I can’t rapture over this flick without some visual aids. All images in this post are credited to Apple.~

Storytelling is the most ancient human art; acting out those stories is presumably equally old. In such terms, Shakespeare’s stories aren’t *so* old, and we certainly have older. But the kind of story that Shakespeare tells through MacBeth is a very ancient story indeed, about hubris and power and the ability of a breathtakingly badass monster wife to make her husband dance. The play is a now-historic look at even more historic tropes.

I’m not the only one who never gets tired of getting yet another look at these stories with the newest iteration of storytelling sensibilities. I mean, at this point, I’ve seen a lot of “new” takes on Shakespeare!

When I grew up, the Hot Current Take on Shakespeare was emphasizing how much of it easily transposed to modern drama. 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, and even the anachronistic Shakespeare in Love all have a very particular delighted way of playing with the tropes, for instance. The Lion King gave us Hamlet for Kids. We also got dramas transposing the entire social culture of society upon street gangs in West Side Story.

Joel Cohen, sans the Other Cohen, expressed his appreciation for this most ancient story in a fascinatingly retrocontemporary style. The Tragedy of MacBeth is as much a love letter to the golden age of cinema as it is to theater, Shakespeare’s work, and the art of acting.

Visuals are compelling and minimalist. It looks like they filmed in a Los Angeles mansion, part brutalist concrete architecture and part Spanish colonial, but research* informed me that these were all sound stages. (*My research is “Rory told me they read it in an article.)

Perhaps Coen wanted old world of Macbeth to look like somewhere that a king might live in modern California, transposed onto the fashionably bleak surfaces. It reminds me of Old Hollywood. If Gene Kelly had tap-danced into the technicolor universe of Oz, he probably would have originated from this black-and-white palace instead of Dorothy’s Kansas farmland.

We never make it to Kansas. The world always feels very small, like you’re either sitting in a black box theater or Duncan was ruling from a walled enclave in the apocalypse. A snowglobe of staring trees, biting archways, and hollow hallways that hear every single whispered monologue. It starts small and it irises tight around MacBeth until he chokes.

Rory had an interesting observation about the extremely stark cinematography in this flick: it’s a lot like the effect the cinematographer of Villeneuve’s Dune sought to get across, except mostly with sandstone faces.

We both agree that it’s taken further, and more effective, in The Tragedy of MacBeth.

Committed performances from some of our generations greatest actors are, of course, fantastic. Just listening to Denzel purr, chuckle, bark, and menace his way through the character arc is a treat. If this was just an audiobook of Denzel Reads MacBeth, I’d be basically just as happy. It’s impossible not to love MacBeth early in the play, fraternally affable, just as it’s impossible to feel bad for him once he loses. And my God does the man deserve to lose.

Any of us could be swayed by the ravenous cruelty of Frances McDormand as Lady MacBeth, and we’d deserve to take the same fall that both of these characters do–literally, in her case. It’s stunning to watch her ambition build a fragile house of daggers around her husband, who is ill-suited to wear the crown, and then watch every single knife gash this woman to the bone as her house falls apart. Some actresses were just born for the role I guess. She kills.

Though none carry the dramatic responsibility so much as these two leads, the witches portrayed by Kathryn Hunter are a deeply unsettling modern dance act, and it’s sorta crazy that Moses Ingram brought so much character to Lady MacDuff with so little time. The actor playing her kid was soooo cute and seemed to be having fun, so I couldn’t get too mad about the MacDuffs getting offed, but the performance makes it seem extra-stupid for MacDuff to leave them behind. What a MacDick. I still rooted for him against Denzel though, and that’s saying something.

Generally, I guess, my favorite part is how well this movie really does interpret Shakespeare’s dialogue-only scripts in a way that makes the intrigue so clear. Every character feels well-understood. Their roles are defined. In the hands of Joel Cohen, an ancient story I’ve struggled to parse sometimes in the past becomes clear as Game of Thrones.

And I don’t even need the characters to be in high school, sarcastic, and dressed fashionably to care about the story anymore. I think that means we (myself, the culture) are growing up.

I posit there are really two ways you should watch this movie though:

For the first time, in a normal way, paying attention, enjoying how badass the story is and how great the performances are. The spacious sound design is eerie. The beating heart-type sounds drag you into madness right with MacBeth. This is a horror movie, and it’s incredible.

And then watch it a second time muted. No sound! Just visuals.

Look at the rhythms of the set design. Just as spacious and eerie as the sounds. As beautiful as paintings.

A rapture!

I love this damn movie.

In the spirit of movies like Before Sunrise and My Dinner With Andre, What Happens Later is essentially a 1.5-hour long conversation between your dad and the woman he loved when he was thirty. Willa and Bill get snowed into an airport overnight and have a postmortem about their romance, which ended twenty-five years earlier.

When I first saw this movie announced, I promptly ran off to buy and read the stage play upon which it is based. The trailers made everything look so shiny/stylized/simplistic that I kinda thought the leads were dead, and the airport was Purgatory. The title also supports such a reading. I could not get emotionally invested until I knew if this was the case.

