[Raphael Holinshed,] William Shakespeare, and Joel Coen, 2021
#39,
2021 Skandies
When you decide to film a Shakespeare play, chances are good that
not too many viewers will be wondering what’s going to happen
next.
You have to figure that a substantial majority of your potential
audience already knows the story, so the interest comes from seeing
how you’ve interpreted it.
You can play with the nuances of character: does Hamlet actually go mad
or is he just pretending the whole time?
Is Prospero a wise patriarch or a colonialist tyrant?
But the main things filmmakers play with are setting and
visuals.
From 1990 to 2000, three Hamlet films had the
title character deliver the “to be or not to be” speech in
a dank catacomb, in a dazzling Napoleonic-era palace, and in a
Blockbuster Video.
And this version of Macbeth is all about its
visuals.
That means a couple of things.
First, the film is fundamentally a showcase of absolutely
gorgeous, crisp black and white photography with a dynamic range of
tones—it’s easily one of the
best-looking movies I’ve ever seen.
Then there’s what’s actually in the squarish frames
with their rounded corners: Coen’s Scotland, whose stucco castle
was filmed in Los Angeles, lies in the sweet spot where realism trails
off into geometrical abstraction.
This is, theoretically, habitable space—it’s not
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari where the
windows in the background are just painted on—but homey
and lived-in these stark interiors are not.
Have a look:
Unfortunately, the visuals are pretty much all this movie has
going for it.
The performances do nothing to make this dead language come alive;
if you don’t already know the text, it’s not even as
comprehensible as “Skwerl”.
I would have loved to see this technique applied to something else, or
even to a modern translation of
Macbeth.
I know that the conventional wisdom is that if you put on a Shakespeare
play you’re pretty much locked into the dialogue—some
argue that if you modernize it, you’re no longer adapting
Shakespeare so much as Holinshed (whose
Chronicles furnished the plots to
Shakespeare’s history plays and several of the tragedies).
But c’mon.
When Joel Coen and his brother adapted the
Odyssey back around the turn of the millennium,
they didn’t keep the dialogue in the original Greek.
This eccentric adaptation made me wonder how it compared to previous
attempts to bring Macbeth to the screen, so I
decided that before moving on to the next film on the Skandies list,
I’d have a look at this one’s two most commonly discussed
predecessors.
[Raphael Holinshed,] William Shakespeare, Kenneth Tynan, and Roman
Polanski, 1971
I realized while watching this one that I’d seen it before:
when my class studied Macbeth in high school,
this is the film our teacher showed us.
It’s rated R and was produced by Playboy Productions, yet
as I recall, even in conservative Orange County in the conservative
1980s, showing this to high school students was not particularly
controversial.
Strangely, it feels like we’re more uptight now.
I’m pretty sure that I would have taken a lot more flack had
I tried to show this to my classes during my stint as a public school
teacher thirty years later, even in one of the most liberal areas of
the country, given the way my supervisor chewed me out about the
trauma she said I was causing my seventeen-year-olds by putting up
this poster.
Anyway, in this case the trauma is the point: this was Roman
Polanski’s first project after his heavily pregnant wife,
Sharon Tate, was slaughtered in their home by the Manson
“family”.
So while the Coen film handles the attack on Macduff’s home by
showing his son get thrown from the second floor into the fire
below, where he artfully disappears into the smoke, Polanski’s
shows the bloody dismembered corpses of children, accompanied by the
screams of a servant woman getting raped onscreen.
The Coen film reminded me of those martial arts movies that have
leaves swirling around beautifully as the ninjas try to kill each
other: violent as it sometimes is, virtually every shot aims for
aesthetic perfection.
The Polanski film is about the mud and squalor of a far corner of
the earth in the eleventh century.
And it even tries, much more than the Coen film, to make the dead
language carry meaning to a modern audience.
I’m not sure it succeeds, but it does seem to try.
What doesn’t really come across is the emotion that should
inhere in the play’s events.
When Macduff is informed that his wife and children have been
massacred, I would have thought that this would be where Polanski
in particular would want the raw grief of the moment to hit the
viewers hard, but I just saw an actor pretending to weep in
response to the stage directions.
Oh, and apparently in 1971 it was still considered a neat trick to
put soliloquys in voiceover.
Ha ha, poor Shakespeare couldn’t get a character’s
thoughts across to the audience without having him speak them aloud
to nobody!
Now we can just show the character staring into the middle
distance, his mouth shut, while the speech plays on the
soundtrack!
Except this always feels weird to me and it kind of threw me out of
the film every time it happened.
Apparently I’m not alone in this, as the soliloquys in the
Coen film are done the traditional way.
[Raphael Holinshed, William Shakespeare,] Hideo Oguni, Shinobu
Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Akira Kurosawa, 1957
蜘蛛巣城, or
Kumonosu‑jō in romaji, translates
to “The Spider-Web Castle”, but for some reason the
movie was released with the English title Throne
of Blood.
There are no thrones in the movie.
In fact, there is no furniture of any kind, unless you count
floor mats.
But I guess Floor Mat of Blood doesn’t
have the same ring to it.
Anyway, so this is Macbeth transplanted to
medieval Japan.
The differences are quite minor—e.g., instead of a trio
of witches, the Macbeth and Banquo figures meet an “evil
spirit”, which doesn’t end up affecting the story any
more than swapping in sake for wine when it comes to drugging the
guards.
So really the big change is that the Shakespearean language is gone,
and while I have no idea how well written the Japanese dialogue
sounds to Japanese speakers, the English subtitles make it seem
purely functional.
I don’t feel like I would have missed much by skipping this
one.
Which to me served notice that, yeah, had William Shakespeare never
lived, not too many people today would be filming the chronicles of
Raphael Holinshed.
So I guess that I should clarify that when I say that adaptations
of Shakespeare should be translated into modern language, I don’t
mean that they should ditch the lyricism.
I’m not asking for “Shakespeare Made E‑Z” or
“Joe Macbeth”.
Like, to pick a few lines more or less at random, here’s Ross
in Act 1, Scene 2: “That most disloyal traitor, the
thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict, till that Bellona’s
bridegroom, lapped in proof, confronted him with self-comparisons,
point against point, rebellious arm ’gainst arm, curbing his
lavish spirit; and to conclude, the victory fell on us.”
This is hard enough to follow on the page; hearing it as dialogue,
few are going to get much more out of it than that the thane of
Cawdor turned traitor, but our side still won.
But it doesn’t take a ton of reworking to make even the details
comprehensible on first listen to a 21st-century audience.
Here’s a first pass: “Then Macbeth took the field, armored
as if he were off to marry the goddess of war. He parried Cawdor’s
attacks point for point, as if that traitorous thane were fighting his
reflection in the mirror. And in the end? Victory was
Macbeth’s—and ours.”
Just do that.
Do a few drafts, polish it up.
It still owes more to Shakespeare than to Holinshed, and it
doesn’t sound colloquial at all, but you don’t need a
glossary to follow it.
I’m sure some people would hate the departure from
Shakespeare’s words, but the fact that one of the most
highly regarded cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare is in
Japanese suggests that a lot more people
aren’t wedded to every line in the play.
“Life With the Macbeths” (Sparks ft. Rebecca Sjöwall, 2017)
