The Long Goodbye

For several years – a few decades – I have been getting around to reading Raymond Chandler. Once, in 1998, I was flying home on leave from the army and I had chosen one of his novels to read on the long flight from Seoul to Denver. At Kimpo Airport I gave my sister a call to let her know I was on my way. During our short conversation (my prepaid phone card was about to expire – I was a poor soldier at the time) she broke the news to me that our mother had had a massive stroke the day before and probably wouldn’t live much longer. I hung up the phone and returned to my seat to await my departure. I pulled the novel out of my bag. It was The Big Sleep, the novel that marked the first appearance of private detective Philip Marlowe. I started to read it in the airport, started to read it again on the plane, but I never got past the first chapter. 

In the years since then I have read many testimonials to the quality of Raymond Chandler’s prose. Readers of detective fiction (I am not one of them) have always been proprietary of writers like Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie and some others. I never once thought there was something I was missing – or enough to actually read any of it. To me such books have always offered nothing but detours from what I was after. They reduce life to a puzzle and human beings to pieces in the puzzle that needs to be solved by the final chapter. 

There are several puzzles in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the next-to-last of his Philip Marlowe novels. The puzzles are other people as Marlowe struggles to figure them out. The solutions Chandler comes up with are never quite satisfying. And just when you thought the story of one of the characters is at an end (because he’s supposed to be dead), he turns up again, in disguise, in the final chapters. Chandler subtly shows his hand, leading the reader to the solution to the two central mysteries of the novel, so the suspense is downgraded to curiosity – a condition much more conducive to the novel’s emotional impact. The reason I picked up the novel was because I had read a book co-edited by Colm Tóibín called The Modern Library, in which he stated, 

Chandler’s importance and influence are more than a matter of his taut writing style. His genius lies behind the personas of the great Hollywood film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck and others – who portrayed the characters he invented. Chandler’s novels originated Hollywood film noir, not the other way around. In this, the sixth of his seven Marlowe novels, his immortal private eye engages with murder and betrayal in his meanest and most moving crusade.

Chandler was able to create, from an accumulation of grim commentary, an acutely fatalistic and menacing atmosphere. The worst thing about Chandler is his association with Hollywood and the Hollywoodization of his books. He may have invented movie noir – with Los Angeles as his setting. It’s why his books have translated so easily into a string of mediocre movies. (I’m having a go at the Robert Altman adaptation of The Long Goodbye next, dear reader.) 

But Chandler’s prose is considerably better than what Hollywood did with it. I never once, while reading Philip Marlowe’s narration, saw the faces or heard the voices of the men who’ve played him on the screen. Dick Powell played the role first, in Murder, My Sweet – aka Farewell, My Lovely, and it’s probably the best of the Marlowe movies. 

The details of the universe that Chandler chooses to italicize are sometimes alluringly strange and sometimes astonishing. They are panoptic in how they suggest greater depths or encompass a broader meaning. His metaphors are legendary, like “Off to my left there was an empty swimming pool, and nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.” But some of them are so elaborate they take on a life of their own: “And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.” 

The truth is Philip Marlowe is a romantic – there is nothing more quixotic than when he agrees to take on a case. He is so romantic that he likes to pretend that he isn’t. In a late chapter of The Long Goodbye he comes close to a summing up of himself and his world: 

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. 

Still, Chandler is occasionally guilty of a slick line – the kind for which he is famous. Lines like “He hooked me with a neat left and crossed it. Bells rang, but not for dinner.” And “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.” Then there are exquisite lines that come out of left field: “Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle.” 

All of the novel’s observations simply pile up – they don’t cohere into a whole. The characters have attitudes rather than traits. The women are unreal, over-idealized, and they are all dolls – Sylvia Lennox, Eileen Wade, Linda Loring. (Incidentally, two out of three of them die.) The love scenes, if you could call them that, are oddly affected and fail to ignite – and not for want of interest. Marlowe is either too much of a gentleman or Chandler is trying – quite unnecessarily for a 20th-centiry writer – to be discreet. It makes one wonder at the level of maturity that the writing implies or at which the writing is aimed. It is certainly not as “adult” as Chandler’s reputation would suggest. 

Reading a great novel through to its last page brings with it a sense of a greater ending. You read the last sentence and close your eyes, letting the moment spread through your consciousness. By the time I read the last line of The Long Goodbye (and it, too, is just another of Chandler’s slick lines), it was exactly what I expected and I wasn’t disappointed. It would’ve been so much better if I had.

