Tea at Trianon: Joel Coen’s 'Macbeth'

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Joel Coen’s 'Macbeth'

From LitHub:

Joel Coen’s gorgeous new film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, can be read as a kind of return to Blood Simple, all these years later—it is a co-production between him and McDormand, who plays Lady Macbeth, and for this and many other reasons, it feels a little like an anniversary. But crucially, Macbeth is Joel Coen’s first feature film made without collaborating with his brother, and so it also is a kind of debut. As Blood Simple was for the brothers in 1984, Macbeth is a demonstration of a groundbreaking, brand-new filmmaking perspective. It is also, as with Blood Simple—which is a reworking of The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself a kind of reworking of Macbeth—a starkly fresh take on a story we’ve seen played before us over and over again.

Watching The Tragedy of Macbeth is seeing old lovers in a new way for the first time. Lady Macbeth and her husband (a steely, bearded Denzel Washington) are in their sixties, longtime courtiers, longtime partners. Coen—who in addition to directing wrote the screenplay and co-edited the film—has drawn attention to every single line in Macbeth that underscores how the central couple is childless. He moves one of Macbeth’s soliloquies, in which he acknowledges his childlessness as he is deciding to kill his friend Banquo, to a subsequent scene with Lady Macbeth. (Read more.)

From The Wrap:

Coen also placed a priority on maintaining Shakespeare’s classic dialogue.

“Another ambition was to do the play, do the verse — don’t sort of run away from that,” Coen said in the Q&A event.

But a compromise, however small, would be required.

“We had a long discussion between ourselves and with Denzel,” McDormand said of Denzel Washington, who played the lead role in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” at 66. “Changing just the tense when he says, ‘Bring forth men-children only, for thy undaunted mettle should produce nothing but males.’”

The line, not unlike many others in the Shakespeare oeuvre, carries weight. Delivered late in Act I in the bell tower when Macbeth is plotting the murder of King Duncan with Lady Macbeth, it most resoundingly serves as a declaration by Macbeth that Lady Macbeth should exclusively give birth to males because of her inordinate strength and courage in the face of adversity. (Read more.)