![]() There has been a revival of fine black-and-white filmmaking this year, as in Mike Mills’s “ C’mon C’mon” and much of Wes Anderson’s “ The French Dispatch, ” where the abstracted format places the characters’ variegated talk in high relief. The movie is filmed in black-and-white because, you know, colors hadn’t been invented yet in Shakespeare’s time. ![]() The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style that isn’t achieved-and that undercuts the mighty import of the play. ![]() Denzel Washington, as Macbeth, and Frances McDormand, as Lady Macbeth, fit their performances to the movie’s narrow view of Shakespearean cinema, which reduces grandeur to petulance and poetry to decoration. It’s a special form of cinematic torment when great performers are stuck in a misbegotten production, because the intrinsic pleasure of seeing them is overshadowed by a sense of waste, of artistry neglected by directorial willfulness or vanity. “Macbeth,” however, is more than a serious drama it’s a ready-made showcase for inspired actors, and Coen’s cast is filled with some of the best. Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is the kind of movie that a hero of the Coen brothers, Preston Sturges, mocked eighty years ago in his great film “ Sullivan’s Travels,” about a famous comedy director who strains after relevance by turning his attention to a super-serious social drama.
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