the review of Joel Coens film with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand – D1SoftballNews.com

Macbeth, a new film adaptation of the tragedy of William Shakespeare after those of Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, is the first film made by Joel Coen alone, without the collaboration of his brother Ethan. It is therefore the feature film that marks the unprecedented separation between one of the most decisive, brilliant and influential couples of contemporary American cinema: the definitive split has not yet been formalized, but Ethan has in the meantime decided to devote himself to something else and an indirect confirmation has also come from their composer and collaborator habitual, Carter Burwell.

The transposition, produced by the fertile production house A24, standard-bearer for the new territories of genre cinema, and with protagonists Denzel Washington And Frances McDormand in the role of Lord and Lady Macbeth, he re-reads the raw and bloody soul of the work of Bard, not a little freezing instincts and impulses and letting the sound of the cynical and anti-humanist detachment typical of the works of the Coens (a strong stretch of discontinuity, undoubtedly, compared to the previous versions for the cinema of Macbeth).

The expressive hold is very remarkable and dazzling, with the complicity of black and white bruise photographed by the always excellent Bruno Delbonnel in 4: 3 format, while glacial elegance, although constantly on the edge of the patinated, fortunately never disperses the black heart, archetypal and universal, of the events of a man convinced by a trio of witches to be next king of Scotland, flanked and overwhelmed by a ambitious and furious wife.

The terrible and tyrannical spiral of violence thus translates into one dissertation on purely visual power, with a punctually unhealthy pallor, pushed towards abstraction by a geometric and spectral rationalism of forms. At the base of the operation there is after all an idea of macabre and sardonic thriller, in full Coen style, with a provocative and destabilizing approach to the psychoanalytic impulses of the classic text.

In fact, the protagonists face their own personal challenge for absolute power as they watch their mutual hopes inexorably unravel under the weight of a collapsing world and emotional landscape. The result is human portraits torn and deep contrasts, which are not only applied in the aesthetic packaging, indebted to so much German expressionist cinema and the Danish master Carl Theodore Dreyer, but also in the reflection on the case and fate of individuals crushed by a blind and unfathomable fate, ready to blow the bank of any reasoning.

All themes very dear, in the past, to Coenian poetics, with respect to which Macbeth is, in filigree, a sort of cold return to origins, of an ideal prodrome, of a literary rib noble in which all the characters are aware of their own physical and inner deterioration, as well as bearers of an exhaustion that passes from introspection as much as from framing.

Photo: A24, IAC Films

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the review of Joel Coens film with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand - D1SoftballNews.com