The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood's acclaimed novel, adapted for the screen and turned into a high-minded but posed, uncomfortable human drama, despite an expert cast. Taking place in the soulless distant future, all young women have been turned into child-breeders for wealthy, infertile couples, with Natasha Richardson assigned to nightmarish twosome Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway. Elizabeth McGovern plays a lesbian who hopes to make a break for it (every totalitarian society should have one). Certainly watchable, though an icy cold presentation which promises to be much more than it is. Richardson doesn't flash a hint of her feisty personality, though McGovern is very good and Duvall does what he can with a terrible role. ** from ****

I have just one point to make about this film, and that is why on earth did the director decided to name Offred kate. In the book, which I hope to god the producers etc actually read, there is no mention of the name kate what so ever, the only name that we could possibly guess would be June which is supplied to us in the first chapter but even then we never learn her real name. And this is of great significant importance, the fact that we as readers or viewers never learn her name means something and to simply choose a name out of a hat is destroying a piece of the character created for us by Margaret Attwood. Also reading the plot outline makes me wonder whether whoever wrote that even saw the film, especially where it says "Kate is a criminal, guilty of the crime of trying to escape from the US, and is sentenced to become a Handmaid." when really "KATE" becomes a handmaid as her husband was married once before and their marriage never really existed in the eyes of the law. Also i read on to see that "After ruthless group training by Serena Joy in the proper way to behave, Kate is assigned as Handmaid to the Commander." Well that is not at all true as anyone who has seen this film will notice that Serena Joy is the commanders wife and not one of the Aunts and the Red Centre. Please in the future get your facts right and also thanks to director Volker Schlöndorff for ruining a perfectly enjoyable book. My advice stick to the book and not the watered down version for the small minded.

This movie, based on Margaret Atwood's story, concerns a woman living in the not too distant future in the Republic of Gilead, a country that was once the United States. The country is now run by fundamentalist Christians who have demoted all women to a second class citizenship. Nuclear war has made most women infertile, so the government has forced all the fertile women to serve as handmaids and bear children for the leaders and their infertile wives as part of a biblical prophecy. The infertile women are sent off to toil as slaves and clean up nuclear waste. This movie concerns one handmaid, Offred (Kate) and her struggle to escape Gilead, find her daughter, and flee to Canada. Not a bad movie at all, all the actors do very well. The material just runs very slow at points, and the character's aren't all that well developed.

There's nothing subtle about this screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's cautionary fable, but the premise is nothing if not provocative: in a repressive fundamentalist dictatorship (called Gilead, but ostensibly America in the near future) the few remaining fertile women are forced to bear children, in effect becoming sexual servants to the (male) powers-that-be. Gilead may be colored red, white and blue, but there's more than a passing resemblance to Orwell's Oceana; even the act of conception is reduced to a ritual, with the euphemism 'ceremony' doubling for intercourse. A talented cast does its best with Harold Pinter's typically inscrutable screenplay, but under Volker Schlondorff's dispassionate direction the film never achieves a convincing level of oppression or paranoia. Worse, it lacks a story to match its scenario; the handmaid Offred's redemption is achieved only with the help of another man, which seems to deflate the feminist slant. The final result is nowhere near a successful movie, but never less than a fascinating failure.

The handmaids in brilliant red, the wives in electric blue, the children in white--Margaret Atwood's neo-fascist state comes startingly alive in Schloendorff's film. The bright colors are oppressive in their uniformity, whether in the "ceremony"--Robert Duvall's passionless copulation with Natasha Richardson as she lies in the lap of his sterile wife, Faye Dunaway--or in the party to celebrate the birth of a handmaid's child, or the execution of another handmaid for fornication. There are several fine actors--Elizabeth McGovern and Aidan Quinn also play memorable, if brief, roles--but the cinematography steals the show here, giving this anti-Utopia the same oppressive tension as the original 1984 and far surpassing any version of Brave New World. It may be that Atwood's book, which I haven't read, adds layers of depth to the characters and plot, but Schloendorff's visualisation is a real enhancement to the tale. He creates the tension of a police state with only momentary intrusions of brutality or machinery. A strong film that will gain its following with time.