DOOMED FROM THE START - Aug 2010 - MACBETH and SCOTLAND, PA

MACBETH has always been my favorite of Shakespeare's plays. It's possible that I'm not paying enough attention, but it seems like filmmakers love it the most as well, reinventing it in different eras, with their own spins. Some have been great (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood), some have been terrible (Men of Respect, where the play is reimagined as a NY mafia story. Good luck finding it, but it stars John Turturro as "Mac", who brags that "no man o' woman born can do shit ta me!" Peter Boyle plays "Duffy", ludicrously delivering the climactic speech about how "they had to rip me outta my mutha's fuckin' uterus!" Good stuff.)

Anyway, I offer up two compelling yet wildly different versions of the classic tale:

Macbeth (1971, Roman Polanski): It's impossible to ignore that Roman Polanski's first film after the murder of his wife and unborn child is a nihilistic, oppressive, and shockingly gory take on Shakespeare's play. Although it was named Best Film of 1971 by the National Board of Review, critics such as Pauline Kael found the violence distracting and harmful to the text. Polanski himself allegedly defended the heightened violence on set by saying "You didn't see my house in California last summer. I know about bleeding." He also claimed an awareness that any production he mounted after his wife's murder would draw a certain level of over-analysis, and had it been a comedy, he'd be called callous. (thanks, Wikipedia!) Beautfully photographed, with a screenplay co-written by Kenneth Tynan, and produced by Hugh Hefner.

Scotland, PA (2001, Billy Morrissette): The Scottish Play is transplanted to a fast food restaurant in the middle of Pennsylvania in 1975. Joe "Mac" McBeth (James LeGros) works at Duncan's Cafe with his wife (Maura Tierney). Mac is passed over for a manager position, despite his heroic feats of throwing out rowdy customers and reporting his thieving superior to Mr. Duncan, the cafe's owner. Urged on by his social climber wife and a trio of stoned hippies (Amy Smart, Andy Dick, and some other guy), Joe kills his boss and takes over the place, stealing Duncan's idea for delivering orders to customers' cars through a window in the building. Things are going well and the McBeths are a couple on the rise, until vegetarian homicide detective Lt. McDuff (Christopher Walken) arrives to investigate the murder of Duncan.

Oh and the movie's soundtrack is comprised almost completely of Bad Company songs. Enjoy.

I forgot to mention Jon Finch, who stars in Polanski's film. I've seen him in exactly three things: Macbeth, Hitchcock's Frenzy, and a seriously fucked up sci fi film from 1973 called The Final Programme (aka The Last Days of Man on Earth). I always liked this guy, but he never really hit (he originally had John Hurt's role in Alien but dropped out, and turned up in Kingdom of Heaven). He's like a non-campy Tim Curry.

My early note is that the witches, killing Duncan, and McDuff being an adversary are the only places the parallels are truly exploited. There's no corollary in Scotland, PA for Macbeth's later murders, or Duncan's sons having a more active role in the resolution, or of the witches' predictions about how Macbeth can or can't be harmed, or the twists of those predictions. I think had Morrissette really carried the 1:1 Macbeth riff into those waters it really would have been an amazing feat.

No, but I was in error about the film dropping the ball on Duncan's son and the Banquo subplot. It's been nine years since I last saw it.

I'm so full of shit. I wrote the above before rewatching Scotland, PA. I misremembered quite a bit. Most of what they toss away is the third act stuff (Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, etc.). They don't make McDuff "not of woman born", but they find another way to make him unique among the community of hunters and burger-gobblers. The murder of McDuff's whole family is addressed and dismissed.

Scotland, PA even works in the witches' opening narration, which Polanski's film does not. Polanski's witches are nude in a scene; I would have liked to see Amy Smart naked, but not if it meant also seeing Andy Dick naked.

Maura Tierney is a great foul-mouthed Lady Macbeth.

Cinematography by Wally Pfister!

God, Polanski's version is just bleak as hell. Murdered children, LOTS of shots of corpses in awkward positions. You at first think it’s an on-the-nose choice for Macbeth to, in the middle of the climactic swordfight, scramble to put back his crown, but it becomes perverse and kind of brilliant once MacDuff beheads him: I could be misreading, but as his head comes off it looks as if his arms instinctively reach up to try to catch not the head, but the crown.

Polanski very much tells “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, but Morrissette’s film is almost more about Lady Macbeth. Or perhaps I’m being charitable and it’s more that LeGros just doesn’t nail anything beyond the surface. She outshines him by a bit.

Can you get into what you mean by female revisionism a bit more? Where they took Lady Macbeth certainly felt logical enough.

Scotland, PA is flawed, and has a deflated third act, but I thought it was a promising first feature and a clever enough graft to keep me compelled throughout. According to IMDB, Billy Morrissette never even worked again. On anything. Wonder what happened there.

Also, lest anyone be put off by the boring-as-fuck DVD cover to Macbeth (which is an old-age shot of Banquo from a dream sequence; seriously, it's like they carefully selected a cover to make you not want to watch the film), here are some shots:



Edit: NSFW

Spoiler!

But I think it says SOMETHING that the director comes out and says the movie is based on his hazy teen memories of reading the play in high school, and that as a teen the biggest character to him seems to have been Lady Macbeth. And it says something yet again that he cast his own wife as that character.

Maybe that reading makes it accidentally compelling, but compelling just the same.