marioncap

Nope, this film is NOT an accurate adaptation of "The Scarlet Letter" by any stretch of the imagination. It's more like a modern "Variations on a Theme by Nathaniel Hawthorne," or one of those Fantasias that 19th- century composers used to write with a famous, much-older melody as a starting point.

That said, I enjoyed this movie quite a lot. The depiction of late 18th/early 19th century Native American civilization on the Northeastern Seaboard is vividly and richly imagined; don't think I've ever seen this in a film before. Gary Oldman, as a wonderfully sexy and yet perfectly pure young Rev. Dimmesdale, probably would have pleased Hawthorne on the whole, and his chemistry with Demi Moore's obviously anachronistic, but compelling, Hester Prynne is delicious (their scene in the barn is very hot indeed).

Finally, something has to be said about the gorgeous John Barry score. What lovely, memorable film music! On the strength of the score alone, I encourage anyone who enjoys romantic stories (and won't be offended by the vast, ridiculous departures from Hawthorne's masterpiece) to give this movie a look.

I was thrilled and terrified by this movie, but also shocked that none of its reviewers seemed to understand it. Almost every review I've read misses the point of Tom Ripley's degrading job at Carnegie Hall's men's room: He worked the job so he could hear great music for free; for an aspiring young concert pianist, it was actually a pretty good job in the 1950s.

Nobody seems to have noticed that while Dickie Greenleaf just wants to goof around in Europe, Tom Ripley actually wants to play the piano professionally. Yes, of course he wants to be rich, but he doesn't just want to be rich for the sake of being rich. When Freddy finds him in Rome, he finds him because his landlady hears him practicing the piano at all hours. Tom Ripley longs for the rich life, but he wants it so he can play the piano! His horrible tragedy is not only that he kills the only person who can ever love him; it's also that he kills the only person who could ever understand and embrace him as an artist. He starts out as an aspiring artist with a once-in-a-lifetime freak chance, and ends up a serial killer.

Most reasonably-educated Americans alive today think they know something about the Civil War; but I would bet serious money that most don't know just how bloody and horrible it was. The sheer numbers of killed and maimed soldiers, between 1861 and 1865, is horrifying - and the new technology of photography made it possible for average citizens, reading their newspaper, to see the heartbreaking images of dead and dying young men lying on the battlefields. Now, digging deeper, it's even more horrifying that half of these brave young men fought and died to preserve a monstrous system in which people with light-colored skin enslaved people with dark-colored skin, for no good reason at all, except for the great enrichment of a small, wealthy white elite.

Faulkner wrote, more or less, that the past "isn't over; it isn't even past." He was terribly, absolutely right.