Interestingly, Coen lets the two do the cheeky “If we should fail? We fail!” line-reading, which isn’t strictly accurate but has an irresistibly modern sound. McDormand is more specific and precise in her delivery. He sees the floating dagger and the ghost of Banquo but we don’t. Washington takes the big speeches at an even pace, sometimes rolling over shades of meaning. Kathryn Hunter is the witch apparition who presents herself disturbingly to Macbeth with two reflections in a pool of water and Stephen Root is the hungover porter making gags about erectile dysfunction, hinting at the reason behind male rage. Bertie Carvel is Banquo Harry Melling is young Malcolm. Corey Hawkins is a fierce Macduff, lacerated with self-hate for abandoning his wife and children to the tyrant.
#Pellucid reviews series#
And then, angry and paranoid, he escalates his fanatical rule with a series of pre-emptive murders while McDormand’s Lady Macbeth retreats into horror and despair.īrendan Gleeson has a cameo as the King, and Coen imagines a gruesome close-up murder scene for him. Washington’s signature rolling swagger looks careworn, but his Macbeth submits to both the duplicitous supernatural promises and his wife’s demands like a soldier taking his orders. Macbeth is Denzel Washington, who portrays the Thane as already exhausted by his great triumph in the King’s cause at the very beginning, a moment at which he might be expected to look forward to retirement. This Macbeth is in many ways similar to the Coen brothers’ black-and-white crime thriller The Man Who Wasn’t There, which had Frances McDormand as the barber’s wife, brooding and suffering, a lot like Lady Macbeth.Īnd McDormand is of course Lady Macbeth here, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan.
Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is pellucid and austere and Stefan Dechant’s magnificent production design imagines Macbeth’s castle as a giant, rectilinear modernist house, with chilly courtyards bounded by vast vertiginous walls and corridors that extend like some sort of open-plan death row.ĭisturbingly, there is no sense of what it looks like from the outside: we are always within its Escher-like weirdness, with battlements that can extend infinitely into the fog. Coen’s visual contrivances have something of Kurosawa and Welles, with some German expressionist shadows, and this looks like a crime drama from the 30s or 40s – but entirely naturally rather than as an interpretative affectation.
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