Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 12, 1990 TAG: 9005120102
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DONNELL STONEMAN LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Making a movie out of Margaret Atwood's disturbing novel about a militant futuristic America was an undeniably daunting task. But, with a cast of excellent British and American actors, a screenplay by noted British dramatist Harold Pinter and the remarkably talented German director, Volker Schlondorff, at the helm, conditions seemed right for "The Handmaid's Tale" to become one of the season's top films.
Alas, things turned out quite differently.
The basic problem is the novel's underlying theme of soullessness. The story takes place "a few years from now" when the country, re named Gilead, has been taken over by a group of right wing religious fanatics. They govern at a time when nuclear waste, war and pollution have rendered all but one in 100 women incapable of bearing children. The few still fertile are rounded up like cattle, branded "breeders," or handmaidens, and assigned to certain government officials with whom they are to mate.
The copulation ceremony is based on the Bible's story of the barren Rachel who relied on her handmaiden Bilhah to provide children for her husband. If the chosen breeder also proves to be infertile, she is sent to a kind of concentration camp where she joins other outcasts to clean up toxic waste.
Kate (Natasha Richardson), the handmaid in Atwood's tale, along with her husband and small child, try to escape the oppressive regime and flee across the border to Canada. They are discovered and her husband is shot and her child is taken away. She is returned to a training center where, after fertility tests, she is renamed Offred and assigned to service a Commander (Robert Duvall) whose barren wife Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway) is a former television evangelist.
At first, Offred and the Commander's monthly sexual encounters are coldly, humiliatingly impersonal as Serena, stretched out on the bed behind the woman, watches her husband's face for the least sign of pleasure. Later, when he summons Offred to his office to share in the pleasure of a game of Scrabble and a perusal of a banned Vogue magazine, she realizes their forbidden relationship is headed toward disaster.
When she fails to conceive, Offred becomes desperate. Suspicious that the Commander might be impotent, she allows herself to be seduced by Nick, his chauffeur (Aidan Quinn).
The film, like the story, is a fascinating combination of various types of paranoia. Unfortunately, they remain in the background, intermittently punctuating the emotional landscape like flashes of summer lightning. Or, in too many cases, swooping fireflies.
The foreground is externally, and internally, bleak and drab. Women's costumes are color-coded with hand maidens dressed in ankle-length red, their supervisors in brown and wives in blue. Filmed in and around Durham, N.C., "The Handmaid's Tale" has the appearance of thrift, as if it were forced to get by on a shoestring budget. It can be rationalized that the subject lends itself to austerity. But the way the film is put together, it looks as if the camera had been locked down, limited to a narrow angle, fearful of catching a wider view.
The acting is similarly cramped. In an effort to convey the absence of soul or passion, Schlondorff has directed his cast to walk through their roles as automatons. It makes an interesting initial impression, but it eventually precludes any possibility of emotional response from the audience.
At the heart of the story, Richardson tries for an intellectual approach but, with no connecting link to the viewer, she becomes little more than a pawn in the author's cautionary tale.
Duvall plays the role of the commander with apparent sympathy and understanding, but hamstrung by the Atwood-Schlondorff combination, he gives an unexpectedly flat and disappointing performance. Dunaway does her usual close-to-caricature turn. Quinn's contribution is negligible, but Elizabeth McGovern is surprisingly sharp and cutting as Moira, Offred's lesbian friend who attempts to defy the system. Contrasted with the other characters' colorlessness, McGovern's Moira assumes an unwarranted large profile.
The film's most serious shortcoming is its failure to offer a sense of what the inhabitants of Gilead have lost. Without that, all the dreary posturing seems pointless. `The Handmaid's Tale' Showing at the Grandin Theater (345-6177). Rated R for nudity and sexual situations.
by CNB