The Talkies/Men and Their Vessels

...For—assuming one is capable of suspending one's philosophical antagonism along with one's disbelief—there's a lot to enjoy here...

...Silent Propulsion System himself), offers a distaff nightmare...

...he keeps a stash of forbidden old magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan...

...Since, unlike ninety-nine out of a hundred women in Gilead, she is fertile and free of venereal infection, Kate is sent to a re-education camp of sorts where she sleeps on a gymnasium floor with several dozen other fertile young women and is harangued endlessly by a pretty, wholesome-looking instructress named Aunt Lydia (Victoria Tennant...

...Here's the story: the Soviets, in an attempt to enhance their first-strike nuclear capability, have built a submarine, the Red October, with a propulsion system so quiet that American sonar can't detect its presence...

...One never feels as if one knows any of them...

...They're taught to grovel...

...The country was the Republic of Gilead...

...Much of the time she just doesn't strike one as a woman who has lost her husband and child...

...Kate lives in their lovely suburban home and, whenever the Commander wishes, participates in the "ceremony," a weird, impersonal fertilization ritual in which the Commander, Serena, and Kate (now renamed Offred) all take part...

...Kate, as it happens, is assigned to a couple of VIPs: the Commander (Robert Duvall), an army officer who is in charge of security for the entire state, and his wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway...

...in particular, her concern for her daughter—whose whereabouts she doesn't know —seems to materialize on those occasions when the script calls for it and then to disappear...

...Jesus, that's a big sucker," says an American when he gets his first look at the Red October...

...Then we watch a young couple and their small daughter trudge through a snow-filled forest in an attempt to sneak across an international boundary...

...Every woman's fear...

...Atwood has worked out Gilead's whole social system—everything from grocery-shopping protocol and the role of television to birthing rites and rituals of punishment—and it's fun to watch it all unfold...

...Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...You're going to be handmaids," Aunt Lydia tells them...

...I f The Hunt for Red October con- 1 stitutes a solid, two-hour chunk of male fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood and scripted by Harold Pinter (Mr...

...But a bit of this meticulousness goes a long way, and after a few minutes one finds oneself thinking that it's all rather too fussy, that the potential for human drama is practically stifled by a welter of minutiae, that the characters are getting lost amid all the nicely rendered particulars...

...But it doesn't work: all the characters in Hunt are plot functionaries, and they stay plot functionaries...

...The revolution, Aunt Lydia informs her charges, was triggered by the proliferation of "lazy women, sluts" who, failing to respect their bodies as "temples of purity" and to recognize fertility as a "precious gift," advocated such evils as abortion, birth control, and artificial insemination...

...But it's wonderfully ridiculous...

...What would Bruno Bettelheim have said about all this...

...When Bart Mancuso (Scott Glenn), the Dallas's wary captain (who's inclined to think Ramius a warmonger, not a defector), lets his ship's location be known to the Soviet sub, he says, "Well, we've unzipped our flies...

...She never quite comes into focus: if at times she's impertinent, at other times she comes off as torpid, apathetic...

...No Tom Clancy hero, she...

...This hurts in the case of Ryan, and it hurts even more in the case of Ramius, whose motivation for deserting his country is hinted at but never made real...

...I'm talking also about such elements as the lighting, which is painstaking (though the film should more properly carry a credit not for lighting but for chiaroscuro), and the sound, which is so impeccably miked that every opening of an envelope, every jangle of a set of keys, seems to offer itself up as a potential aesthetic experience...

...and singlehandedly, he has himself dropped by helicopter onto the American attack submarine Dallas and—but I don't want to ruin it for you...

...Naturally, Kate doesn't dig this new life...

...Such, as I say, is one's initial reaction to The Handmaid's Tale...

...On the one hand, he seems sincere when he argues that pre-revolutionary America "was in a mess," torn apart by black, gay, and women's pressure groups, and had to be cleaned up: "Nobody really knew how to feel anything anymore: respect, reverence, values...

...this movie gives us, well, subs...

...Let's just say that without Jack Ryan we'd all probably be plunged into World War Three...

...Here, as in those films, there's a real undercurrent of terror: set aside the silly politics, in fact, and the suspense easily surpasses that in The Hunt for Red October...

...I'm not just talking about the much-heralded sequences involving submarines and other military hardware...

...To watch The Handmaid's Tale is to climb for a couple of hours into the cranium of a canny feminist with a fantastic imagination, and it's a real adventure...

...I was wrong on both counts...

...Directed by Volker Schlondorff, The Handmaid's Tale gives us a feminist dystopia, a Women's Lib version of 1984...

...Dunaway—who brings to her part a breathtaking intensity—is the standout: the minute we see her as Serena, we know she can't be trusted...

...and he patronizes an underground nightclub where other high officials of Gilead dance with bimbos ("Jezebels") in black tights and excessive makeup...

...Top Gun gave us the warplane-asphallus...

...One reason for this is first-rate acting...

...If this all sounds ridiculous, it is...

...The film acquaints us with the wacky folkways of Gilead by taking us, step by step, through Kate's new life...

...How much braver, wittier, and more to the point it would have been, one thinks, for Atwood, Pinter, and company to depict a future America in which men are incarcerated for calling eighteen-year-old females girls rather than women, for finding attractive women more attractive than unattractive women, and for getting excited by naughty photographs in magazines...

...Needless to say, Hunt is a man's film...

