BruceMcM

Why should anyone find it necessary or even appropriate to hijack one of the landmark works of American literature to replace it with an emotionally slack, thematically vacant, and feebly agenda-driven narrative? Demi Moore's curious Scarlet Letter is almost an hour underway before it even reaches the point where Hawthorne's book begins: whereas Hawthorne's novel is a study of sin, psychological torment, and forgiveness, this film has neither heart nor mind behind its high-gloss presentation: it is apparently a libertine tract in defense of adultery, and an attack, pretentiously lofty but incapable of more than junior-high subtlety of thought, on intolerance.

This can only be pulled off at all by systematically reducing Hawthorne's three-dimensional characters to flat and dull-witted markers, inane in their dialogue, a set of manic and breathy artifacts of a soap-opera sensibility. Accordingly, the characters of Hester Prynne (Moore) and her erstwhile husband Roger Chillingworth (Robert Duvall) emerge as parodies of themselves -- bad acting and bad direction across the board by one bad actress and one good actor. Gary Oldman's Arthur Dimmesdale is astoundingly more or less credible for whole scenes at a time, but he has nothing to play against, and the thematic underpinnings of the story have been knocked out from under him. One can defend this film for its cinematography, for its score, and for any number of other production-based virtues, but when they are all added together, they still don't come close to justifying the film's existence. It is a vulgar and banal demolition of one of America's greatest novels.

This filmed version, of uneven production quality but sound performances, takes the slow and reflective course of Hawthorne's novel seriously and develops Hawthorne's themes with some maturity. Opinions may vary, but I found all the lead performances convincing -- a difficult job, given that they have somehow to encompass four different sets of sensibilities: those of the Puritan era in which the film is set, those of Hawthorne's 1850 Romanticism, the aesthetics of 1979 when the production was released, and those of the viewer in 2000. Parts of Meg Foster's performance are genuinely haunting. The piece is admittedly a bit dated, its filming techniques are a bit plodding, and its dialogue (inevitably) sounds a bit stilted. But it has the gumption to take on the dark and difficult issues the novel raises. For that it deserves a great deal of credit, and is worth viewing.