Spoilers herein.
Shakespeare mixes poorly with film, and it takes great talent and/or cleverness to do it well. We have a great clever Tempest (Greenaway); a great straight Lear (Kurosawa) ; two great Hamlets, a straight and clever one (Branaugh and Almereyda); two great Romeo and Juliets, a straight and clever one (Zeffirelli and Luhrmann).
But Othello and Macbeth hold special challenges. They are too internal for realistic film, designed for direct bonding between a performer in the physical presence of his/her audience. Welles triumphed with his Othello using the trick of deep architecture, unique to my knowledge. But we still have no masterpiece film Macbeth.
This is the best we have. Polanski understands the devil, specifically the celtic devil which is what this is about (written for the superstitious Scots thug James). He was masterful in other devilish stories (`Rosemary,' `Repulsion,' `Ninth Gate'), and there placed himself within the mind of the character rather than the audience (an Eastern European conceit).
It doesn't work here, I think because there is a visual presence and a quite different one created by the imagination of words, and he couldn't marry the two. None of his other films have particularly worked with language well, even Tess.
What we do have are some rather masterful sets (worthy of Zeffirelli), and an interesting vision of the witches. What we need is a `Shakespeare in Love'- type reworking of the story, built around the witches. He could do that if Stoppard would come back from the dead and write it, back from the devil. Could it tell the truth?
Shakespeare mixes poorly with film, and it takes great talent and/or cleverness to do it well. We have a great clever Tempest (Greenaway); a great straight Lear (Kurosawa) ; two great Hamlets, a straight and clever one (Branaugh and Almereyda); two great Romeo and Juliets, a straight and clever one (Zeffirelli and Luhrmann).
But Othello and Macbeth hold special challenges. They are too internal for realistic film, designed for direct bonding between a performer in the physical presence of his/her audience. Welles triumphed with his Othello using the trick of deep architecture, unique to my knowledge. But we still have no masterpiece film Macbeth.
This is the best we have. Polanski understands the devil, specifically the celtic devil which is what this is about (written for the superstitious Scots thug James). He was masterful in other devilish stories (`Rosemary,' `Repulsion,' `Ninth Gate'), and there placed himself within the mind of the character rather than the audience (an Eastern European conceit).
It doesn't work here, I think because there is a visual presence and a quite different one created by the imagination of words, and he couldn't marry the two. None of his other films have particularly worked with language well, even Tess.
What we do have are some rather masterful sets (worthy of Zeffirelli), and an interesting vision of the witches. What we need is a `Shakespeare in Love'- type reworking of the story, built around the witches. He could do that if Stoppard would come back from the dead and write it, back from the devil. Could it tell the truth?