18 The New York Reviewthe country and Donald Trump and
Joe Biden fought for the presidency.
Coen drew on actors with extensive
training in the theater (“the Yale and
Juilliard mafia,” as Washington put it).
The preparation for the film owed more
to stage practices than to how movies
are usually made. The company had a
chance to rehearse for three and a half
weeks, unusual for a film, and during
table work Coen asked his actors to
read a different role each time. The
cast knew the entire play, not just their
own parts. “Covid,” Coen said, “made
us into a company.”
No Black actor has previously ap-
peared in a commercial film of Mac-
beth. Coen chose Black actors for
several of the leading roles—Macbeth,
and also the Macduffs, played by Corey
Hawkins and Moses Ingram. Coen told
the audience at the New York Film
Festival, where it premiered, that not
only “is there diversity in the casting,
but also there’s diversity in the dialect,”
as Irish accents mix with British and a
wide range of American ones.
That’s true, but for a production with
an interracial couple as the leads, com-
pleted while the nation confronted such
deep divisions in the aftermath of the
Floyd murder, it seems almost at pains
to avoid the subject of race. I was left
confused by the film’s ostensibly color-
blind casting. If race doesn’t figure, and
casting is truly colorblind, why are the
Macduffs and their children all played
by Black actors? And if race does
matter, what might that say about the
personal and political challenges the
Macbeths face as a couple? Should we
read anything into Macbeth’s decision
to send a Black man to kill Macduff’sfamily? And are we meant to overlook
race when Washington’s Macbeth, frus-
trated at being passed over by Duncan,
mutters to himself, “Let not light see
my black and deep desires”? I don’t
think there are easy answers to these
questions, but that doesn’t mean that
a Shakespeare film can all but ignore
them, because audiences won’t.Coen shows far greater interest in
Shakespeare’s language than his cin-
ematic predecessors, and his accom-
plished cast speak Shakespeare’s verse
comfortably and naturally. While Welles
and Polanski opted for soliloquies to be
spoken in voice- over, Coen has his actors
recite them aloud, usually while in mo-
tion. McDormand reads aloud Macbeth’s
letter (in which he shares with her the
Witches’ prophesy that he shall be king)
while walking down a long corridor,
her action later matched by Washing-
ton, who recites “Is this a dagger which
I see before me” as he walks steadily
toward the sleeping Duncan’s chamber.
Speeches that in the theater are part
of group scenes take on the quality of
soliloquies here, spoken directly to the
camera. It’s a technique that invites us
to focus on the words, even as we study
facial features and, in a play rich in
equivocation, the speaker’s sincerity.
Silences matter in Shakespeare, ges-
tures too, and Coen is attentive to both.
McDormand, in a memorable scene in
which we see how much Lady Macbeth
has declined physically and mentally
after Duncan’s murder, pulls gently on
a tuft of her hair, which comes away
in her hand. McDormand refuses the
well- worn paths of playing Lady Mac-beth as manipulative, fundamentally
evil, or aligned with the Witches. Her
love for her husband is genuine, as is
her frustration with him. Hers is a de-
termined yet devoted Lady Macbeth.
The Witches have long been a direc-
torial challenge. If Macbeth is seen as a
tragedy of fate, the supernatural has to
be believable; but if the actions of the
play are attributable to human agency,
what’s the point of paying much atten-
tion to the Witches? They dominated
Welles’s film from beginning to end.
Polanski played down their role, ac-
knowledging the demonic but locating
the source of the tragedy in the main
characters themselves. Coen takes a
more ambiguous approach, casting a
single extraordinary actor, Kathryn
Hunter, as all three Witches, and in the
opening scene we witness her contort
herself into a bird—mimicking the cir-
cling crows or ravens with which the film
begins—leaving us dazzled by the per-
formance and curious about the extent
to which the Witches and the birds are
aligned. But there is never a question
here of fatedness: Coen is interested in
how humans are responsible for their
own downfalls, and the supernatural in
the play—from the dagger that haunts
Macbeth to his visions of Banquo’s
ghost and future royal line—is the pro-
jection of an overheated imagination or
a potion- induced hallucination.
