The entity usually referred to as "the Coen brothers" has always seemed like one person to me. I know that Frances McDormand is married to one of them, I have no idea which, but presumably the brothers are distinct persons to her. Now that one of them, I guess Joel, has written and directed a film version of Macbeth maybe I'll achieve some clarity myself. McDormand plays Lady Macbeth in the movie and I see now that she's Joel's spouse. A household proprietorship instead of the familiar brotherly one.
I'm a little puzzled about some of the conventions surrounding the film project. It's said the movie was "written and directed by Joel Coen," which must mean that, in addition to directing, he's responsible for a script that's adapted from the play written by William Shakespeare in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Yet reviewers, sophisticated ones, often make it sound as if the thing dropped from the mind of Joel Coen. Here is Joyce Carol Oates.
(as the child speaks brightly & is allowed to be "cute," in the sole playful scene in the entire film, I thought: Coen is preparing us to think this little boy is real, before he's savagely murdered.)
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 14, 2022
(a transparent move, yet still effective.) https://t.co/Pb0q33FnJZ
The scene she describes, whether "out of place" or not, wasn't invented by Joel Coen: it's Act IV, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play. The murder of Macduff's family serves no political or strategic purpose, which may contribute to the impression that it's extraneous, "spliced in." But the senselessness is the point. Macbeth's first murder followed an agonizing scene of moral deliberation. The boundary once crossed, however, there's no more reasoning. He's self-aware enough to diagnose his own disorder:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.
This speech had begun with a bit of wayward information dropped, as it were, unintentionally:
I hear it by the way; but I will send;
There's not a one of them but in his house
I keep a servant fee'd . . . .
"Keep a servant fee'd"—that is, pay them to spy. He succeeds to the throne after killing the king and his profit on it is that he takes up residence in a nightmare world of paranoia and madness. He tries to escape by committing more and more murders, the consequent slaughters making less and less sense. In general, Shakespeare's savagery receives short shrift, and a movie version that elided the slaughter of Macduff's family would be contributing to the trend. The scene in which Macduff receives the news is brutal. What we call "toxic masculinity" is one of the play's themes. His wife had tempted Macbeth to act on his foul ambition by taunting him, "When you durst do it, then you were a man." Macduff, told of the slaughter of his family, is advised by a third party to "Dispute it like a man."
MACDUFF:
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
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