Review of The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) by Yulloa — 07 Feb 2022

The 2021 movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen, does an excellent job of delivering the compelling story through the setting, characters, and added embellishments. However, the movie fails to accurately mimic the play’s speech and language.

When Macbeth, portrayed by Denzel Washington, walks down the bare staircase of his mansion reciting his all too famous soliloquy, speaking of life as meaningless, he seems more sorrowful than careless. In Shakespeare’s play, after facing the death of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth shows indifference, and the soliloquy follows. Given his indifference, his soliloquy about ‘meaningless life’ takes a careless type of tone, rather than the movie’s crestfallen tone. Denzel Washington speaks in a slow, sorrowful voice that strips this original meaning from Shakespeare’s play. When, in the play, Macbeth displays indifference towards his wife’s death, it demonstrates how Macbeth’s mental state has progressively declined since the beginning of the play, which is not translated into the movie.

Furthermore, the actors fail to deliver their lines with an element essential to language, which is accent. Both the original play and the movie adaptation take place in Scotland. However, the actors do not exhibit the accent at all, instead, they carry on with their American accents. Through this choice, it is easy for the audience to forget where the story is taking place. This takes away the opportunity for viewers to draw connections between the history during Shakespeare’s time and the play. When writing Macbeth, Shakespeare was thought to have been appealing to the King of England, James I, who was also James VI of Scotland. Without the Scottish accents, viewers are less likely to draw these interesting historical connections.

The movie also doesn’t represent Lady Macbeth, portrayed by Frances McDormand, as the powerful and commanding character she is at the beginning of the story. She seems passive and only really raises her voice once, which dwindles the obvious sense of power she has over Macbeth in the play. While almost perfect, these many instances of failure to accurately mimic the speech and language of the play bring my rating of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth down to a B.