False Face Must Hide What 'The Tragedy of Macbeth' Doth Know
#159: "The Tragedy of Macbeth," "The Lost Daughter," "The Tender Bar"
Edition 159:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: We have to make up for lost time! I’ll be catching you all up on those 2021 wraparound movies I missed at the end of the year, including a couple of buzzy fringe Oscars contenders and a true blue Ben Affleck movie star performance. Then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” one of the industry’s most creative directing duos has a metaverse movie I can get behind.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
(Theaters, AppleTV+ on Jan. 14)
Actors loooove doing Shakespeare. I mean love it. Listing all the A-list mega-talents who have embodied the famed Thane of Cawdor alone would take up too much space, but suffice it to say the first thing Daniel Craig wanted to do after finishing up as James Bond is to go and play Macbeth on Broadway.
Why?
Maybe it’s the tradition, the idea that you’re portraying the same characters and saying the same words as all the great actors who came before you. Or maybe it’s the fact that many actors are trained using Shakespeare, because the words are fixed and an actor must make decisions to fill out the character in some new or fresh way.
I have another theory. It takes me back to my teenage years, when the video game “Guitar Hero” was at the peak of its popularity. There was one song all the kids wanted to play more than any other, a relatively obscure and admittedly mediocre tune called “Through Fire and Flames” by a band called DragonForce. The simple fact was it was the hardest song on the game, practically impossible, and anyone who could play it was just about the coolest kid in school.
Doing Shakespeare is just straight up difficult, because it’s entirely up to the actors to “translate” the text.
That’s even more true in this latest cinematic adaptation by Joel Coen, who has chosen to strip down the setting into minimalistic, hyper-stylized black-and-white sets upon which characters more or less enter stage right, deliver lines and shuffle off stage left.
It’s the first movie Joel has done without his brother Ethan, who combine to form my favorite directing pair of all time (No Country For Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo etc. etc.). To whatever degree their reputations can actually be separated, Ethan is the more sardonic and clever writer and Joel is the more cinematically inclined artíste (and perhaps this movie did miss Ethan’s comedic touch…).
Joel is also, importantly, married to Frances McDormand, whose desire to play Lady Macbeth was the impetus for the entire project.
Together they’ve crafted a slightly different interpretation of the well-trod story, pairing McDormand with the great Denzel Washington to form perhaps the oldest title pairing ever assembled. It shades Macbeth’s motivations, painting him less as an ambitious young striver and more as weary middle manager who has never quite received his due reward.
Still, there’s only so much shading that can be done. The words are the words. And the decision to proceed with The Bard’s original text will be the biggest obstacle for this movie finding an audience. Often during its runtime I found myself having PTSD flashbacks to high school English classes where we discussed what “unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps” meant.
The reason why Shakespeare is such a rich text is that each line can be dissected and studied and pulled apart for meaning, but when those lines are speeding by at the pace of regular dialogue it becomes sensory overload, and it’s impossible for someone not incredibly familiar with the text to understand everything that is happening at a given moment.
This is one of those rare instances where I place the fault on dumb viewers like me and not the filmmakers. That old English is worth it when you hear top notch actors deliver lines as iconic as “False face must hide what the false heart doth know,” or “fair is foul and foul is fair” or “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and of course the “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” monologue. These moments are nothing short of electric, and I wouldn’t trade them for any lingua franca.
Coen reprises the brothers’ incredible ability to find interesting faces and characters to fill out their worlds, played here by more than a few “that guy” types to surround our towering stars. And in the moments where he chooses to put visual flourish on the barren backdrop (I’m thinking particularly of the moment Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane) will blow your socks off.
So really, the only thing stopping you, and me, from appreciating this movie is our own ignorance. It’s an excuse I’m claiming, for a movie I appreciated more than loved. Here’s to hoping the brothers get back together on the next one.
The Lost Daughter
(Netflix)
“There are no new ideas,” as the saying goes. Maybe you’ve heard someone say there’s only Seven Basic Plots, and often it seems like we’ve seen every single variation of each of them during the hundred-odd years of the cinematic form.
And yet, Maggie Gyllenhaal — the celebrated actress of The Dark Knight, Crazy Heart, Adaptation, and many others — has given us something revelatory in her directorial debut.
Very few movies take on the topic of motherhood, and fewer still do so with any degree of complication. Movies, most of which are written by boys with daddy issues, almost always portray mothers as saints. That’s a lovely concept in the abstract but disappointing in real life where it’s crazy in 2021 to be so shocked to see a woman who has failed (or believes she has failed) as a mother on screen.
