I keep meaning to edit the dozens of pictures I've been taking of my spring flowers and post an entry on them here, but things keep getting in the way... last night, it was a queasy headache and the determination to start cataloging my entire home library in an MS Access database (how's that for masochism?). Tonight, it was the little bug someone put in my ear about Scotland, PA, a take on Shakespeare's Macbeth set in a 1970s drive-thru.
Read on without fear, I've been careful to avoid major spoilers (tho' how one can actually spoil a 400-year-old plot is a wonder).
I love quirky ways of accessing Shakespeare... Strange Brew (Hamlet in a Canadian brewery, eh?) is a kick in the head, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet set in "Verona Beach" was the first treatment of that play that actually made me cry for the dead lovers at the end. (Up until then I'd been too busy laughing at Will's awful puns, and being disgusted by those hormonal, too-hasty teenagers.) Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (which flip-flops between scenes from the play and scenes of the actors preparing for the play, trying to get into their characters' heads) is a fantastic way to suck you in to one of the history plays, which seem to be hardest for modern audiences to relate to... hey, even that "Taming of the Shrew" episode of Moonlighting was fun, dont'cha think? (Have I dated myself yet?)
And then of course there are the by-now classic retellings... Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for Hamlet, Akira Kurosawa's Ran for King Lear, West Side Story for Romeo & Juliet, Kiss Me Kate for Taming of the Shrew. (And if you *haven't* seen any of these last, you've had a seriously deprived cinematic childhood. Run, don't walk, to your local library or video store and go watch them, already!)
So. Quirky Shakespeare. Right. Scotland, PA definitely qualifies. The director says in his afterword that he's had the idea of setting Macbeth in a drive-thru since high school, when he himself worked at a small-town drive-thru and wanted to murder his boss. Okay, that I could see... little businesses are just as rife with nasty, back-stabbing office politics as big ones. I was a little more dubious about the time setting... I was born in the 70s, and living through them once was more than enough, thanks. Loud, ugly, clashing colors, excessive hair, slightly seedy faux-everything... that whole cheap plastic ambience that (for me, anyway) typifies the 70s... it all comes together, and in the context of the movie gives you a great "border-of-civilization, not-quite-now" modern equivalent for the medieval Scottish marches. The music's great, too... an off-balance mix of a little classical and a lot of Bad Company. And the acting... I had to look up Joe "Mac" MacBeth again when the movie was over, because he reminded me so strongly of a younger Val Kilmer (James LeGros, the actor who played Mac, isn't all that young, either-- only about two years younger than Kilmer. Must've been the haircut.) But he has that same sort of lazy intensity. He and Maura Tierney ("Pat Macbeth") played off each other incredibly well, and Christopher Walken brought just the right touch of proddy, gallows humor to the whole thing as the police detective, Lt. MacDuff.
I really... well... okay, "enjoyed" is probably not the best word for this movie. It's a disturbing sort of film, and I was distinctly uneasy by the end of it. But... it worked. The reason I like quirky Shakespeare movies is that they allow you to look past the archaic speech and the beautiful poetry and take another look at the characters and plot... they let you find things you might not have found before in the plays, no matter how many times you've read them in the original. All the right elements are there-- the witches, that damned spot-- but, stripped of their usual setting, they're given fresh impact, and what you're left with is a really great story of one couple's murderous greed, and their slow tilt into madness as both nerves and schemes slowly fall apart.
Thanks, Matt, good choice. ^_^
Posted by gris at April 23, 2004 11:59 AM