![]() Adapted from the play by Coen himself, with Denzel Washington as our titular antihero and Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth, this is very much a Coen movie in its worldview. But you can’t fault it for lacking a genuine sense of interpretation, the type of deviation from the original material that works to illuminate ideas that had been there from the start. Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth - which is now streaming on Apple TV+ after a brief theatrical run - is both satisfying and limited, spot-on and slightly off, for myriad reasons. But the mere chance… That it proves so titillating for so many is part of what Macbeth exposes about everyone involved - and everyone watching. Proximity to power creates hunger in even those who’ll only briefly have any chance to wield it. What resounds, in every great version of this play, is a sense that culpability is hardly the flaw of Macbeth’s alone. ![]() However it happens, Macbeth is often enough inclined toward his worst impulses by someone egging him on out of their own self-interest. We could be talking about Lady Macbeth (whose gradual disillusionment with her husband’s schemes is palpable for Welles, whereas Kurosawa, Polanski, and many others paint her in more starkly manipulative terms) or some other player. The most memorable film adaptations over the years attest to this, from Orson Welles’ low-budget, noirish version in 1948, to Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood (in which the three witches are whittled down to one evil spirit who, like mythology’s Three Fates, work a loom while delivering Macbeth the news of his imminent power), to Roman Polanski’s notorious 1971 adaptation, controversial in its time for its bloody rendering of things Shakespeare left to the imagination. ![]() This wouldn’t require some radical revision of the original play, which endures in part because the tangle of influences on Macbeth’s desires can lean in multiple directions, depending how we want to spin it. This powerful intervener is far more hands-on, nudging the action along this way and that, getting their hands dirty in the cloak and dagger of it all and - in line with those witches, pending how you interpret them - shaping the fate of the play’s tragic hero with an almost godlike knowingness and an equally potent silence. What if there were a fourth witch? Not in the literal sense, but rather a meddler, a planter of devious seeds. Which, in Macbeth’s case, is not for much longer. ![]() The kind of hunger that makes you kill your friends, slaughter children, wreak havoc in pursuit of what will only last as long as you’re alive. That’s the story of the “Scottish Play” as we know it: foul, foggy, and - if karma is real - damningly fair to its titular king-to-be, who takes the germ of an idea proposed by that trio of “weird sisters,” the idea that he will become king, and allows it to metastasize into a consuming, destructive hunger for power. There are only three actual witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. ![]()
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