Scotland, PA.

Shakespeare in Vain should have been the title of the 1998 burlesque Shakespeare in Love but it'll also do to describe Scotland, PA.?an updated parody of Macbeth. Popularizing Shakespeare to a fault, it's about a ruthless young Pennsylvania couple in the 1970s who will do anything to turn the diner where they work into their own fast-food joint. According to the presskit, Joe "Mac" McBeth (James LeGros) and his wife Pat (Maura Tierney) "dream of fame, fortune and french fries." This bad idea might seem like a Happy Meal in today's facetious, postliterate climate accustomed to dreadful, fast-food Shakespeares like Baz Luhrmann's 1996 abomination Romeo + Juliet and last year's execrable Othello-update, O. Attempting to be hip, Scotland, PA. travesties life?the essential thing that comes through in Macbeth and gives it lasting power.

Power of a different sort ought to be the subject of Scotland, PA. "We're not bad people, we're just underachievers who have to make up for lost time," Pat says, justifying her husband's extremely hostile takeover. Instead of dissecting the McBeths' villainy, director-writer Billy Morrissette is more interested in joking about small-town, working-class losers. Okay, so he transposes Shakespeare's poetry into 70s vernacular, but it's like Kevin Smith stumbled upon a "Classics Comics" version of Macbeth just prior to making Clerks?it's a slacker comic-tragedy and verbally undistinguished. Morrissette might have explored minimum-wage desperation as listless Mac takes orders from his boss Duncan (James Rebhorn) and Pat tires of drudgery and boorish customers. Their venal plans could have connected to something universally recognizable (as in Mike Judge's hilarious Office Space) or satirized middle-class privilege?as with Duncan's wayward sons, stoner Malcolm (Tom Guiry) and gay Donald (Geoff Dunsworth), who don't care about the family business that's got the McBeths so anxious. But Morrissette ignores the everyman substance one hopes to see from indie filmmakers. He denies Mac and Pat's grunt existence a proper Shakespearean analogy because his first priority is flaunting his narrative gimmick (The Bard for the bored). Mac and Pat's banal greed never evokes the mystery of evil?or the joke of bad career-planning. Worse, it falsifies working-class ambition?the thing Mike Leigh got right with the would-be restaurateur in Life Is Sweet.

Every Macbeth point Morrissette remembers (especially every killing) is meant to spring a laugh. Mac's friendship with Banquo/Banco (Kevin Corrigan) is so simplified that their mutual betrayal does not inspire horror, pity or reflection. This isn't a populist reinterpretation of Shakespeare as in previous Macbeth remakes Joe Macbeth and Men of Respect; Morrissette refuses insight into ambition, guilt, violence, fidelity?varieties of human nature?as if such themes got in the way of hipster entertainment. Scotland, PA. winds up being primarily about the filmmaker's own imprudence as Morrissette banks on audience illiteracy and his own facetiousness.

The central fact that Macbeth is not a comedy eludes Morrissette, a former actor, who has chosen to make his directorial debut against theatrical convention. He follows a questionable cultural trend that says no art form need be taken seriously. (Intellectuals call this "postmodernism," film execs call it commercialism.) Yet, Morrissette's acting background should have shown him that once you get past the cauldron-stirring witches, there is nothing to parody in Macbeth. It remains among the greatest dramas because it elaborates the workings of envy and ambition in stark, ominous, poetic terms that still perfectly express how people dream, scheme and fear. (Fame and Fortune are indeed as trivial as french fries compared to what Shakespeare showed actually motivates human beings.) Morrissette's cursory view of small-town anomie is more suited to tv's Bewitched than Macbeth. He appeals to a generational taste for nonprofound, less credible forms of art. In fact, Scotland, PA.'s opening sequence pays homage to the old Dennis Weaver tv show McCloud (wink, wink). Kitsch like that doesn't derive from Shakespeare but Morrissette somehow (postmodernly? commercially?) thinks there's no difference. He may have gotten his idea of how to make trash from McCloud but his tale of penny-ante bungling and murder pays little attention to the psychology (Shakespeare's discovery before Freud) or the anthropology (Shakespeare's discovery before Darwin) that can be found in common American life.

Nothing's wrong with having a pop sensibility, but to use it as the basis of a McWorld spiritual/economic critique (replete with the McBeths' McDonald's-like golden arches) is, well, idiotic. This facile analogy is no substitute for what we learn from Lady Macbeth's classic lines about "the milk of human kindness" or "Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him." Post-Tarantino, those epiphanies mean almost nothing. (Kindness has disappeared from most movies, and blood constantly flows from the screen.) Morrissette has no equivalent to those lines because filmmakers today don't countenance shock or regret. (His ideal audience would be like those youngsters in Renaissance Man who thought Hamlet was "about a little pig.") Scotland, PA. enshrines immorality by making light of it. Morrissette depends on pop-cultural references to gain distance on human horror.

Get past Morrissette's puns (the three witches are now annoying hippies; McDuff becomes Lt. Ernie McDuff, played Columbo-style by Christopher Walken) and Scotland, PA. is simply a dull mass of cultural trivia. The subtlest jokes feature Donald Duncan's Joe Namath poster and Mark Spitz tv footage as 70s gay totems (what, no Dan Gable?), while the obvious 70s song cues pop up incessantly, as in Moulin Rouge. Morrissette's lampoon of 70s pop doesn't evoke the development of social consciousness as in the Farrelly Bros.' affectionate Outside Providence; it's just fatuous?like American Psycho's ridicule of 80s pop. None of it is trenchant enough to make us reconsider what death or ambition or global economics means.

In the 1991 My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant incorporated Shakespeare's Henry IV to unexpectedly controversial effect. Today his experiment seems inspired. Van Sant allowed that even in the worlds of teen hustlers and junkies, there was something to learn from Shakespeare. He made startling, instructive parallels between contemporary experience and classical drama that, against the drift of the George Bush/Bruce Willis zeitgeist, insisted upon honor and trust. The unusual friendship (unrequited love) between Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix gained depth from Van Sant's knowing contrast of the Prince Hal-Falstaff example (in which rich-boy Reeves also betrays his street-crony Bob Pigeon, played by William Richert). Van Sant has never made clearer sense of class exploitation and emotional fealty. It proved he understood the play in a personal, meaningful way. Morrissette's vacuous stunt gives his actors nothing to draw on. Walken's become a bored emblem of boredom. LeGros has lost that disarming stockboy appeal he had in Stacy Cochran's My New Gun and Maura Tierney gives one of those energetic-but-vapid, Nicole Kidman-type performances. These McBeths are an uncompelling couple; we only know their type from other movies. They don't add up to Shakespearean models of behavior (that is, our private selves). Unlike Van Sant illuminating eternal truth, Morrissette's jokey update is a failure of the pop(ular) instinct. Scholar Harold Bloom suggested that Shakespeare "invented the human," but Scotland, PA. is its denigration.