is
nowhere more unnerving than the
knocking at the gate heard after Mac-
beth kills Duncan. (Denzel Washing-
ton, as Macbeth, handles the murder
scene chillingly, putting a finger to his
lips as a trusting Duncan awakes, then
silently sliding a dagger into his jugu-
lar.) At this pivotal moment in the play,
as Thomas De Quincey explained two
centuries ago, in the repeated knockingthe human 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 sen-
sible of the awful parenthesis that
had suspended them.The Coens’ recurrent interest is that
staple of film noir, “an uneasiness with
male weakness and female perfidy, as
well as a skepticism about the prom-
ise of the... dream of psychic whole-
ness, fulfilled desire, and attainableaffluence”^4 —words no less applicable
to Shakespeare’s tragedy. They came
to mind in the film’s rendering of the
scene in which Lady Macbeth must
persuade her wavering husband to go
through with the murder of Duncan,
his king, kinsman, and guest. When
Macbeth, still unsure whether to act,
asks his wife, “If we should fail?” she
replies, “We fail?”
Every actor who has played Lady
Macbeth has effectively summed up
her ambition and her marriage in how
she says these two words. That question
mark derives from the 1623 First Folio
text of the play, the earliest printed ver-
sion, at a time when it could also be used
to signal exclamation. In 1709 Nicholas
Rowe changed the line to “We fail!”
and subsequent editors have offered a
more neutral “We fail.” McDormand
opted for an adamant so- what: “We
fail.” We die trying. This is our last shot
at realizing our long- frustrated hopes.
Polanski, who was still in his thirties
when he filmed Macbeth, cast actors in
their twenties in the leads, and Tynan
supported the decision: you can’t “have
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed
by 60 year- olds,” Tynan said. “It’s too
late for them to be ambitious.” Coen
thinks otherwise, and McDormand
and Washington, who are both in their
sixties, bear him out: their ambition
still burns fiercely.
Coen’s attentiveness to Shake-
speare’s plotting has me rethinking my
reading of the play. Take, for example,
the scene in which Macbeth kills the
two grooms who had been guarding
the sleeping Duncan, which takes place
offstage in Shakespeare’s original. All
we know is that Lady Macbeth has
drugged them, then returned after the
murder and smeared their faces with
Duncan’s blood. When the assassina-
tion is discovered, Macbeth explains to
those gathered that he has gone back
and killed “the murderers, / Steeped
in the colors of their trade, their dag-
gers / Unmannerly breeched with gore.”
“Who could refrain,” he adds, “That
had a heart to love, and in that heart /
Courage to make’s love known?”
I had always taken this action as pre-
cautionary, part of the Macbeths’ plan.
But as Washington recites the last lines,
looking directly at McDormand, she
shoots him first a quizzical and then a
devastating look that says, “I told you
the plan, you agreed, and now you are
going off- script; get a grip.” What Coen
and his stars manage so deftly here is
locating an otherwise undefined mo-
ment in the play when the Macbeths,
until now of one mind, begin their in-
exorable drift apart. As the cocreator
of Blood Simple well knows, plans go
awry and relationships unravel once
blood is spilled.The Tragedy of Macbeth was made
during a period of national turmoil.
Filming began in February 2020 but
was halted the following month because
of the pandemic. It was completed in
July, after the murder of George Floyd,
as Black Lives Matter protests sweptJoel Coen with Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth on the set of
The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021Alison Cohen Rosa(^1) There was nearly a fourth: Laurence
Olivier, hoping to build upon his string
of influential Shakespeare films—
Henry V in 1944, Hamlet in 1948, and
Richard III in 1955—wrote a screen-
play of Macbeth but failed to secure
funding for it.
(^2) E. Pearlman, “Macbeth on Film: Pol-
itics,” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 39
(1987), p. 68.
(^3) John Parker, Polanski (London: Vic-
tor Gollancz, 1993), p. 178.
(^4) R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan
Coen (University of Illinois Press,
2004), pp. 48–49.
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