Blush With Shame

"Granted, novel-based movies don't have to be faithful to their books--and the makers of "The Scarlet Letter" sure put this freedom to use. But by basing a film on a classic of American literature, you beg your audience to ask how and why the original has been altered. Logic (certainly not experience) tells us that producer/director Roland Joffe and screen-writer Douglas Day Stewart couldn't have wanted to make the story worse, so they must have thought that they were making it better.

In so suggesting, the pair have accorded themselves another lettered badge of shame--picture them cheerfully crowning one another with conical hats emblazoned with the letter 'D'. With this film they will make public life their prison; their tortures will be the jeers and abuse of their audience. Yet such pain pales in comparison with the cruel and unusual punishment they have inflicted on the movie-going public.

And they don't even get the consolation of lapsarian love-making with Gary Oldman on a huge pile of oats.

In Joffe's eyes, even such starchy sex acts don't sufficiently round out the story of Hester Prynne, a woman hounded for her adultery with the local vicar Dimmesdale. He also interjects a premonitory canary which appears to have fallen in a pot of scarlet (Geddit?) paint. The scarlet admonition then materializes like a cartoon birdie every time Hester (Demi Moore) glances at a man. In a High Mass of heavy-handedness, this fowl of doom engages in virtual sex with the slave girl Mituba (Lisa Jolliff-Andoh) in a bathtub while Hester and Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman) go at it in the seed bins.

Not content with throwing in the odd gratuitous buttock scene or some flamingly inept symbolism, Joffe and Stewart decide to addend several new themes to give more scope to their crassness.

After all, what's a movie about colonial times without bloodthirsty Indians and irrational witch trials? While we're on this whole American literature kick, we might as well wrap up The Last of the Mohicans and The Crucible.

So Joffe has Demi throw twee tea parties which go horribly awry when all the guests are sentenced to hang for witchcraft. The evil magistrate has tightened the nooses round the hapless damsels' necks and with unimaginable cruelty is teasing his victims by rocking the rickety bench which stands between them and death. But he delays too long, giving the Injuns time to gallop up and save the day by attempting to slaughter all the inhabitants, starting, as luck would have it, with the malicious magistrate. Amid all the confusion of the attack, Joffe manages to sneak a cloyingly happy ending past the logic of the distracted narrative.

All this added material comes off as hackneyed as it sounds. But to give Joffe what little credit is due, a discernable logic underpins this pop-up-book montage of colonial history. He reads The Scarlet Letter as a dialogue between witches and Indians on the one hand and the Puritan colonialists on the other, between the untouched wilderness and the civilized world between our most authentic impulses and social norms. Predictably enough, he poses the question, "Who is really more civilized?"

But this rather trite dichotomy does give scope for the film's most redeeming quality: the cinematography. Director of photography Jonathan Cornick captures straight-laced Puritanism in idyllic shots awash with scullers, clapboard and steeples straight from an Eakins canvas. Dramatic cliffs and dense forests redolent of Bierstadt represent America's noble savagery. Happily, such arresting backdrops tend to distract the audience from the action.

The acting, too, helps to disguise the plot Demi Moore plays her part with a determination and recklessness that would have done Hester Prynne proud. Gary Oldman would cut a more convincing figure as her passionate and inspirational lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, if he weren't undercut by the melodramatic sermonizng thrust upon him by the script. And Robert Duvall steals the show as Demi's estranged pay chopathic husband, who has gone so native that the natives themselves decide they're scared of him.

But in the end, the spirited resistance of the cinematography and acting crumbles in the face of the relentless attacks of the script, like free spirits suffocating in a puritanical society.

How ironic that Joffe managed to liberate Hester and Dimmesdale from the tragedy of Hawthorne's narrative, yet in so doing passed a death sentence on his own movie. Perhaps a worthier self-sacrifice would have been not to make the movie at all.