Film Freak Central

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

***½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Bertie Carvel, Brendan Gleeson
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw The Tragedy of Macbeth is a middle-aged lament of the childless, a haunted interpretation of Shakespeare that underscores my belief that the Coen Brothers--in this case, just Joel--are/is among our finest literary critics. Their O Brother, Where Art Thou? unpacks The Odyssey as a collection of regional tales and songs; their adaptations of No Country for Old Men and True Grit demonstrate a deep understanding of not merely the specific works being adapted, but Cormac McCarthy's and Charles Portis's entire bodies of work as well. The Big Lebowski, needless to say, is a brilliant and essential take on Chandler's The Big Sleep. That their planned adaptation of James Dickey's To the White Sea with Brad Pitt hasn't happened yet and doesn't look like it ever will is a genuine tragedy. (The relative failure of their Ladykillers remake suggests this skill may be limited to the transmutation between mediums.) For his solo debut, Joel Coen has taken a German Expressionistic approach, leaning heavily into long shadows and aestheticism that feels like mourning. The film falls somewhere between the mysticism of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Orson Welles's incantatory 1948 Macbeth, though it's less wild and windswept than either, reminding in this way of how steeped in superstition and the supernatural was Shakespeare--and how raw, even stripped down, the Scottish Play seems in comparison to the Bard's other histories.

Macbeth (2015)

***½/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis
screenplay by Todd Louiso & Jacob Kokoff and Michael Leslie
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw In a season awash in Terrence Malick shrines, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth has the temerity to evoke Andrei Tarkovsky instead. Maybe certain moments from Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, married to the saturated minimalism of Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's beautiful, in other words. Stunning enough that its self-consciousness is just another approach to centuries-old material, and a comfortable part of the whole. There are two approaches left to Shakespeare, I think: to acknowledge the centuries of intense scholarship around the canon that has uncovered the archetype (mostly Jungian, sometimes Freudian) mooring the tales, or to ignore them. This Macbeth understands that the Scottish Play is splashed red--all passion and portent and looming storms flashing low on the horizon. Every incident is portent. I mumbled along with the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech that I memorized for extra credit in eighth grade and marvelled at how Kurzel rolled it into a greater thematic conversation about the lust between these two people, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard). It's as interesting an interpretation as Ethan Hawke's Melancholy Dane pondering choices in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. Muting the dialogue, swallowing it as Fassbender does here (or burying it, as in the various battleground sequences--Banquo (Paddy Considine) calls out his warning choking on blood and dirt), has the effect of placing the words of the story as secondary to its indelible images. It's Macbeth as mythology, seeking to explain how eternity metastasizes in the space between a couple who have lost a child.

Coriolanus (2011)

***/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox
screenplay by John Logan, based on the play by Edward de Vere
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Angelo Muredda Ralph Fiennes has been building up to Coriolanus for some time. Whether as a scarred or just nervous exile in The English Patient and The Constant Gardener, respectively, or as the noseless ghoul of the Harry Potter movies, he's served as the embodiment of human refuse for a long stretch of his career--the English go-to for wanderers, burn victims, and miscellaneous banished men. It's a treat, then, to watch him take relish in the part of the ultimate cast-off, a Roman general chewed up and spit out by the city for which he earned his war wounds. The actor's hyphenate debut, Fiennes's adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a curio, to be sure: It isn't so much directed as cobbled together from the source and fed through CNN-style reportage of armed fighting in the Balkans. But as a star vehicle, for both himself and the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave, it's a powerful match between actor and character. While the general-turned-politician's fine suit hangs awkwardly on the brute it houses, for Fiennes, Coriolanus is a good fit.

Anonymous (2011)

*/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi
screenplay by John Orloff
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Anonymous comes out swinging against the Shakespeare industry with all the force of a midsummer night's fart in the wind. If director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff--a match forged in Mordor--had their way, the film would upend university curriculums, supplementing every Shakespeare syllabus with an elliptical "...but what if..." written in invisible ink on the last page. To that end, they've taken their baby on a tour of college campuses, and scheduled Facebook-webcast debates in which they've stunned Shakespeareans like James Shapiro with wise nuggets comparable to Adam Sandler's astonishingly incoherent address at the end of Billy Madison. It hasn't been clear sailing all the way, mind: popular historian Stephen Marche recently took to the NEW YORK TIMES to debunk such "prophets of truthiness"--Emmerich and Orloff are but a new, high-profile strain of Oxfordians, a group who name nobleman Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare's texts, even the ones dated after his death--for advancing a lunatic conspiracy theory based on little more than class snobbery. Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme was even less charitable, proposing in a blog entry that has since become an Oxfordian recruitment camp fronted by Orloff himself that the film's chief sin is not historical inaccuracy but its filmmakers' posture as courageous iconoclasts, railing against established wisdom. Anonymous, then, has had a fairly storied pre-release career.

