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AMONG THE TOP 20 PAPERBACKS on USA Today's best-seller list is The Scarlet Letter--the Cliffs Notes version. Bibliophiles who purchase that slim volume in lieu of dozing over the original will get a much clearer view of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 tale of heroism and hypocrisy than those visiting the new movie adaptation. It's a lugubrious, often ludicrous, wallow...
...stars are actually pretty good--Moore holds the camera's gaze as securely as any actress--but they can't save this revisionist slog. The film blames the 17th century for not being the 20th and Hawthorne for not being Danielle Steel. If this Scarlet got a letter, it would...
...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...
...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...
...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...