Hunter plays another role in the film:
the Old Man, bearded, aged, looking
like King Lear on the heath. We are
left to wonder if this is another witch-
like transformation, or whether she is
simply doubling the part. After Dun-
can’s murder, Ross visits the Old Man’s
hovel, where Hunter speaks lines that
may give those steeped in Shakespeare
a jolt, for they are lifted from the ditty
spoken by the Fool in King Lear, writ-
ten immediately before Macbeth—
lines that underscore that life consists
of hardship and struggle:He that has and a little tiny wit—
With hey, ho, the wind and the
rain—
Must make content with his
fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.There’s a further twist, for the actor
who first spoke these lines in King Lear,
Robert A rmin, had recycled them from
an earlier Shakespeare play in which
he had recited a nearly identical re-
frain as a different fool, Feste, in the
closing lines of Twelfth Night. Hunter
played the Fool in a Royal Shakespeare
Company production of King Lear in
2010, and I wonder whether it was she
or Coen who was responsible for this
canny interpolation, in a film so aware
of antecedents, that beautifully sets up
the ending of the film. Whether spoken
by a witch or an impoverished old man
the message is the same, and familiar
to admirers of the Coen brothers’ films:
life is dark; get used to it.Shakespeare pulls a bait and switch at
the end of Macbeth. While the Witches
prophesy that Banquo shall be father to
a long line of kings, the play ends with
Duncan’s eldest son, Malcolm, succeed-
ing Macbeth as Scotland’s king. Film
directors in particular have made much
of this, inventing new endings. Coen’s
take turns on the character of Ross.
In the original text, Ross is one of
several unremarkable characters whodrift through the play; he appears in
eleven scenes, mostly asking for news
or sharing it. The idea of expanding his
role can be traced back to M. F. Libby,
a Canadian schoolmaster who in 1893
published Some New Notes on Mac-
beth, in which he argued, without much
evidence, that Ross was in fact “an am-
bitious intriguer, a man of some abil-
ity but no moral worth, a coward, spy,
and murderer.” Libby also claimed that
Ross was the unnamed Third Murderer
d ispatched by Macbeth to a mbush Ba n-
quo and his son Fleance.
Libby’s ideas circulated and found
traction among directors, including
Polanski. Coen has said that he wanted
to see if what Polanski had done with
Ross “could be pressed further.” Alex
Hassell plays an inscrutable Ross in
the new film and carries much of its
political weight: his Ross finds himself
in a treacherous world and maneuvers
accordingly. Like Polanski, Coen casts
Ross as the Third Murderer, but rather
than seeking to butcher Fleance, his
Ross spares the young boy’s life, not
out of kindness but to hedge his bets.
When Ross visits Lady Macduff just
before she and her children and house-
hold are massacred, he glances out
the window, sees killers on horseback
approach, and excuses himself, saying
with punishing self- knowledge, “Cruel
are the times, when we are traitors /
And do not know ourselves.”
Had he come there to warn her? To
be able to share with her husband (as he
soon does) details of the slaughter? His
self- preservation contrasts sharply with
the selflessness of Lady Macbeth’s ser-
vant, who, in a scene invented by Coen,
overhears Macbeth’s plans and rushes
to Lady Macduff’s castle to warn her
but is unable to prevent the murders
there, including, we suspect, her own.
Only the unprincipled Rosses of this
world manage to survive, and thrive.
The film comes to a close 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!” The film could have
ended there, as Shakespeare’s play
does, but Coen has one more task left
for Ross: he returns to the hovel of the
Old Man, where he has hidden young
Fleance, and we see him pull the future
ruler of Scotland onto his horse and ride
toward us, disappearing momentarily in
a dip in the road. In making what looks
and feels like a timeless film, Coen may
have wanted to sidestep our political
moment, but in the end he confronts it.
The way this scene is shot, we expect to
see Ross and Fleance reappear as the
road rises, but before they do, before the
final blackout, we are unexpectedly con-
fronted with a horrifying flock of black
birds—a “murder of crows”—startled
no doubt by Ross’s galloping horse. The
maddened, shrieking birds fill the screen
in a nod to the terrifying flock in Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). “Light
thickens,” Macbeth had said, “and the
crow/Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.”
Coen’s birds signal that between
Malcolm’s coronation and Fleance’s—
and long after—there will be more vi-
olence, more horrors, more pointless
and destructive conflict. His film, which
could seem an exercise in nostalgia for
midcentury cinema, is also a repudia-
tion of a different kind of nostalgia:
the American fantasy that things were
once different and better, and will be
again—a fitting message for our peril-
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