Landscapes of the Mind

MACBETH

Directed by ROMAN POLANSKI

Screenplay by ROMAN POLANSKI and KENNETH TYNAN

No sound, no fury. Instead, a palpable sense of clammy despair and an eerie surrealism. The milieu is torn from Polanski's imagination and flung into some medieval limbo. The visual images are often gripping, but the poetry of the play--as well as its force --is missing.

Shakespeare's Thane is a man possessed by his own craving for power. He is destroyed by the evil within himself, not, as Polanski would have it, by witchly auguries of doom. Polanski is most at home dealing with black magic, and Macbeth's second meeting with the witches ("Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . .") is expanded into a veritable convention, with dozens of naked, withered old crones cackling and drooling all over themselves. It looks like a remnant of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's affection for the supernatural is so unrestrained that many of the movie's straight scenes have an almost cursory air. The language is flattened into conversation, and some of the best lines are simply tossed away. This may make Macbeth a bit more contemporary, but it also makes it ordinary.

Polanski takes occasional excursions into outright fantasy, as when Macbeth has a feverish dream following his second meeting with the witches. But the scene is visually uninspired and mechanically clumsy. Faces and images swirl up out of the hags' cauldron, spin about, dissolve, disappear, as if in some hybrid of hallucinogenic nightmare and the kind of antique special effects that looked awkward over 25 years ago in Hitchcock's Spellbound.

Francesca Annis makes an interestingly brittle Lady Macbeth, but Jon Finch's Macbeth seems to be consumed by tuberculosis. In the climactic battle with Duncan, Finch looks as if he was having some trouble hefting his broadsword. But the supporting cast (Martin Shaw, Terence Bayler, John Stride) is fiery, and Polanski manages most of the violent confrontations with brio.

The Tynan-Polanski adaptation contains some arresting notions. Ross becomes the third murderer of Banquo, and Donalbain (whom Shakespeare banished to Ireland early in the action) here reappears at the end of the play, riding across the grim countryside to seek counsel from the three witches. This ominous epilogue neatly evokes the idea of a cyclical, irresistible destiny.

qedJ.C.

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