I’ll try to refrain from spoilers otherwise, but I’ll tell you this: They’re not dead.

Phew.

Now that we know these adorable Boomers are alive, we can appreciate what’s actually a stylized rumination about love and life. Romcom sweetheart Meg Ryan has spent much of her career living through the love stories of fictional people who usually never age past their thirties; now she’s “forty-nine years old” (respectful cough) but still thinking about what love means.

Ryan and Duchovny have a great rapport, especially if you’re fond of the kind of romcom where the leads bicker for a while. The development of their relationship throughout the movie changes in a dramatic but expectedly tropey direction, and it all feels very natural.

Like the play, the history between these two is revealed slowly through dialogue as they begin to open up to one another. And once we see how and why the two of them never healed after each other, I got weepy! It was so well-performed. I really didn’t think I could like Duchovny enough to care, but I really, really cared.

The stylized elements make it clear the whole time that these two need to be brought together so they can connect and heal. It’s the most fundamentally romcom element. Turning away from love left them unhealed for years, but as soon as they got back into it, they could find a way to be whole again. It feels like Meg Ryan is shouting the thesis statement of her career into the universe with What Happens Later: Love each other, darnit! Love makes it better!

Meg Ryan’s style as a director is all over this movie, and I gotta say, I love how spacious it is. She likes to give cuts room to breathe. She frames everything like paintings, focusing on composition, geometry, and values in order to create moments that look the way they feel. I would love to see more just like this from Meg Ryan. I know there’s a big appetite for romances featuring people older than thirty-five, forty-five, and older. There’s no age where this message loses its shine. I’m here to support you, Meg Ryan!

This is a really nice holiday romcom that belongs on the shelf with your other warm cozy holiday flicks, although there is more of an HFN than an HEA. But there’s plenty of room to imagine an HEA if you want one. I like how the movie doesn’t *need* an HEA. (I totally am imagining one.)

(image source: Bleecker Street)

This must be my favorite execution of the family-focused romance. You know, the kind where one person falls in love with another person, and also their family. It was done beautifully in While You Were Sleeping. You see it with the single dad’s little family in The Holiday.

Here, the open-hearted way that Ian (John Corbett) embraces the family of Toula (Nia Vardalos) is especially healing. I love when a romance puts together two characters who just feel like they need each other — not in a weird codependent way, but like something was missing for both of them, and the other person has it. Ian has a wholehearted acceptance of Toula, a large part of which is her family, that Toula needs in order to accept she deserves love. Toula has a life filled with fun and laughter and family, which Ian (single child of two perpetually confused parents) is lacking.

The chemistry is off the charts for Ian and Toula. The fact we know they’ve gotta get married (the movie title promises it) just makes me absolutely *squirm* with delight seeing how much Ian falls smitten with Toula instantly. She’s still shuffling through self-doubt when this man, in his heart, has already married her and made seventeen kids together. It’s the kind of When You Know You Know love that we all hope for.

As a story about an immigrant culture in America, you can also feel the love from the creators for all things Greek. Sometimes this is an eye-rolling love for restaurants named Aphrodite’s Palace, wedding invitations with the Greek flag, and styling the front of your ranch house like the Parthenon. But it’s mostly just sincere, genuine love for the quirks of a big weird family, like your dad who is convinced Windex is a medical cure-all.

Coming from different cultures makes for potential hiccups, but Ian’s willingness to turn the world upside-down to accept every atom of Toula means that everything goes fine anyway. Toula’s traditional dad is afraid of losing something important if his daughter marries a guy who isn’t Greek. But Ian doesn’t bat an eye. He does everything he can to assimilate with the family, and that’s meaningful for a family that’s been halfway assimilated to a new country and fiercely defending what’s left of their traditions. Ian makes it clear: I’m gonna defend these traditions with you. He even uses Windex on his pimple. Now that’s love.

~

On a personal note, this movie feels like family to me personally. I’ve been watching it constantly since it came out, so these characters have been in my life since I was a teenager, and revisiting the movies always feels like going to visit with cousins I haven’t seen in a minute. (I will be watching the sequels soon, but I haven’t yet.)

My husband’s family is Italian American, his granddad having immigrated with his family, and parts of this feel very authentic to his experience. I think that my mom, a first generation American from the Irish diaspora, also seemed to relate to this strongly when we watched it together. I think this must be a story for a lot of families. How many Americans have only been Americans for a couple generations?

We had Irish flags hanging on the walls when I grew up, as well as banners covered in the Irish language, with songs, fables, and maps on constant display. I never got good at pronouncing Irish. But I got candy from my grandma’s visit to her home in Dublin annually, and I learned how to play tin whistle while feeling guilty about not attending church, which is fairly Irish Catholic.

In a way, these things are the ways my mom and grandma were ways they tried to keep alive tradition. Just like how my spouse’s family used to participate in Italian-related festivals every year, flying their flags, making their family recipes, and being a big shouting mess of sprawling multigenerational family.

They wanted this important part of their families, themselves, to remain alive in the memories of children who never set foot in their home countries. That longing is very sweet. I bet a lot of Americans recognize this story as similar to their own.