Went the Day Well?

As we watch the daily reports out of Ukraine and reacquaint ourselves with the obscenity of war – brought down on a city of Europe – I’m convinced that Putin was right and we have no more stomach for it. We have watched the war in Syria for a decade without comparable discomfort and mutter “fucking savages” under our breath, believing that such things as dropping poison gas in barrel bombs on civilians was no longer conceivable in our part of the world. Now we are told that Russia is calling in a debt from Assad and that Syrian forces are being deployed in Ukraine. Putin wants us to see the brutality and complete inhumanity because he has a hunch we will shrink from defending NATO allies like the Baltic states when he decides to attack them. It’s ironic that Americans are seen as the most violent, bloodthirsty people in the world when others (like Putin) are convinced that we will no longer stand up and fight for our values. 

How comforting to turn to a British film made during the war against the Nazis that shows us the unquestioning determination of a people that their values - our values - will prevail against the enemy's. The film is Alberto Cavalcanti's quite unique and somewhat strange Went the Day Well? (1) Under the film’s opening credits we are transported to a town known as Bramley End (it was filmed in Turley, in Buckinghamshire, and if you look for it on Google Earth it doesn’t appear to have changed at all). Once there, a pipe-smoking local (Charles Sims, played by Mervyn Johns) approaches and addresses the camera: 

Good day to you. Come to have a look at Bramley End, have you? Pretty little place, and a nice old church, too. 13th century, parts of it. Still, it won't be that that's brought you, I don't suppose. It'll be these names on this grave here and the story that's buried along with them. Look funny, don't they? German names in an English churchyard. They wanted England, these Jerries did, and this is the only bit they got. The Battle of Bramley End, that's what the papers called it. Nothing was said about it 'till after the war was over and old Hitler got what was coming to him. Whitsun weekend it was, 1942. 

The rest of the film, then, is a flashback from after the war is won. It’s a quite interesting film, rather like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. From the moment of the Germans’ victory in France in June 1940, an invasion of England was expected to happen next. That year, Graham Greene wrote a story called, “The Lieutenant Died Last,” that was a somewhat comical, terse account of an attempt by German paratroopers to commandeer the small English village of Potter. Their attempt is foiled by the village’s old poacher Bill Purves, who witnesses the descent of the German parachutists – dressed in German uniforms. Their commander enters the Black Boar public house and tells the proprietress, “I am a German officer and this village is occupied by my men.” 

Greene’s story was expanded and, I think, improved by the film's three credited script writers, John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, and Diana Morgan. In their script, the Germans are disguised as British soldiers involved in a military exercise. Their commander, Kommandant Ortler aka Major Hammond, played by Basil Sydney, who was King Claudius in Olivier’s film of Hamlet, is a typically officious, utterly intolerant tyrant who commits the first of the film’s atrocities by shooting the village vicar, Father Owen (played by Arthur Ridley), to death when he rings the church bell. 

The German arrival in the village is anticipated by the local squire, Oliver Wilsford, played with perfect poise by Leslie Banks, who is evidently a fifth columnist and Nazi spy. The villagers aren’t fooled for very long by the Germans’ quite feeble attempts to convince them that they’re British – the giveaway is a bar of Austrian chocolate (spelled “chokolade” with the word “Wien” on the chocolate bar itself) that a boy finds in the pocket of one of the soldiers. “P’raps he snitched it from a Jerry what crashed?” the boy suggests. 

Once their cover is blown, the gloves are off and the Germans have to resort to “Plan B” which requires all villagers to assemble in the church where they are kept under guard. How the villagers manage to foil the Germans’ plans and pin them down until the real British soldiers arrive is gripping to watch, even 80 years later. 

There is some real savagery in some scenes – savagery that isn’t at all disguised or prettified by the filmmakers. Aside from the almost surreal depiction of men in British uniforms shooting at one another along village roads and hedgerows, especially noteworthy is the extraordinary toughness of the women in the film. We watch a cheery Mrs Collins (Muriel George) throw pepper in the face of one of the Germans and kill him with one stroke of a hatchet. She is then bayonetted by another soldier. The dastardly squire is shot to death by the vicar’s daughter (Valerie Taylor) who evidently loved him, and dowdy Mrs Fraser (the great Marie Lohr) saves a room full of children by grabbing a live grenade thrown through a window by a German and jumps out of the door. It is followed by a blast in which Mrs Fraser is killed, but the children are safe. 

