"The Crucible" Movie Review
Bahliby Kidane
Pd. 6
Word Count (736)
The Crucible: An Adaptation Worthwhile
All of your memories of Arthur Miller's The Crucible won't prepare you for the scene that opens up director Nicholas Hytner's powerful movie adaptation. In 1692, a group of teenage girls gather in the woods of Salem, Mass., to conduct a ritual. In the late night, the girls all dance, chant, and strip in order to fulfill their wishes and dreams. This stuff is disturbing to say the least. One of them, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), even goes so far as to let down her hair and drink chicken blood, a charm to destroy the wife of the man she loves. The reason you won't remember such a memorable scene is because it is not in the original play: Miller, who was alongside Hytner during the production of the film, added the sequence to make visible what was left to our imaginations before. The scene sets a mood of fear and delirium that reverberates throughout the entire movie.
Hytner has done something startling with Miller's popular classic: he has made it pulsate with dramatic energy. And the opinion of this “energy” that is displayed throughout the movie is up to the viewer. In my case it just makes the film much more enjoyable than having to imagine the scenes play out in my head while reading the play. The devil may not be alive in Salem, but he lives undoubtedly in the minds of these young girls. They want to conjure the forbidden spirits, to experience the madness driven underground by a cold, repressed society. When they’re caught in the woods and put on trial for witchcraft, it sets off a chain reaction of accusations, denial, false confessions, and, you guessed it, more accusations. We're made to see a community engulfed by fear and paranoia, which blinds them of the simple truth.
The way The Crucible speaks to us today has less to do with any specific instance of collective indictment than it does with the relentless “come as a group” mentality of modern America, where
Pd. 6
Word Count (736)
The Crucible: An Adaptation Worthwhile
All of your memories of Arthur Miller's The Crucible won't prepare you for the scene that opens up director Nicholas Hytner's powerful movie adaptation. In 1692, a group of teenage girls gather in the woods of Salem, Mass., to conduct a ritual. In the late night, the girls all dance, chant, and strip in order to fulfill their wishes and dreams. This stuff is disturbing to say the least. One of them, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), even goes so far as to let down her hair and drink chicken blood, a charm to destroy the wife of the man she loves. The reason you won't remember such a memorable scene is because it is not in the original play: Miller, who was alongside Hytner during the production of the film, added the sequence to make visible what was left to our imaginations before. The scene sets a mood of fear and delirium that reverberates throughout the entire movie.
Hytner has done something startling with Miller's popular classic: he has made it pulsate with dramatic energy. And the opinion of this “energy” that is displayed throughout the movie is up to the viewer. In my case it just makes the film much more enjoyable than having to imagine the scenes play out in my head while reading the play. The devil may not be alive in Salem, but he lives undoubtedly in the minds of these young girls. They want to conjure the forbidden spirits, to experience the madness driven underground by a cold, repressed society. When they’re caught in the woods and put on trial for witchcraft, it sets off a chain reaction of accusations, denial, false confessions, and, you guessed it, more accusations. We're made to see a community engulfed by fear and paranoia, which blinds them of the simple truth.
The way The Crucible speaks to us today has less to do with any specific instance of collective indictment than it does with the relentless “come as a group” mentality of modern America, where