May 7, 1972: Polanski, Macbeth
Local cinemas.
The spectacle was judicious and effective; the blood, excessive and thematic. This is a film experience that, to me at least, produces both a strong impact and a mind jumbled with thoughts.
Curiously, the key to Polanski’s view of the play is the minor character Ross. In the play Ross is an abject, conscience-less time-server, up to a point; but then we see him warning Lady Macduff, and then he is in England telling Macduff of the slaughter of his wife and children. He fills this same function in the film — but the film shows him to be the same time-server throughout. At Macduff’s castle, after he has judiciously warned Lady Macduff, and he is on the point of leaving, we see he is in collusion with the Porter. The Porter gets the eye from Ross, leaves the gates open, and Macbeth’s henchmen enter. This appears to make vicious hypocrisy out of time-serving. The subsequent role of Ross is the same as in the play.
I thought, as I watched, that this rendered Ross completely inconsistent. But later I saw that Polanski had deliberately abandoned the emergence of conscience in Ross in order to give us a portrait of a man of minor vision (and sunny, even disposition) whose ambitions, on a small scale, parallel Macbeth’s: he will be on the winning side, whatever it is. In the film, a scene on the battlements shows Ross and three or four others with Macbeth. Macbeth awards a pendant — evidently the symbol of a thane — to someone other than Ross. This is not lost upon him, and we next see him delivering the news to Macduff. He is unchanged somehow by it all. His face was a perfect instance of Duncan’s ironic comment about the first Thane of Cawdor: “There is no art to tell the mind’s construction in the face. He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust.”
The point is that absolute trust is never justified. At the end of the film Polansky adds a sequence in which Donalbain, the son of Duncan, about whom (like Fleance) Shakespeare tells us nothing whatsoever, rides alone to the domain of the weird sisters. Evidently the implication is that he will profit as Macbeth did from their predictions, and there will be another cycle of senseless slaughter. There is nothing of this in Shakespeare, of course, but Polanski’s view seems to be that Macbeth is not really distinguished either by his own character as a man or by what happens to him. All men, by and large, are ambitious of advancement and prone to violence in attaining it. Polanski’s Macbeth is l’homme moyen cruel.
Once one recognizes the view, its original presence is seen to have pervaded the entire film. The result is a film of genuine coherence — and remarkable visual consistency — but also a film that, out of regard for Polanski’s thesis, must implicitly reject the premise on which both the play and its chief character are founded. This Macbeth, one feels, is really incapable of seeing daggers of the mind, although he is a master of any edge of metal.