(I was reminded by a friend of Ladybird, which also brilliantly captured a complicated mother, but that movie is from the point of view of the daughter and therefore casts the mother at least part of the time as the antagonist, rather than the character with which the audience must consider and reckon with at the center of the frame.)
This mother is played by Olivia Coleman, who has quietly taken the crown as successor to the “new Meryl Streep” throne, a perennial Oscar nominee who will be unanimously considered as one of the best actresses in the world no matter what roles she takes on the rest of her career. She’s one of the favorites to win another Oscar this year.
When the movie opens, we don’t actually know Coleman’s character is a mother. That’s the other impressive thing about Gyllenhaal’s debut — she has the confidence to drop us into a world without any explainers, and expects the audience to figure things out as they unfold.
So much so that some may accuse Gyllenhaal of being an enigmatic filmmaker. She doesn’t explain anything, and a viewer is only going to get out of the movie what he or she is willing to put in, much like last year’s The Green Knight. It’s not afraid to sail way over someone’s head (I’m example A). The movie is slow and it’s complicated and it’s thoughtful, just as often prompting us to yell at our screens “no don’t do that!” and “why did she do that?” as we sigh and say “yeah I’ve done that.”
The plot, though that seems entirely besides the point, unfolds around this mother’s working vacation to an idyllic seaside resort, invaded by a large family of rowdy New Yorkers. One of the interlopers is played by Dakota Johnson, a young mother who seems both unprepared and uninterested in leaving behind her young adulthood to take on the yolk of motherhood to her daughter. By observing Johnson’s character, Coleman’s character flashes back to the struggles of her own young motherhood.
It’s a beautiful movie to look at, anchored by awesome performances across the board (shoutout to the always impressive Jessie Buckley, plus Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgard, Paul Mescal and a showcase for “Succession” player Dagmara Dominczyk). More than the craft, it’s an incredibly deep experience if you’re able to connect to it. I had the experience of both understanding I had just watched something great and entirely not understanding why, which points to both my privilege of having a mother who loved me unconditionally and my ignorance as to what she must have been going through when I gave her a hard time.
So if nothing else, at least this movie will prompt you to text or call your mom and say thank you. I understand a little more now why they call that the hardest job in the world.
The Tender Bar
(Amazon Prime)
It’s my sincerest hope that as the movie industry continues its rapid and drastic transformation over the next 10 or so years, more movies like The Tender Bar exist instead of less.
If 2021 taught us anything, it’s that I could make more money working the drive-thru window at McDonalds for a weekend than this coming-of-age memoir would’ve made had it opened at the box office — regardless of the fact that it’s directed by George Clooney and stars Ben Affleck.
But dollars and cents are no longer the measuring stick for success. In terms of passing the amorphous “vibe check” that’s become currency in the ongoing Streaming Wars, Amazon (and perhaps more substantially Affleck) picked up a win here.
For those accustomed to Spider-Man, this is a bracingly low stakes story. A boy growing up without a father finds the paternal example he needs in a bartender uncle and the patrons of his Long Island bar, where evidently Charles Dickens is being discussed as frequently as the Mets batting order. His struggle for identity bumps up against trouble with money, women and career.
In terms of “poor boy gets into Yale” stories, this one sure beats the hell out of 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy, perhaps because it embraces its quotidian ambitions. A podcast I respect called this “a two-hour episode of ‘The Wonder Years’” which, despite the fact that I’ve never seen an episode, feels exactly right. It may be small, but it’s fun.
At the center of the charm offensive is Ben Affleck, as the aforementioned bartender uncle donning both the proud grin and a modified version of the accent that made him famous in Good Will Hunting. It’s not his movie, technically, but he owns every second of it he appears in.
(That could also be because I don’t like Tye Sheridan, who plays the protagonist here, and every single movie I’ve seen him in I would’ve preferred literally any other actor in his role.)
The movie unfurls like the season of a sitcom TV show, with traditional A, B and C plots, plenty of funny situations, laugh lines, episodic breaks and the kind of sentimental wrap-up that keeps you comin’ back for more.
As long as movies like this one might appear in a little box right next to a sitcom on your streaming service of choice, I’m going to recommend the movie 10 times out of 10.
Trailer Watch: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Oh baby, finally a metaverse movie I can get behind! This movie comes from “Daniels,” the directing tag team behind Swiss Army Man, one of the most boldly inventive movies of the last 10 years, which I love and recommend frequently (and people end up telling me they either loved or HATED).
It seems they’re bringing that same creativity to this project starring Michelle Yeoh (of Crazy Rich Asians fame) as a corporate cubicle drone who finds out she’s the chosen one Neo-style.
It’s just an incredible trailer, and gives us a taste of the unique vision these guys bring to their movies. I cannot wait.