Joel Coen’s icy, black-and-white world of violence and pain is a triumph, with Denzel
Washington and Frances McDormand at their peak50 best films of 2021 in the UK50 best films of 2021 in the USMore on the best culture of 2021Joel Coen’s solo take on Shakespeare is a stark monochrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness. The text has been whittled; the drama is framed in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy white fog.
Frances McDormand is Lady Macbeth, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of
MILITARY determination to the plan to kill King Duncan. Macbeth is Denzel Washington, who portrays the Thane as already exhausted by his great triumph in the king’s cause at the very beginning, a moment at which he might be expected to look forward to retirement. Washington’s signature rolling swagger looks careworn, but his Macbeth submits to both the duplicitous supernatural promises and his wife’s demands, like a soldier taking his orders. And then, angry and paranoid, he escalates his fanatical rule with a series of pre-emptive murders, while McDormand’s Lady Macbeth retreats into horror and despair.