The 2021 Macbeth is uninspired

Is it just me or have movies been somewhat backwards-looking recently? Take the 2021 "Macbeth", which is an era-appropriate adaptation of The Scottish Play, which has visual similarities to 2021's "The Green Knight" and 2022's upcoming "The Northman". Then there have been films that have looked to the 60s, such as Tarentino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", "Last Night in Soho" and "Licorice Pizza". Not to mention the endless reboots or adaptations of existing IPs. I suppose it's a kind of social commentary: people hate modern times so much that they've begun looking backwards. (I think we live in the most interesting of times, ironically!)

I wouldn't complain honestly if people added something new through this milieu. I think people are satisfied with having their black/feminist/homosexual retrospective on those times, but they're not adding more to our current understanding of things, just looking through them with a new lens. Yes, women existed back then. Yes, there are many female voices who did not have a chance to speak. But it's happened; let's build towards something else.

Which is pretty much my review of Joel Coen's "Macbeth" - nothing new is added by this movie. Denzel Washington is good, not so good when he is mumbling. Everyone outside of the main cast was great, surprisingly, with emotional performances from Macduff and Lady Macduff. Frances McDormand... and I hesitate to say it... was awful.

Her acting was not awful, to clarify first. I think she was miscast or misdirected. Yes, Lady Macbeth is a bad guy. Or... maybe she isn't. Why does she have to be a bad guy? Her lines indicate she is, but couldn't the film have constructed a character beyond those lines? McDormand just delivers the lines, without adding anything to the text. Yes, she was villainous. Yes, she was crazy. We get it; there have been so many Shakespeare adaptations we are dying for something new.

Somewhere in the middle of the film I wondered why McDormand didn't fit, and it hit me: this is a bit mean to say, but she looks too much like Lady Macbeth. She looks like a caricature of that character. If you want a transgressive Lady Macbeth, who has more dimensions, who can be sad, can be happy, can be angry and miserable, you want someone who looks... well, nicer. I thought Kathy Bates would have been perfect, capital-P perfect for the role. I thought you could have expanded on Lady Macbeth, the socialite, the ladder-climber, the loving wife with bloody ambitions in a bloody world. Bates is a hell of an actor too - she can encompass the murderous side of her as well as the smiling side.

That is the general theme I get from "Macbeth", really: the duality of human beings and how we flip-flop from one feeling to the other. A mediocre interpretation of the play does not address the sudden shift in Macbeth's character, from servant to power-hungry tyrant. A great interpretation, a visionary eye, needs to address that: by emphasizing the irresistible mechanics of fate or his descent into lunacy. Denzel flip-flops between either and the film suffers as a result of that. In the beginning he is a humble servant of the king, who is not in love with violence; he mumbles, he hides, he is argued by his wife, but leaves the audience no path toward what he personally gains from the affair.

I would have preferred the latter approach: descent into lunacy. There are three reasons why he chooses to kill Duncan: his wife's entreaties, his modest nature and his struggle with the concept of fate. His wife represents the good things in life (which is why you need a kind-looking woman who can change faces at an instant, like Kathy Bates) - he follows her because he genuinely loves her, and he is tantalized by their life as king and queen. He is amazed by the king's great nature and, as a humble man, desires to be as great as the king, or at least held in the same esteem. The last reason is his undoing: as a man who cannot choose, much like Hamlet, he does not have strength to dismiss the superstitious tales of the witches, as Banquo does.

Once he kills Duncan, his character changes unalterably - Denzel has a good scene with the "paint the green seas incarnadine" speech, but it could have been better. The act of murder should not simply enrage him, it deforms him; he should not have thrown the dish of water, but a kind of self-mutiliation should have occurred, as he wrestles with the immensity of his deed. This then leads him to his anxiety, yelling at the murderers for being unmanly and raging at the ghost of Banquo, and finally arriving to sheer lunacy, as he begins ranting, raving through palatial halls about his enemies, unable to sleep a single night.

Kathryn Hunter does a darn good job as the witches, but again she feels misdirected - the witches feel sinister, when, in Shakespeare's time, they were probably a little silly. What makes the witches memorable in the play is that there's uncertainty as to why Macbeth even listens to them at all. They are seducers, primarily, and not true forces of nature - Macbeth is a force of nature, the witches are simply the storytellers. Again, Hunter did a good job, but the job she did feels disconnected from the broader story about politics.

The film overall, for these reasons, feels a bit pretentious - Coen had ideas for individual scenes, but there is no unifying idea around the whole film. The frequent setting of wastes, foggy earth and barren castles has no meaning in the film, and seems only to preserve the "theater" origins of the story, which is a bit silly, since theater can be quite ornate. It can't really be said the setting reflects Macbeth's descending sanity; if so, it only correlates vaguely. If the scenes have any power in them, they come primarily from the original text, less than the direction of the actors - most of the scenes are pretty much what you would imagine the scene would look like in your head.

This is not a fair comparison: the film just made me miss Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet". It is a great film, rather than a great adaptation merely of something; the actors give life to these characters bound to paper, and yet at the same time they are performing something greater than them. It's that ability to feel real, with proper sets, with the actors showing due emotion - sometimes over-the-top, but how should one act under existential crisis? - conserving place and time, while also delivering lines feeling unreal, that are downright poetic, that belong to a completely different rhetorical style to our own, that balancing act is quite impressive.

What does the 2021 Macbeth have to show for itself? It has plenty of mood, which is what draws people to Future's songs, and is what makes his songs boring; it makes the characters look somewhat like superheroes, with the witches turning into crows and Macbeth fighting a swordsman unarmed. In this particular way this film is thoroughly modern - it's sure to please today's crowds by tension alone, but it has nothing to show for it. Tension, or insinuation, is really not something that should be bought with ominous music and precise shooting, especially for characters who have not been established yet. You can really only buy tension after establishing the characters first, or in subsequent viewings of the film, when the audience knows what the fate of its characters are - but done in a way where the audience cannot be thinking of previous viewings.

A king in borrowed robes indeed.