You could argue that a bit much – too much – is made of the deep down decency of the villagers. It is a sort of faith or trust by all English people that their neighbors are in the same boat they are in. It’s a quality that English films always seem to exude – a quality that James Agee noted with admiration. (It was a quality that Agee didn’t find in American films.) You can find it in British wartime films especially, like David Lean’s In Which We Serve and the Powell/Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale. It is worth noting that the British fought the Germans alone for 18 months after the fall of France until the US entered the war in 1941. 

Went the Day Well? is easily one of the most curious products of wartime British film production, a propaganda film that, once exhibited during wartime, was then shelved for decades. The British Film Institute restored it in 2010 and it was released to theaters to general astonishment.

(1) The title is a line from an epitaph by John Maxwell Edmonds:

Went the day well? 

We died and never knew

But, well or ill,

Freedom, we died for you.

Belfast

I feel Irish. I don't think you can take Belfast out of the boy. 

Kenneth Branagh 

For St. Patrick’s Day, I chose Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast for consideration. Last weekend it won the category “Outstanding British Film” at the Baftas.

Since 1989, Kenneth Branagh has made nineteen films, his best being his very first, Henry V, based on Shakespeare’s play. He has made five more films based on Shakespeare plays, all of which show far more talent and ambition than any of his other films. In addition (or, rather, subtraction), in the past twenty years he appears to have become a commercial Hollywood tool, one of any number of people who could’ve made Thor or Cinderella. His Murder on the Orient Express never once showed me a reason for being made. It made me instantly nostalgic for Sidney Lumet’s version which now seems toweringly glamorous. 

Now he has made a “semi-autobiographical” romance of his boyhood times in Belfast. As everyone should know by now, the Northern Ireland Conflict, or the Troubles, erupted in violence in August of 1969, as Protestants rioted and attacked Catholics. Despite this, the conflict was nationalist rather than religious. The six counties of Northern Ireland remained loyal to Great Britain after the Republic of Ireland was established in 1949. The so-called Battle of the Bogside happened on August 12, 1969. British troops were deployed to Northern Ireland on August 14. When the film opens it’s August 15. 

Branagh makes it seem as if the whole conflict erupts on Buddy’s (the 8-year-old stand-in for Branagh himself) street, but it seemed that way to Buddy. And if anything seemed big or small, right or wrong to little Buddy, Branagh makes it seem for us. Barricades and barbed wire are erected at the entrance to the street. Buddy lives with his family – mother and father, grandparents and an older brother – in a Belfast backstreet (no one else in Buddy’s family except his older brother, Will, is given a name. They are called Pa, Ma, Pop and Granny). On the wall at the entrance to the block is a text from I Timothy 1:15, “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” 

Buddy’s father has a job in England and, when the violence flares in Belfast, talks with his wife about taking the whole family to Australia or Canada. Eventually, they leave for England (Branagh’s family moved to Reading in 1970). The boys watch a great deal of television, including the original Star Trek series and such Westerns as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon. The theme song from the latter, “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’,“ is even imported by Branagh when a local Protestant tough tries to enlist Pa in his gang. As if the allusion weren’t clear enough, Branagh gives him the name Billy Clanton, straight out of the OK Corral. There is even the moment, near the end of the film, when Buddy says goodbye to his classmate and she opens her door and her door frames the shot, á la The Searchers, and he stands there like John Wayne. Branagh holds the shot like Ford did as Buddy walks forlornly away. 

Branagh dwells on the father and mother’s love for each other. They are given two opportunities to dance in the film, for no demonstrable reason. The songs of Van Morrison, the Irish soul singer, are prominent on the soundtrack. The family go to the movies twice, the second time on Buddy’s birthday, to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We are thereafter subjected to two choruses of Dick Van Dyke’s singing the theme song. 

Pop is taken ill and is hospitalized. His death is the deciding factor for the family’s emigration to England. They all board a bus at the end of the block. It’s old granny who stays, alone after the death of Pop. Judi Dench, as Granny, who is made by a merciless closeup to look quite a bit older than she is, speaks the last line, “Go. Go now. And don’t look back. I love you, son.” At the very end of the film Branagh dedicates the film “For the ones who stayed For the ones who left And for all the ones who were lost”. 

