Macbeth is Denzel Washington, who portrays the Thane as already exhausted by his great triumph in the King’s cause at the very beginning, a moment at which he might be expected to look forward to retirement. This Macbeth is in many ways similar to the Coen brothers’ black-and-white crime thriller The Man Who Wasn’t There, which had Frances McDormand as the barber’s wife, brooding and suffering, a lot like Lady Macbeth.Īnd McDormand is of course Lady Macbeth here, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan.
Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is pellucid and austere and Stefan Dechant’s magnificent production design imagines Macbeth’s castle as a giant, rectilinear modernist house, with chilly courtyards bounded by vast vertiginous walls and corridors that extend like some sort of open-plan death row.ĭisturbingly, there is no sense of what it looks like from the outside: we are always within its Escher-like weirdness, with battlements that can extend infinitely into the fog. Coen’s visual contrivances have something of Kurosawa and Welles, with some German expressionist shadows, and this looks like a crime drama from the 30s or 40s – but entirely naturally rather than as an interpretative affectation.
