If one is able to forget, even for a moment, the controversy of the flesh (I imagine it is possible) and stops to think for a moment which of Shakespeare's tragic works could best fit into the Coen brothers' stylistic corpus, The answer is ... Garzón, sorry
Macbeth
. And the reason is precisely the meat itself.
A not too shrewd overall look at the work of the Minneapolis brothers yields enough balance of excess, bled sarcasm and easy blood to choose the tale of the King of Scots as the most obviously 'Coenian' or 'Coenite' of the world. Bardo corpus.
Or vice versa. On the other hand, few texts so obviously cinematographic, so suggestive in the hint of mystery and so brutal in the patterned description of the abyss that haunts us.
What happens, once again, is that nothing ends up being exactly what it seems and what is presented as true news, as you know, many times is no more than a simple hoax. More meat.
On the one hand, in Joel and Ethan's filmography there are larger pieces as measured and hidden as
A Serious Guy
or
About Llewyn Davis
that discuss a good part of the commonplaces of current manuals.
And that, at the same time that the wildest part of that masterpiece that goes by the name of
No Country for Old Men
, far from running through the joyous display of the viscera, flows through the silent and wounded monologue of an obviously and existentially unsuccessful policeman. .
Let's say that,
in his first solo Joel job without Ethan, the older brother opts, perhaps out of respect for the brand, for that other less obvious, more precise path
. But, in any case, just as 'coeniano' (or 'coenita'). The ambitious King Macbeth we see now is not Prince Hamlet infected with the poison of doubt, but shares with him the same fever of despair. And there,
in that slight displacement towards the depths, is where the film in charge of breaking one of the most dazzling fraternal collaborations that the history of cinema has seen since the Lumière, acquires its meaning, its peculiarity and its, let's face it, greatness.
We speak, yes, of a perfectly carnal excellence, not at all mystical.
Formally
, the film assaults the viewer from at least three decisions that mark their destiny.
All the expressiveness of the film rests, in order: a) in an essentially sad black and white that prolongs its shadows in a deep and expressionist setting; b) in a square format that moves away from the panorama to lock the gaze in a prison that is also a simple well, and c) in a sound design that refers to the rugged and cacophonic landscape of hell itself.
The photography of Bruno Delbonnel and the music of Carter Burwell place the viewer in that strange space where everything comes to life
and even the stones bleed from the evidence of ... the flesh.
The Macbeth that Joel wants is neither passionate nor burned by the sensuality of pleasure and the lust for power.
The Macbeth we see now is, first of all, old.
The huge works of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are located on the other side of the clichés and the phrases made to present two characters eaten away from the inside, unable to understand the omen of a destiny of glory suddenly transformed into a circle of chaos and dream
;
the same circle that magpies pregnant with shadow trace over and over on the screen.
The result is a film that is as eternal in each of its gestures as it is perfectly modern in the feverish and disillusioned tale of a silence built from, in effect, noise and fury.
As we said, few of Shakespeare's texts seem so diaphanous and so close to modern cinema.
Betrayal, power, guilt, ambition and, again, the flesh are mixed in a perfectly recognizable universe, at once intimate and mythological.
Perhaps this is why it has undergone so many brilliant adaptations. From the magical baroque, let's call it that, by Orson Welles to the energetic and brutal transparency of Akira Kurosawa, through the murky gesture of Roman Polanski or the sensory explosion of Justin Kurzel,
Macbeth
remains perfect in his detailed description of the wound of being alive.
What Joel does to distance himself from each and every one of the readings that preceded him without throwing himself into the impertinence of the ridiculously original adaptations (which there are) is to pay more attention than ever to the imminence of death. And it is in that subtle and perfectly recognizable breath so close to its end that the film rises. Everything in this
Macbeth
speaks in the same register so close to the despair with which the character of Tommy Lee Jones was explained right at the end of
No Country for Old Men
. Merit undoubtedly of a Cormac McCarthy so close to Shakespeare's own dark drive.
Joel Coen's Macbeth is, by all accounts, a man of action.
He does not doubt, but neither does he ever lose sight of the fact that each of his furious gestures are nothing more than waves that break again and again against the rocks of his most intimate impotence.
The result is a film that is as eternal in each of its gestures as it is perfectly modern in the feverish and disillusioned tale of a silence built from, in effect, noise and fury.
Joel Coen has found a way to get away from the Coens without giving up one iota to be, make no mistake about it, the oldest of the Coens.
+ The sensation of serious sleep that floods the entire film seems as deeply hypnotic as it is inalienable.- Once again, it is inexplicable that a film like this is condemned to the television screen.
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