Like all microbudget indies, Never Say Macbeth suffers from its share of flaws, including a tendency towards over-lighting, a dubious electronic score, wobbly visual effects, and its fair share of performers who maybe aren’t quite great at what they’re doing. But what the film has that so many of its impoverished cousins lack, mired in thickets of relationship tragicomedy, is a fairly delightful personality, and a cute story born not of anybody’s conflicted relationship with sex or obsession with urban life, but of an unbridled love for live theater.
In a nutshell, the film is an exploration of the “Macbeth curse”: that anyone who says the title of William Shakespeare’s Scottish play is inviting doom upon the production. Danny manages to do that when he interrupts the play’s casting call while looking for Ruth (Ilana Turner), the production’s Lady Macbeth. Through circumstances neither more nor less contrived than they ought to be, Danny is cast as the First Witch, and gets to experience an outsider’s inside view of the quirky and deranged things that theater people do. Gradually, he starts to like this strange new world, even when it’s filled with things like mysterious smoke, crashing lights and ghost pirates of Penzance.
Never Say Macbeth isn’t a world-changer. There’s very little in here that you haven’t seen in most other films about theater (a genre second only to films about films in its navel-gazing ubiquity; for people trained to pretend to be things they’re not, actors sure like to play actors). But it’s charming as hell, anyway, and almost indecently eager to make the audience fall in love with local theater in all its tics and eccentricities. The film constantly strikes a balance between semi-irritating caricature and “I knew this guy” reportage, in figures like the ludicrous, zodiac-obsessed director Jason (Alexander Enberg), so enmeshed in his own vision that he fails to notice that Danny can’t even memorise dialogue, let alone act.
Directed by C.J. Prouty, the film is brisk and funny, without having much in the way of visual distinction (it’s also a touch over-edited…by C.J. Prouty, whose aesthetic seems to be that if you can film a conversation from three separate angles, it is well to utilise all three of them with abandon). Still, he is good as much for what he doesn’t do as what he does; unlike many indie directors, Prouty has managed to avoid the temptation for filigrees, never overloading the set with obsessively-collected bits of design. The film is clean and the blocking straightforward, which seem like funny things to praise until you’ve seen enough microbudget films.
One wishes that more indie films were this ambitious without aiming for giant themes about the totally of human existence. Sometimes, just a simple bit of good cheer is all you need; and of the two Shakespeare films of the week, I daresay that Never Say Macbeth has a good deal more of it. It’s tremendously cute and pleasing, and it wants to be nothing more.