Macbeth
2006 [1988]: Michael T. Starks

This is not listed in IMDB. It is only available (as far as I can discover) through Amazon’s streaming video service. Amazon gives a date of 1988 for it, but that is transparently impossible: there are a lot of computers in evidence, and some of them are 1998 iMacs (of the original Bondi blue variety). Other computers have slide-drawer CD-ROM readers, as well, which were not available in 1988. 1998 would be possible. In fact, the end of the credits gives a 2006 copyright date.

It is either a rather well-produced amateur production or a not-very-finished commercial film; the technical treatment, use of music, composition, etc., seem reasonably professional, while the acting is, to put it generously, not. Either way, it’s a high-concept treatment of Macbeth — more concept than Macbeth, really — in which everything is rendered as a squalid power drama in upscale corporate America — a bit like the Almereyda Hamlet, though done with considerably less finesse. The correct dating of this film makes it plausible that it was deliberately emulating Almereyda. As with that film, the spoken language is Shakespeare’s, but the framing narrative is tortured into an alien shape that is explained in visuals — captions on computer screens, and so on, as having to do with something else. Within a limited range, it’s somewhat amusing, but it’s no longer really about Macbeth; it’s about How Clever We Can Be in making the transposition. The witches are three keyboard operators, typing on computers with bloody fingers: the imagery is intriguing, even striking — but the point of the exercise is less clear. Macbeth is a worker at Dunsinane Telecom, Inc., where Duncan is CEO; Banquo and Macbeth encounter the Weird Sisters at the “Help Desk on the Heath”. It goes from there. As with most such productions, the goal seems to be to provoke admiration at the cleverness of the transposition, rather than disclosing anything about the play itself. That being said, the transpositions are at least moderately entertaining. It isn’t really sustaining fare, however. Clever transpositions are no substitute, moreover, for solid acting.

The acting is unexceptional throughout; many of the lines seem to be recited, rather than spoken with any real understanding of either their plain meaning or appreciation of their music; delivery hovers close to the wooden in most cases. I have not found any of the actors on IMDB (though I haven’t looked for all of them); it does suggest an amateur production, however. Some of the actors speak with clearly affected English accents; others more wisely don’t bother. Somewhat amusingly, those who prepared the script also seem not to have understood what it was saying at some junctures: when Macbeth inquires of the murderers about Banquo, the chief murderer replies, “Ay, my good lord: safe in a ditch he bides, / With twenty trenched gashes on his head; / The least a death to nature.” In this film, however, the second of those lines is omitted, leaving the referent of “the least” completely unstated — the least what — ditch? (Here the murderers are women, who have approached Banquo and Fleance as prostitutes and wind up attacking them while they are indisposed and in an indefensible condition; while the one who is speaking has in fact cut his throat, there is no ditch anywhere in sight.) In the sequent interchange with Banquo’s ghost at a fancy restaurant, the ghost’s hair is clearly the shortest in the room — his “gory locks” are maybe an inch long, and don’t seem to shake very much at all. Such ludicrous inconsistency follows the play through from one end to the other.

For reasons passing understanding, the Hecate season is not entirely cut, though it is almost unversally considered spurious.

For all that, there are occasional fits of inspiration that deserve a nod: the death of Lady Macbeth (nowhere specified other than as her death) in the text of the play, but widely considered to indicate suicide, is dramatized by showing her get into a bath with pills and a razor blade — the coupling of this imagery with the hand-washing and the ongoing water/blood theme of the play is curiously apt.

The whole is less than two hours in length, and is far from complete. It may be interesting for those who want to see what can be done with the play, and the story is at least somewhat amusing on its own, since there are certainly some clever transpositions, which verge on parody. Scotland, PA is more entertaining, however, and far more unified. The whole here is markedly less than the sum of its parts, which, while occasionally independently amusing, don’t really coalesce into a coherent whole. This accumulation of immiscible parts is entirely missable.

Watch Macbeth on streaming video from Amazon