Last night I watched Joel Coen and Frances McDormand‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (Apple, 12.25). For some reason I woke up at 4:30 this morning, and just as my head was clearing a friend texted to ask what I thought.
“Not half bad!,” I replied. “I found it striking, gripping, strict and to the point. The grim grip of horror that resides in the human heart. A literate, thinking person’s story of doom foretold. The austere approach was more captivating than expected, given the Venice turndown and the spotty word of mouth.
“It’s relatively short (105 minutes), so much so that it almost felt like Macbeth’s greatest hits (abridged). I loved the spooky sets and the dense fog and the circling hawks and definitely the performance by recent NYFCC award-winner Kathryn Hunter, who plays the three creepy witches. And I was very impressed with Alex Hassell’s highly disciplined performance as Ross. And I adored Bruno Delbonnel’s sharp and silvery cinematography.
“McDormand really nailed her eerie, obsessive, sharp-taloned Lady Macbeth — she was almost coming from the same place as Hunter. Now and then Denzel’s delivery of this or that passage was quite affecting; at other times (“Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased…pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?”) a bit under-nourishing. But he’s still The Great Denzel.
“I still vastly prefer the 1971 Polanski version but Coen and McDormand definitely found their own tone and approach. It’s a film that warrants respect.”