With its streaming release on Apple TV+, it seems like everyone is watching The Tragedy of Macbeth. As people discuss Joel Coen's adaptation of Shakespeare's Scottish play, talks of Oscar are nearly unavoidable - Denzel Washington is poised to earn his ninth acting nomination for the titular role. However, while his awards triumph feels obvious, one shouldn't think that playing the Bard's most famous roles is an easy ticket to the Oscars. Many major adaptations have been snubbed over the years, and even when the Academy embraces a Shakespearean flick, it rarely extends such love to its cast.
Look no further than Sir Ian McKellen's first major bid at big-screen stardom. In 1995, after starring in a famed stage production directed by Richard Eyre, the actor decided to take that Richard III to the movies…
Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, especially when considered in the context of his history plays. That last bit is especially interesting when looking at McKellen's Richard III. You see, this take on a 15th-century story transposes it to an imagined 1930s, an alternative reality where Britain turned fascist. In essence, by playing a man out of history, McKellen ends up playing history rather than a man. He is fascism personified, an amalgamation of every 20th-century dictator, their evils concentrated on the form of a miserable devil who spouts verse and vomits despair.
This reading perpetuates Shakespeare's own relationship to historical fact. His Richard III was informed by contemporary politics and a need to exalt the Tudor monarchs rather than honest verisimilitude. Like that 16th-century Richard, this 20th-century version reflects a look back at events that are not yet a couple of centuries old. If, before, it was an entertainer's propagandist purview of a failed dynasty, in 1995, it was a chilling consideration of what England might have been if it had fallen to fascism like so many other countries did. Indeed, looking at history, one need not dig deep until a Nazi-sympathizer royal comes up.
Fittingly, this future fascist king enters the movie like a bigger-than-life Angel of Death. He's a Darth Vader of the Third Reich, labored breathing overwhelming the soundtrack while a frail body commits heinous violence. This bleak spectacle is quickly followed by the pomp and circumstance of a victory party. Though, of course, war is far from over. The battlefield where Richard wages war isn't only a place of open bloodshed and clashing armies. It can also take the shape of courtly intrigue, manipulations made out of words with double meanings, lies spoken like truth. Both player and cinematic form underline this central duplicity.
For example, the famous soliloquy that opens the play is divided into two halves. First, there's a public speech at the royal banquet, said to everyone's ears, on and off the screen. But then, in the space of a cut, we're in a more intimate setting, listening to Richard's words as he pisses on his brother's legacy, sharing his venom with the camera. We're his confidants, and McKellen spares us not an ounce of the character's venality. He also allows us to see the childish malevolence, the vulnerability of a man addicted to power beyond reason. The only persons within the narrative that seem capable of seeing that weakness up close are a lowly confessor and Richard's mother, a curse on her lips.
Witnessing these weaknesses of character only makes his public proclamations feel falser, his charm more reptilian than it would otherwise read. Talking to the camera, the wannabee usurper is a conspiratorial wonder. His lips and tongue savor the malevolent lines, a smirk and a shiny eye beckoning us to have as much fun as Richard does. It's an impish take on the fourth-wall-breaking text, more self-amused than strictly ominous, threatening but laced with the possibility of camp. Naturally, though, McKellen can also switch up the quantities of lizard-like inhumanity and raw charisma in his actorly recipe. It all depends upon what Shakespeare demands.
Take Richard's wooing of Lady Anne. It's one of the play's trickiest scenes, a piece of bizarre human behavior that has defeated many a mighty actor. So it's with great glee that I declare McKellen's take on the scene to be its best-filmed iteration. Maybe the solution comes from foregrounding the matinee's idol manner over political genius. No matter his hunched back and limp arm, the wrinkles on his face and the coldness in his eye, McKellen makes for a relatively dashing Richard III, one that might have passed for a silver screen lothario in slightly different circumstances. That's crucial for the faint illusion of romance.
His scene partner further helps him. With Kristin Scott Thomas, the leading man negotiates the text with her and finds a pending balance through collective anti-chemistry. If McKellen is eminently demonstrative, whether Richard is being sincere or not, Thomas' Lady Anne is more closed-off and impenetrable. For most of the film, she remains so for the other characters, the audience, and the camera. Her dynamic with McKellen is thus something of a meeting of opposites, a weird pairing who succeeds through their weirdness rather than in spite of it.
The interplay with other actors is admirable throughout. Dining with his crowned family, McKellen performs Richard as a cat playing with trapped mice. He toys with them, chewing the scenery with unashamed joy and going so far as to make a comedy out of this historical tragedy. Such an approach pays off when the laugh dies in the viewer's throat, and we're left with the seriousness of the character's actions. When he drops the fanciful lark and speaks with clarity to Annette Bening's Queen Elizabeth, the danger is undeniable. It smacks us in the face, revealing that Richard is both a playful guide and a frightening monster.
No matter how much he may ask us to join him in the diabolical revelry, that doesn't mean we're safe. Nobody is, not when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is out for power and blood. Throughout the film, that sense of unavoidable, almost cosmic danger grows in a crescendo. By the time we've seen Richard wield the information of a brother's death to shock the other sibling into an early grave, every word rings with menace. His interaction with the princes (soon to be in the Tower) is thus a comedy of implicit horrors. McKellen acts not unlike a tight-wound uncle who can't talk to children, but the atrocity of his displeasure is clear.
The addition of a boar's maw in a subsequent dream is unnecessary. After all, the actor has already expressed the beastliness the latex tries to materialize. He does it with more economy and nuance, even though his Richard III couldn't be further from subtlety. Indeed, the actor's a show-off, his work as loud as the Nazi-fied production design. Keeping this register up to the very end, one grows to see McKellen's smiles as calamities in the making. Even when annihilation is incoming, those greedy grins send chills down the spine. He dies like Cagney in White Heat, a gangster on top of the world and licked by flames. Only he's still smiling, almost as if death is a joke. He's Satan going back into the hell he calls home.
Examining the awards journey of Richard III is to grapple with the inconsistencies of international release dates. While the film competed at American awards as a 1995 film, the British counterparts considered it a 1996 release. That means that McKellen's BAFTA nomination and European Film Awards victory came after the Oscars rather than as a precursor honor. But, of course, the Golden Globe nod still counts as a significant precursor, though the Academy ended up ignoring him. Instead of choosing McKellen, AMPAS nominated Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Hollnd's Opus, Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, and Massimo Troisi in The Postman. Cage won, while the British thespian had to wait a couple more years for his first Oscar nomination.
Richard III is streaming on Amazon Prime, tubi, and Hoopla