Belfast is a rather puzzling film simply because it isn’t really about Belfast. You see the city’s name at the film’s opening and at its closing, and the film is punctuated with panoramic views of the city. Buddy’s family is Protestant, and he is drawn into an act of violence only once by an older friend – when he is enlisted in the looting of a Catholic grocery store. She tells him to steal something, anything, so he grabs a box of detergent for his mother. His mother drags him back to the store, still being looted, to return it. 

Like vinyl records, black and white films are making a curious comeback. It doesn’t provide Belfast with any kind of nostalgic patina. Quite the contrary, the images are extremely sharp. But why they’re black and white isn’t certain. It certainly doesn’t contribute to a sense of the period. On three occasions, Branagh switches to color - for the movies the family goes to see, and a stage production of A Christmas Carol. Cleverly, Branagh shows us the color stage scene reflected in black and white Granny's glasses. Most of the scenes inside and around the family’s home were shot with an extreme wide angle lens – as if, not content with Panavision, Branagh wanted to further expand his narrow focus. Somehow, it manages to emphasize the smallness of the house and the back stoop. 

The grownups in the cast – Jamie Dornan, Caitriona Balfe, Judi Dench, and Ciarán Hinds – are excellent. Jude Hill, however, as Buddy, is well coached but utterly lacking in conviction. Branagh wants us to know that his parents were perpetually in love. As I mentioned, they’re given two opportunities to dance together, and on both occasions Dornan ends up lifting Balfe off the ground, which must’ve been rough on Jamie’s back, since Caitriona is a strapping woman at least as tall as he is. 

One thing I learned in my research for the film is my coincidentally having the same last name as Kenneth Branagh’s mother, Frances (née Harper). As an Irish-American, I found the film’s last scene deeply moving. Judi Dench walks slowly back to her door, and turns to look at the bus carrying her son and his family. As she speaks her last line, we see Buddy turn his head and look back at her. She closes the door and we see her rest her head on the glass, her eyes closed. Branagh reminds us that it's as much her story as the departing family's.

Cold War

I spent the first 33 years of my life enduring the Cold War, the sole benefit of which was that it never turned into a hot one. It seems so odd now that one of the things I had to be cognizant of at a very early age was the possible end of the world in a nuclear holocaust. Materially, however, I didn’t suffer one bit from the Cold War. The prosperity of America was unaffected by the number and magnitude of missiles that were aimed at us. In Soviet Bloc countries, however, the arms race had a direct impact on the price of bread and every other commodity. Add to the actual paucity of goods the insistence by Communist governments to redistribute wealth (except their own of course), the end result of which was arriving at a general level of poverty for everyone. 

Of the European countries that constituted what became known as the Eastern bloc, Poland had the most successful film industry and produced more world class filmmakers than all of the others combined. Some of them emigrated to the West, like Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski. Others remained in Poland, like Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Over the course of my filmgoing life I have been especially lucky to have seen so many films from Poland – and so many that left a lasting impression on me. I suppose the first one I saw was Wajda’s Kanal, which captured so brilliantly the heroism of the Polish resistance in World War II, its protagonists having to use the sewers of Warsaw to escape the Nazis. Wajda’s film set a high standard, even if it was somewhat overrated. 

Pawel Pawlikowski’s film career resembles his life. Born in Warsaw in 1957, he was taken to London with his mother when he was 14. He attended Oxford, studying literature. He directed documentaries for British television from 1989, and his first three feature films were made in England. He was cultivating an audience and winning some awards when, in the middle of what would have been his fourth feature in 2007, his first wife became gravely ill and died. The film was never finished. In 2011 he directed a multi-national co-production in Paris before returning to Poland, where he has lived ever since. In 2013 his film Ida, his first film in Polish (though it was a Polish-French-Danish co-production) was released to wide acclaim.

Cold War, released in 2018, is about Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zuzanna, or Zula (Joanna Kulig). He is the music director of a folk song and dance troupe. When the film opens in Poland in 1949, he is auditioning new talent, among whom is Zula, a young woman with striking blonde hair and smoldering eyes. She can sing and dance and seems to attract every male around her, including Wiktor and Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who leads the company. While every aspect of life in Poland becomes more political, Wiktor and Zula develop a passionate – if erratic – love for each other. By introducing patriotic hymns to Stalin to their folk repertoire, Wiktor and Kaczmarek are rewarded with a tour – first to Warsaw, then to East Berlin. On the train to Berlin, Wiktor tells Zula he is going to defect and that she is to join him on a particular street corner. Wiktor waits there with a suitcase until it is dark, but Zula doesn’t show up. Wiktor walks out of the Russian Zone by himself (this was several years before the wall). 

