A stark and powerful 'Macbeth'

 

   The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film from a Coen brother.

    I put it that way because director Joel Coen takes on  Shakespeare with The Tragedy of Macbeth and, yes, it feels weird to talk about a film with the name Coen attached without following with the word "brothers."

    The result of Joel Coen's solo effort is visually striking, intense, and bursting with fury.

     Employing an old-time aspect ratio and cutting through dark swaths with paths of white light, Coen simplifies the movie’s environment while simultaneously amping up its power.

     He opts for minimal but suggestive design. A castle still feels like a castle — albeit one you might find in an Ingmar Bergman film.

     I begin there because what stayed with me about Coen’s movie was its atmosphere and visual poetry, the way Coen married Shakespeare and back-and-white imagery of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel.

    Coen and his team allow Macbeth to strike its own pose. And I don't mean "pose" in a pejorative sense, I mean it the sense of a movie that has the power of a starkly drawn silhouette.

    Coen isn’t trying to make Macbeth feel “real;” he bends cinematic convention to allow Shakespeare’s story and language a place where tragedy gathers force.

    A grizzled Denzel Washington provides the centerpiece of the drama. Washington doesn’t underline the play's great monologues  ("Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow"). You won’t catch him orating; he delivers the dialogue as if it were his own speech.

    Washington's performance brims with emotional undercurrents, perhaps driven by the guilt that accrues to Macbeth as a result of killing his king (Brendan Gleeson) and then slaughtering rivals and their families. He even turns on his best friend and ally Banquo, a fine Bertie Carvel.

    Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) encourages Macbeth in his murderous ways, prompted by the king’s announcement that he plans to make his son Malcolm (Harry Melling) his successor. 

    Washington makes Macbeth's attitude less a matter of naked ambition than of reaction to a slight: Macbeth, who looks ready for an AARP membership, fought tirelessly for the king and never got his proper reward. If his anger has a modern equivalent, it's getting passed over for a promotion someone thought he had earned.

    All the actors rise to the occasion. Corey Hawkins makes a fine Macduff, perhaps the best and most human of the characters.

    Coen does a wonderful job with a bizarre and unforgettable performance from Kathryn Hunter as the witch who offers her prediction: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and then king. Coen suggests the presence of Shakespeare's three witches by using a reflecting pool and adding ominous circling crows. 

   Hunter's performance is haunting enough to take the place of a half dozen witches, had Shakespeare wanted to increase their number.

   Coen’s Macbeth seldom finds itself idling and, thanks to a pared-down text, moves quickly toward a conclusion in which he makes it clear that, for him, Macbeth speaks loudly about dark forces that can be unleashed but seldom controlled.  

   This Macbeth screams when it needs to scream.

Satire sinks in Clooney's 'Suburbicon'

Finding the right tone for dark comedy might be one of the most difficult things for a director to achieve. Case in point, Suburbicon, a mangled George Clooney-directed comedy about the nightmares that bubble beneath the surface of America's suburban dream.

Set during the 1950s in the fictional community of Suburbicon, Clooney's movie struggles (but ultimately fails) to link a story about family hypocrisy and horror to the racism that pervades a carefully designed community that has been marketed as a mid-century utopia.

The story focuses on a family in which Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a father who contrives with his sister-in-law (Julianne Moore) to murder his wife (also Moore), a woman confined to a wheelchair after an automobile accident.

To carry out his foul plan, Lodge hires a couple of thugs (Glenn Flesher and Alex Hassell) to invade his home. Gardner's six-year-old son Nicky (Noah Jupe) functions as the movie's innocent witness to the horrible deeds that unfold around him, and, at times, your heart aches for this tormented young actor. What's he doing in movie that treats his character so cruelly?

Joel and Ethan Coen are listed among the film's writers, and traces of the Coens' work reveal themselves as the story unfolds. Clooney and Grant Heslov also take writing credits, but the overall result is a hodgepodge that Clooney can't unify. Worse yet, Clooney plays some of the movie straight. The result: scenes that feel as if they were lifted from a low-grade thriller.

The harassment of Suburbicon's African-American family (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, and Tony Espinosa) supposedly was inspired by a real-life, 1957 case in which William and Daisy Myers were subjected to terrible race-based abuse in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Suburbicon's easy-target approach to racism consists mostly of showing sneering expressions of hatred by the supposedly upright residents of Suburbicon.

Moreover, a baseball-related friendship between Nicky and the African-American kid next door (Espinosa) sees like a transparent effort to add symbolic and emotional resonance.

The only actor who finds precisely the right tone for Suburbicon is Oscar Isaac, who shows up midway through as an insurance claims investigator with his own sleazy agenda.

The cast does its best to keep the story tracking, but scenes that are intended to be funny don't produce the expected laughs and the satirical point (Lodge is the real menace, not the town's only African-American family) doesn't resonate the way it should.

Maybe Clooney wanted to expand a small story about the underbelly of suburban life by offering a sidebar about the racism that underlies America's shining facade. Whatever he was thinking, he mostly missed the mark.