Lay off, McDuff

reviewed Fri, 29 Mar 2002

Scotland, PA is a genial reimagining of Macbeth as an over-the-top, trailer-park soap opera, which probably seemed a lot funnier in concept than it ends up being in execution.  James LeGros and Maura Tierney are Mac and Pat McBeth, slaving away at Duncan's (James Rebhorn) eponymous diner.  Frustrated at seeing Duncan's slacker son Malcolm put in charge after all the brilliant ideas the McBeths have had for improving the restaurant (like putting in a drive-thru, which is treated as a revolutionary idea, despite the mid-1970s setting -- um, I know I was still pretty young in the '70s, but I'm fairly sure drive-thrus were a widespread phenomenon at that time), ambitious Pat urges her somewhat lunk-headed husband to kill Duncan and buy out Malcolm.  Police Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) investigates; meanwhile, Mac's skeevy friend Banco (the reliably repulsive Kevin Corrigan) starts to suspect Mac.  And the three weird sisters are, well, weird "sisters" -- Andy Dick, Timothy "Speed" Levitch, and Amy Smart (who uses a Magic 8 Ball rather than a cauldron for her divinations).
 
Walken is hilarious as the mild-mannered McDuff, far and away the best reason to see this movie.  And though I wanted to ram a sock down his throat when I tried to watch The Cruise, Levitch is pretty funny here and works well with Dick (Andy Dick, that is).  I think the key with him is small doses.
 
But the movie is too precious and self-conscious by far, and while it occasionally works by its very overt ridiculousness -- at one point, Mac stops a conversation to get up and change the song on the jukebox to something more ominously appropriate -- most of the time it feels like a group of terribly clever theater geeks got together and wrote this one night when they were slightly drunk, and then somehow got a bunch of famous people to star in it.  And it's just hard to play the events of Macbeth in this setting -- I mean, in Scotland they were fighting over a kingdom.  It's a little harder to go with Mac's murders when they're over a dinky greasy spoon in Nowheresville, PA (the PA part, incidentally, you'll have to take on faith, because unlike Diamond Men, you get zero sense that it's actually in Pennsylvania ... probably because it's not: the IMDB says it was filmed in Nova Scotia.  Why not just call it "Nova Scotia," then?  That's just as fitting, and I bet even Canada has trailer trash and fast food).  You get the feeling the plot unfolds the way it does because they're following the plot of Macbeth, not because that's how the plot would evolve organically, so the characters and their actions aren't terribly convincing.
 
Anyway, it would be mildly entertaining as a rental; Christopher Walken is worth the price, and the clothes and music are good (in the sense that they're dreadful, but they fit the era).
 

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