Joel Coen’s Stunt Macbeth

The tragedy of Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth is that it is not a comedy. When Coen, usually in collaboration with his brother Ethan, explored crime, deception, corruption, death, and fate, the perspective was angled toward satire, paradox, and dark humor in Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men. Working alone this time, Joel Coen plays it humorlessly straight.

But he doesn’t play it safe. Coen fashions a “color-blind” adaptation starring Denzel Washington in the lead as the Thane of Glamis, plus a host of other black performers in prominent roles mixed with assorted white performers (including Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth). These unnecessary “risks” get in the way of the film’s potential success as a modern interpretation of Shakespeare.

Oscar-ready, Coen fails to speak to the moment as he did with the self-conscious angst of The Big Lebowski, The Ladykillers, and A Serious Man — perhaps the funniest films of the Coen legacy. The need for Shakespeare’s relevant parallels to the modern condition (“Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly / Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly”) was evident in how the Coens satirized characters and situations of the day. That’s how the sophomoric Coen wit made The Ladykillers a more brilliant comedy on race traditions vs. venal liberalism than Get Out. (Only now, Coen’s own ethnicity prevents PC media from recognizing that all-American accomplishment.)

This mixed-race Macbeth reduces Shakespeare’s political and psychological revelations to the level of a TV Regency romance series like Bridgerton. Updating what in the early days of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival used to be called “nontraditional casting” turns the play into a woke novelty. Coen even casts a sexually ambiguous contortionist to play all three CGI witches who give Macbeth his fateful prophecy, but that actress, Kathryn Hunter, was used to greater androgynous effect as Puck in Julie Taymor’s multileveled film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This distracts us from interpreting the text for modern parallels and directs us instead to be satisfied with Millennial trendiness.

The fanciful black-and-white visual scheme of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and the light/dark gothic production design by Stefan Dechant and Jason Clark just seem an elaborate imitation of the psychological expressionism in Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet and Orson Welles’s low-budget but powerfully visionary Macbeth. This doesn’t create a parallel universe of social consciousness.

Putting a black actor in a black-and-white Macbeth is insipid. We’re primed to react on cue when black Macduff (Corey Hawkins) is victimized by Macbeth’s political ambition and when Macduff’s wife and child are lynched. It’s not tragedy, just an obscene political frisson. Coen doesn’t carry this vision through to consider skullduggery of contemporary race politics or king figures like Obama.

Washington and McDormand are typically ornery — stomping through the monarch madness the same way they always play tough cops, criminals, and bitchy Karens but this time using Elizabethan slang. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard got to a spiritual essence in Justin Kurzel’s hallucinatory full-color 2015 Macbeth. Here, Coen dismisses the obvious suggestion — what critic Harlan Jacobson insightfully called “a grievance nursed in his skin” and “a rationalization supplied by his white wife” — which merely plays us cheap.

The Tragedy of Macbeth finished production shortly before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its sweeping industry-changing rules on race and representation in casting and production, but it fits right in with the new anti-art orthodoxy. It’s as if Coen — and how many others? — were afraid to truly touch our imagination. Mainstream Hollywood still can’t satirize Obama, so Joel Coen goes against his own artistic instincts.