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'The Crucible': Guilt Tripping

Surely the point of any serious political play or film is to make the audience, when faced with some morally questionable action, reluctantly acknowledge, "I could do that." The movie of "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's celebrated play about the Salem witch trials, makes the audience ask, "How could they do that?"

Like the play, Nicholas Hytner's film doesn't press us to challenge our own consciences. The audience is given handsome, upright John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) as a stand-in, and encouraged to despise the weak-minded, if not downright evil, people of 17th-century Salem. Avoiding similar social calamities in the future is clearly quite simple -- the good people (us) must simply find the evil people (them) and neutralize them.

The Salem witchcraft panic, in which 20 people were killed, remains a much-studied, essentially unexplained piece of American history. One thing we do know is that the most vocal of the "possessed" girls, Abigail Williams, was 11 years old (her companions were around the same age). In the movie Abigail is played by Winona Ryder, who ritualistically sucks the blood from a rooster's neck, and later drools with sensual pleasure as she watches a slave being beaten.

This Demon Girl has got her hooks into a Good Man, one John Proctor (Day-Lewis), who has done the dirty deed with her and now heartily wishes he hadn't. Not that it's his fault. He was driven to it by his frigid wife, as she finally admits, begging him over and over to forgive her.

Proctor tells Abigail to get lost, and, as we all know, Hell hath no fury, etc. Next thing you know, Abigail and her girl gang are having fits and accusing all and sundry of having bewitched them. A prime target, of course, is Mrs. Proctor (Joan Allen); when Mr. P objects, he finds himself accused. Soon the whole town has gone crazy, pointing fingers at innocent people and persecuting them just like the McCarthyites in the 1950s! Of course, as Kenneth Tynan once pointed out, though there were no witches, there were Communists, so the respective leaps to hysteria didn't take off from the same sort of platform. But it's more fun to depict your enemies as being completely without justification, as well as nuts.

The sad thing about all this is that, during the McCarthy era, Miller behaved with singular political courage. He challenged the House Committee on Un-American Activities, risking imprisonment and putting his career very much at risk. He was brave, and he was modest and unpretentious about his bravery. Unlike Lillian Hellman, he didn't make a myth of his defiance. He knew as a man what real heroism was, yet he didn't or couldn't make use of it as an artist.

Hytner has filled the cast with good actors, but he's used them in obvious ways. Day-Lewis is not required to be anything but noble. Allen is such a purse-mouthed wife that you see why her husband ran to Ryder's nubile temptress (Hytner keeps turning Allen sideways, as if to emphasize that she has no chest). Ryder might as well have S-L-U-T tattooed on her forehead. None of these performers is bad, but what they're doing is shallow and ultimately uninteresting.

Paul Scofield has the plum role of Judge Danforth. The grimly religious Danforth is a pleasure-hating ascetic, and Scofield has the puffy, drooping face of a man unacquainted with self-denial: He looks more like the Marquis de Sade than a Puritan judge. But he gives the role his all, struggling mightily to inject some humor, gentleness and integrity into the character. Miller's script isn't going to let him get away with that. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Danforth is shown up as a hypocrite who applies one set of standards to his own sort of people and another to the vulgar masses, and all the actor's attempts to make the character a recognizable human being come to nothing.

The only role with any ambivalence written into it is that of the Rev. Hale, who starts out smugly confident that witchcraft exists and ends up an anguished skeptic. It always helps an actor to have some conflict to play, and Bruce Davison is quite good in the role. In contrast to the other actors, his face is open, ready for experience; he freshens every scene he's in.

"The Crucible" is a period piece, but the period isn't the 17th century, it's the 1950s, with its sexual skittishness and out-of-control teenagers. The kitten-with-a-whip villainess, the pseudo-poetic dialogue, the melodramatic division of good folk vs. evil -- all these bring the script to the verge of the ludicrous. But Hytner treats it as if it were Shakespeare. He doesn't seem to understand that what he's directed could be subtitled "Blood-Crazed Teen Bimbos From Inner Space."

The Crucible is rated PG-13.