Hamlet (1996) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B-
starring Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Kenneth Branagh, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Jefferson Robbins You could tell it was an epic: it had an intermission. Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet may be the last mainstream film to feature an honest-to-goodness, seriously-I-gotta-pee-now pause-point in its theatrical release.¹ How daring was that, in a period when studios demanded 90-minute runtimes to crowd more asses in seats? When just a year later, people would unironically say "epic" and mean Titanic?

William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (2004) + The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) - DVDs

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins
screenplay by Michael Radford, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Radford

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Niels Mueller & Kevin Kennedy
directed by Niels Mueller

by Walter Chaw As we comb through the continuing fallout of the Bush Jr. administration's first term, themes begin to assert themselves on our movie screens as clear as the words of prophets written on tenement halls. Colorized misogyny and race-baiting spectacles share time with protest pictures that are oftentimes more strident and dogmatic than the party line--it's the Eighties neo-Cleavers at war with postmodern B-pulpers, which many moons ago manifested themselves as one of the most fertile periods in the history of science-fiction and now resurface as part of a new wave of existential science-fiction. We're all about Blade Runner these days, deep into Philip K. Dick territory where memories and dreams are manipulated and franchised for you dirt-cheap. Images have become the jealous currency traded in the underground of a land where one sad breast was flashed in the middle of our annual orgy of violence, sex (sometimes incestual, lesbian sex as sold by primogenetic neocon Pete Coors--"And twins!"), and unrestrained plea for/rewarding of mass consumption. It was enough to send my beloved nation's vocal demographic of selectively pious idiots into paroxysms of...what? Outrage? Righteousness? I don't know. What I do know is that in the United States, it ain't the suggestion of sex, it's the actual, pale, flaccid appendage that feeds the sometimes-joyous result of sex that offends. Women need to be protected from showing the outsides of their bodies in the same way they need to be protected from having a say in what happens to the insides of their bodies in the same way they need to be prevented from reading, voting, or holding a job. When a society gets really frightened, see, we must protect people from themselves. Let's start at the girls and the darkies and work our way up.

Chairman of the Bard: FFC Interviews Michael Radford

January 9, 2005|The best films of British director Michael Radford (whose best known film is probably the Oscar-nominated Il Postino) are his directorial debut, Another Time, Another Place, and his grim 1984 adaptation of George Orwell's suddenly-current-again 1984. (They are, along with White Mischief, at least my personal favourites of his.) Something like a whirlwind in person, Radford cuts through the pre-lunch crowd at a swank Denver bar, where he spots me at a table chatting with his ingénue from The Merchant of Venice, Lynn Collins, and makes a beeline, hand extended in a gesture unaffected enough to shed a little light on how unspoken he's been about his film, United States foreign policy, and actors. (Ian McKellen: "Movie star, not movie actor.") Over the course of our interview, Mr. Radford proved more than willing to set alleged misquotes straight, as well as to share his view of not only the cultural differences between the U.S. and Europe, but also the cultural similarities between the U.S. and Orwell's dystopia.

O (2001) [Signature Series] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Elden Henson
screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare
directed by Tim Blake Nelson

by Walter Chaw Tim Blake Nelson's updating of Shakespeare's "Othello" is hamstrung by a deficient script that hastily neglects motivation and character depth in favour of a dependence on our familiarity with the source material to lend O its tragic gravity. It overuses animalism and the specious equation of high school basketball with military conquests and prowess, and unforgivably consigns the Desdemona character to a haughty afterthought and a series of shrill, shallow pronouncements. Another fatal misjudgment of the hackneyed and over-complicated plot (which actually seems to contradict itself right at its conclusion) reduces Iago's wickedness to his need to earn daddy's approval. Admittedly though, O's transplanting of "Othello"'s insular Venetian political setting to an exclusive upper class prep school is a wry and excellent decision, offering any number of opportunities for satirizing the glowering atmosphere and claustrophobic in-fighting of high school at its most advantaged.

Hamlet (2000) - DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Liev Schrieber
screenplay by Michael Almereyda, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Almereyda

by Bill Chambers This review of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet has long gestated, and the good thing is, the film does not suffer the ravages of memory. My expectations for this modern-dress Shakespeare adaptation were low enough that I presumed its impact would be short-term at best (the play will always transcend approach and performance to a certain degree), having been effectively show-stopped by Kenneth Branagh's definitively faithful take of 1996. Prior to spinning the DVD, I also internally debated Almereyda's talked-about corporate setting, a milieu that would seem a better fit for the political backstabbing of "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar".

Titus (1999) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Feore
screenplay by Julie Taymor, based on William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus"
directed by Julie Taymor

by Bill Chambers Soldiers bedecked in Roman fighting garb, blue warpaint icing their faces. Marching. Drumming. And then, the motorcycles.