In a sentenceTwo hours of shrieking girls, and the only frightening person in Salem never raises his voice
Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. A group of girls slips out at night to dance in the woods with the slave Tituba (Charlayne Woodard); the Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison) catches them, and by morning his daughter will not wake. Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), the ringleader, was dismissed from service by Elizabeth Proctor (Joan Allen) after an affair with Elizabeth’s husband, the farmer John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis), and she still wants him. To save herself from a whipping she cries witchcraft, the other girls follow her, and the names begin. The Reverend Hale (Rob Campbell) arrives with his books on the Devil, Thomas Putnam (Jeffrey Jones) has quarrels of his own to settle, and Judge Danforth (Paul Scofield) is sent to hear the cases. Proctor knows the girls are lying and knows what it would cost him to say so.
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Nicholas Hytner takes Arthur Miller’s play out onto the marshes and loses some of its pressure, and the hysteria is played louder than it needed to be. But Paul Scofield’s judge is quietly terrifying, and Joan Allen is nearly as good.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 about the Salem witch trials of 1692 and about the McCarthy hearings he was living through. Here, adapting his own play for the screen, he works with Nicholas Hytner, whose previous film was The Madness of King George (1994). The result is a serious, well-acted, handsomely dressed 123 minutes that is often gripping and nearly as often shrill. It is worth an evening. It is also a lesson in how much a play can lose when the walls are taken away.
Hytner and Miller have taken the play outdoors. The girls’ dance, which Miller kept offstage, opens the film: night, a fire, Tituba chanting, Abigail with blood on her mouth. Andrew Dunn shoots the village under a flat grey sky, all mud, salt marsh and dark water, and Lilly Kilvert’s Salem is timber and whitewash with ceilings low enough to stoop under. Bob Crowley puts everyone in black and brown and starched white, so that a flushed face reads from across the meeting house. It all looks right. The trouble is that the play’s power comes from people trapped in rooms with one another, and every time the film cuts to a procession or a shoreline the pressure drops.
Paul Scofield is the reason to see it. His Danforth does not appear until the village is already in its fever, and once he does he barely moves; he sits, he asks a question in a low even voice, and he waits, and the waiting is worse than anything the girls do. When he tells a frightened man that a person is either with the court or against it, we felt the air go cold. This is where the film becomes properly frightening: not in the screaming but in a reasonable man explaining, patiently, why he cannot now be wrong. Joan Allen matches him from the other side. Her Elizabeth has forgiven her husband and cannot make it look like forgiveness, and the kitchen scene between her and Day-Lewis, two people talking about supper when neither means supper, is the best written and best played thing in the film.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Proctor as a big, sweating, physical man who would rather plough than talk, and for the first hour that is exactly right; when he finally shouts, we believed it had cost him. Later the performance goes up a notch and stays there, and the final stretch asks for more of that than it can carry. Winona Ryder is the problem. Her Abigail is all intention and no cunning; she shows us she is lying when the character’s whole power is that nobody can be sure. Alone with Day-Lewis she looks like a girl with a crush, and Abigail needs to be more dangerous than that. Bruce Davison’s Parris perspires splendidly, Peter Vaughan gives Giles Corey a stubborn, comic dignity, and Rob Campbell’s Hale is the one person on screen whose mind we actually watch change.
The fits are the film’s weakest stretch. Hytner stages the girls’ seizures as full-cast set pieces, bodies on the floor, screaming in unison, and Tariq Anwar cuts them fast, face to face to face, so that we never get to watch one girl decide to join in. By the third of these we were tired rather than horrified, and we suspect the opposite was intended. George Fenton’s score does not help; the strings rise with every accusation, and we were grateful whenever they stopped.
Against The Madness of King George, which had the sense to keep its best scenes in small rooms, this is the louder and lesser film. Against the play it is faithful almost to a fault: the speeches arrive intact, which on screen can feel like a man addressing a hall. The second half goes where the play goes; anyone who did it at school knows, and we will not repeat it. What we will say is that the quiet scenes in the final stretch earn their feeling and the loud ones spend it.
Watch it at home, where the screaming is smaller and the faces are larger. Scofield does not need a big screen; he barely needs the lights on.
The reviews lean positive but not strongly, and the split is wide. Most critics agree that the film is a faithful, serious piece of work and that Paul Scofield is its chief reason to watch: his judge is named as the standout even by the critics who dislike the film around him. Winona Ryder draws praise from more than one quarter, and Daniel Day-Lewis, Joan Allen and the cinematography are singled out by those who rate it highest.
Where the critics part is over what the move from stage to screen has cost. Even the warmest notice, from Empire, concedes that opening the play out loses some of its claustrophobia. Variety goes further, finding the adaptation stirring in places but unconvincing at its climax, and the Los Angeles Times finds it too frantic and schematic to involve, reserving its approval for the quieter scenes with Scofield. The spread runs from near-rave to outright dismissal, with little settled in the middle.
The critic calls it an almost perfect adaptation, though opening up the play loses some of its claustrophobia. They single out Paul Scofield’s mesmerizing performance as the film’s standout.
Read the full review →Caro says the play is brilliantly brought to the screen. He singles out Winona Ryder’s performance and Paul Scofield’s commanding presence as the film’s dramatic highlights.
Read the full review →The review calls the film an enthralling, fine drama and a superb adaptation, though it may not appeal to everyone. It praises the performances, especially Winona Ryder, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Joan Allen, as well as the cinematography.
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Read the full review →McCarthy finds the adaptation emotionally stirring but diminished in impact and ultimately unconvincing. He singles out Paul Scofield’s commanding performance as the standout, while criticizing the film’s failure to make its climactic spiritual transformation persuasive.
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Day of Wrath · not reviewed yetDreyer’s witch trial, shot in candlelight, where nobody needs to scream to terrify.
The Madness of King GeorgeHytner’s earlier stage adaptation, and the one that keeps its nerve in small rooms.
A Man for All SeasonsScofield again, a man of conscience against a court, and quieter still.
The Witch · not reviewed yetPuritan New England played straight, with the Devil actually in the woods this time.
Good Night, and Good LuckThe hearings Miller was really writing about, filmed in cigarette smoke and black and white.