Next we see Wiktor in Paris in 1954. He is playing in a jazz band (jazz was often banned in the East, so it became the music of freedom). Zula is in Paris for only one night and arranges a meeting with him. He wants her to tell him why she didn’t defect with him. She says it was because she didn’t feel she was worth it. They part in the street. She gives him a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and walks away. Then she stops, turns, and runs into his arms. 

Wiktor manages to travel to Yugoslavia where Zula’s troupe is performing. Kaczmarek sees him in front of the theater and gets him a good seat. Zula sees him in the audience, but by the next number his seat is empty. He had been escorted by plain clothes police, alerted by Kaczmarek, to the train and he goes back to Paris. The policemen walk away saying, "They say that Warsaw is the Paris of the East."

In 1957, Wiktor is in Paris in the middle of recording a film music score when a door swings open and Zula stands there, waving at him. She has married a man solely so that she could get a visa to Paris. He tells her he has waited for her. He tries to start her career as a jazz singer at the club (L’Eclipse) where he still plays. He gets her a record deal, but Zula is jealous of the songs written by a French woman Wiktor has been with. Once again, it seems, she feels inadequate, undeserving of her good luck and happiness. The record finished, Zula abruptly returns to Poland. 

Against everyone’s advice (including the Polish ambassador in Paris), Wiktor follows Zula to Poland in 1959. Because he defected, he is sentenced to imprisonment for fifteen years. Zula visits him. They have broken his right hand so he can never again play the piano. She vows to get him out. 

Finally, in 1964, Wiktor is out of prison, but only because Zula married Kaczmarek. They have a young son. She comes offstage, sees Wiktor, and falls flat on the floor. She gets up and falls into his arms. They go to a restroom where she removes her black wig and asks him to help her get out of there. 

On a brilliant sunny day, Wiktor and Zula are riding on a bus. It stops at a crossroad in front of a large field of ripe corn. There is a bench underneath a large tree. They walk together down the dirt road to an abandoned church – the same church that Kaczmarek visited early in the film.(1) The dome has collapsed, letting in all the day’s sunlight. Standing before the crude altar, where a candle and a long row of white pills are arranged, they exchange wedding vows. They vow to be together always until death parts them. They embrace, and then Zula gives Wiktor a number of the pills and she takes the rest. They go and sit on the bench by the road and watch the day wane. She says, “Let’s go to the other side. It looks better over there.” They get up and walk out of the frame. 

In Cold War, which is streaked with a poetic history, the personal and the political are kept in a very strange, inexplicable balance. Pawlikowski, with his cameraman Łukasz Żal (who also shot Ida) pull off the incredible feat of evoking the times and places of the film’s story in a way that makes us feel like time travellers. We have seen those eras and settings captured in films from Poland and France in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but never in a film shot in 2018. His two actors, Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, seem to have stepped into the past and lived their parts the whole while, from 1949 to 1964. 

After seeing recently the predominantly grey palette of the black and white cinematography in Joel Coen’s Macbeth, it’s a pleasure to see the medium used in stark contrasts and the full spectrum of light and shadow. I haven’t seen such gorgeous black and white since Sven Nykvist’s work on Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf and Shame. The last four or five minutes of the film are like an apotheosis – for Wiktor and Zula and for us. It is overwhelmingly beautiful. 

(1) Puzzlingly, it is Kaczmarek who discovers the ruined church at the beginning of the film. Did he mention it to Wiktor?

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings. 

Out of the blue – or in this case the fog – here we have another film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, this time directed by Joel Coen, one half of the Brothers Coen filmmaking team. Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand, asked him to direct a stage version with her in the role of Lady Macbeth. He opted to direct a film of the play instead, and told Kenneth Turan, “I knew I’d be directing the next one by myself. If I was working with Ethan I wouldn’t have done ‘Macbeth,’ it would not be interesting to him.” As one who has been wondering for 30-odd years why the Coens make movies, this doesn’t supply me with an answer. The movies never did, either. But this one does. 

Denzel Washington, who plays Macbeth in Coen’s film, is quite wrong to state that Shakespearean English is "a foreign language.” Shakespeare’s work seems distant to us because he wrote in poetic language. There are anachronisms, but only because some of the words are no longer in currency. But every word Shakespeare used is invested in the English language. We carry those words around with us every day of our lives. I have a religious friend who doesn’t like the King James Bible because it turns him off. He wants it to be clear, so he settled for one of the ponderous modern translations of the Bible. The KJV is written in the same language used in Shakespeare, and it has introduced, in the 400 years since its publication, exalted language to the homes and lives of English speakers.

