Scotland, PA (dir. Billy Morrissette, USA, 2001)

Definition

This film, written and directed by Billy Morrissette, is a shrewd indie adaptation of Macbeth, transporting the play to rural America in the 1970s, complete with muscle cars, the emergence of drive-through fast food, and ambitions that culminate in homicide. As an example of creative genre-switching, the play’s darker themes are rendered comic in this tongue-in-cheek revision, but the film remains true to much of the energies that drive the original play. With a relatively low budget and a highly talented cast, the movie experiments with tone and meaning in ways that are at once deeply engaged in American pop culture of the 1970s and at the same time discernibly Shakespearean. Equivalencies between the play and the movie step well beyond connect-the-dots reference-spotting, and the film often calls out its source in blatant and also subtle ways. While this film is easy to dismiss as a literary farce, it rewards deeper engagement as one of the most original tonal...