The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021): A Movie Review
Good Shakespeare adaptions tend to fall into two camps.
They can be theatrically faithful treatments that put the 17th-century plays on screen with reverence, using cinema to add elements not possible on the stage (Macbeth (1948), Orson Welles). Or, they can boldly rework the source material, modernising the language and dropping the story into a new context (My Own Private Idaho (1999), Gus Van Sant).
For my money, the second approach tends to make more interesting movies. It can lead to results that capture the life and death, everyman but bigger-than-the-universe dramatic spirit that emotionally powers the Bard’s plays, while making the stories more accessible and relatable. The reinventions have more cinematic possibility, and more potential to engage modern audiences in big ways.
Joel Coen’s movie takes the first approach. It is a theatrically faithful presentation of the play, with dialogue that follows Shakespeare closely. That sets it apart from most cinema: it is a cinematic presentation of theatre.
This can make it tricky to understand every line in real-time. You don’t need to parse every word, though: the movie is constructed visually to tell the story without decoding every rhyming couplet. And the language is a bit simplified and cleaned up for modern ears (though not much).