Peter Brook said, “Each line in Shakespeare is an atom. The energy that can be released is infinite—if we can split it open.” Like every other play, Shakespeare’s live through their words, and the best medium for those words is the theater. But more than a hundred movies have been made from Shakespeare plays. The best Macbeth I’ve seen (until now) is Roman Polanski’s from 1971. It did the play’s bloodiness justice. It was scenically realistic, which didn’t clash with the language, since medieval Scotland is as exotic as the words. 

The first thing Joel Coen did right in the making of his The Tragedy of Macbeth is dispensing with any pretense of realism. His film was shot exclusively on sound stages and the flat absence of any recognizable place throws his entire production – and we his audience – back on the words themselves. And for this service to the play, Joel Coen deserves praise. The settings for every scene are functional merely as settings. They serve no other purpose, so the audience quickly learns to ignore them. 

In so many of his film roles, Denzel Washington was a fighter and a killer, so the very first of his murders – Duncan’s – , though brutal (Macbeth covers his mouth and stabs him in the throat) seems almost natural. But there is a world of difference when it is encased in enthralling language. Washington may have seemed so right for the role, but Coen makes it seem as if all of his prior violence – a career’s worth – was a rehearsal, practice, for the violence he does here. Macbeth is a sympathetic, even heroic, character until the assassination of Duncan. Carrying the weight of the Witches’ – or the Witch’s, since “they” are played, startlingly, by one actor – foretelling, at first he actually balks at actively fulfilling it. It is Lady Macbeth who spurs him on. Macbeth knows this. “Bring forth men-children only” he tells her, “For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing but males.” And carrying out his murders gives Macbeth a kind of divine invincibility and impunity. He is no stranger to the slaughter of men, women, or children, except that before he committed the acts under orders. Now he must fulfil a prophecy, under divine orders and under the direction of his wife. 

Coen commits to some novel interpretations of the text. For instance, when Macbeth asks “Is this a dagger I see before me?” it’s nothing but the handle of a door – the door behind which Duncan sleeps – shining in the moonlight. From this we learn that Macbeth isn’t so susceptible to the supernatural, especially as he is about to murder Duncan. 

If greatness eludes this filmed Shakespeare, it's because of the absence of a great performance. Denzel and Frances McDormand are both excellent. I was amazed at his command and assurance in the role. One of his best speeches, trying to explain why he killed the apparent killers of Duncan, he delivers with a quite moving conviction: 

Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate, and furious, 

Loyal, and neutral, in a moment? No man. 

Th’ expedition of my violent love 

Outrun the pauser, reason. 

                                Who could refrain 

That had a heart to love, and in that heart 

Courage to make ’s love known? 

On hearing these words, Frances McDormand swoons. 

The most fascinating performance in the film is from Kathryn Hunter, who plays all three of the witches (she speaks their lines as if she were talking to herself), and a white-haired old man who hides Banquo’s son. Coen represents the three “weird sisters” as three crows, and at one point, Kathryn Hunter caws like a crow and moves uncannily like one before throwing on her long cloak. Though she stands alone on beside a puddle of water, she casts two reflections. Macbeth and Banquo address them in the plural. 

But something happens as the climax of the tragedy approaches – a kind of lethargy overtakes the production, but not because we know how it will end. The dead leaves bursting into Dunsinane when the English army lays down the boughs from Birnam Wood are beautifully eloquent. They’re symbolic of all the children that Macbeth has killed, as well as the children Lady Macbeth never gave him. But the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." speech falls flat, and I suppose that the last sword fight was unavoidable. As swordfights go, it’s rather dull. Denzel is much better with daggers. 

Harold Bloom, in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, stated that Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood was "the most successful film version of Macbeth". How this is possible in the total absence of the text is puzzling. What he meant, I think, is that it comes closest to evoking the atmosphere of the play. Joel Coen is familiar with Kurosawa’s film, which was shot in black & white on the fog bound slopes of Mt. Fuji. I thought Kurosawa’s film was a worthy experiment, but that it teeters from the daunting effort of replacing the missing blank verse with suitably vivid imagery. Coen’s film is, I think, something of an ideal Shakespeare film. Everything is minimized so that the words can do their work.