...and in Gilead, if his wife can't do the job, the state—taking its cue from Genesis 30, in which Jacob's barren wife Rachel invites him to impregnate her handmaid Bilhah—provides him with a woman who can...

...as in The Stepford Wives, and as in Rosemary's Baby and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, much of the dramatic impact of this film derives from an association of the thoroughlyoutlandish and creepy with the familiar and domestic...

...His camera angles invite us to focus on details we wouldn't ordinarily pay much attention to: the flag button on a Soviet diplomat's lapel, the coffee cup on a Kremlin bureaucrat's desk...

...But after the first half-hour or so, one realizes that this picture is simply too ridiculous to stay angry at, and one actually relaxes and starts to enjoy the damn thing...

...There's something genuinely spooky, too, about the stylish, well-bred Gilead housewives in their standard-issue uniforms—blue dress, pearls, and blue pillbox hats—who make the women in The Stepford Wives look like Jane Fonda in Barbarella...

...Sex with the Commander is icky...

...Their plan misfires: the husband is shot dead by border guards, the daughter is seized, and the wife, a librarian named Kate (played by Natasha Richardson, who bears an amazing resemblance to the slender-faced, frizzy-haired, dewy-eyed Miss Atwood), is taken into custody...

...And they're given assignments...

...The lighting is especially distracting: so many submarine-interior scenes are lit mainly by the dramatic red glow of the navigational equipment that one gets to wondering why the crewmen don't spend their spare time developing pictures...

...It's ridiculous in the way that solemnly paranoid movies always are...

...One of the movie's primary flaws, indeed, is that for all its feminism, its heroine is a largely passive character whose one definitive act in the whole movie seems rash and pointless, and who—in a final irony that may or may not be intentional—relies on men for her deliverance...

...when Ramius, who has taken the Red October out on its maiden run, informs the Kremlin of his intention to turn the ship's highly advanced technology over to the United States, his superiors initiate a search-and-destroy mission...

...At first, to be sure, one is irritated by this film's inanity, its vulgar religion-bashing, its thoroughgoing political correctness...

...You're going to serve God and your country...

...Yet for all the richness of Dunaway and Duvall's performances, neither of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 37 their characters pays off as one expects them to...

...As for Duvall, he makes the Commander arrestingly ambiguous...

...officials) but because he aims to defect...

...If she doesn't have a baby, she knows, it will officially be her fault, and she'll be dispatched to the "colonies" (apparently some sort of gulag...

...In the Republic of Gilead, such women aresummarily executed...

...It seems only a matter of time before somebody in the household finds her out, gets angry, and turns her in...

...You know, presaging glasnost, and all that...

...Or will somebody—Nick, her friend Moira (Elizabeth- McGovern), or perhaps a sympathetic neighborhood handmaid—help her escape...

...In one such scene, the reflected red light forms a hideous shape on a man's face which reminds one very much of Gorbachev's birthmark, and for a couple of minutes one sits in the theater munching popcorn and wondering: Hmmm, could this be a symbol...

...Once upon a time in the recent future," we read in the opening explanatory note, "a country went wrong...

...singlehandedly, he divines how Ramius plans to carry off this scheme...

...She can't run away: the city in which the Commander and Serena live is heavily militarized, with armed checkpoints all over the place, and if she tries to escape she'll be killed...

...Singlehandedly, Ryan ascertains that the Soviets have developed this amazing sub...

...They learn a new doxology (all together now, to the tune of "Old One-Hundredth"): "Remove our anger, cleanse our will;/And leave us empty to be filled...

...The movie, directed by John McTiernan from a script by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart, proves to be a thoroughly straightforward, sturdy thriller which differs from other films in this genre neither by its brilliance nor by its intricacy but, chiefly, by its production values...

...McTiernan has said that Hunt is about how Ryan "learns to stand up and be a man among men," and one gets the idea, watching the film, that something 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 of this sort is indeed supposed to be happening...

...As for Natasha Richardson, she falls a tad short of making Kate thoroughly coherent and sympathetic...

...But what ca' she do...

...The Commander is virile, sanctimonious, horny, humane, and hypocritical, and somehow Duvall makes the combination believable...

...THE TALKIES MEN AND THEIR VESSELS by Bruce Bawer Given everything I'd heard about The Hunt for Red October, the new film based on Tom Clancy's bestselling novel, I'd expected to be (a) confused to death by the brilliantly complicated plot and (b) blown away by the extraordinary level of suspense...

...That's where Kate and the other fecund females come in...

...Remember Chernenko...

...Meanwhile, everybody on our side is completely in the dark about what's going on, except, of course, for one guy: the spunky young Britain-based CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin...

...They're given official handmaid garb: bright red habits and veils...

...For it is a historical movie, set in the dark, early-80s days of Konstantin Chernenko...

...At Serena's suggestion she copulates behind the Commander's back with his young driver, Nick (Aidan Quinn), even though it's a capital crime...

...In Gilead, it's understood that while men can't be expected to keep it clean, women are different: "We have self-control, dignity...

...Underneath the Gilead-housewife sweetness and light, she radiates looniness, resentment, malevolence: it is plain that she desperately wants a baby, and it is also plain that she will be desperately hostile toward the handmaid who furnishes her with one...

...Besides, as months pass without a pregnancy, it becomes clear to her that he's sterile...

...A woman's duty is to bear a man's children...

...Meanwhile, behind Serena's back, the Commander has frank, intimate tete-a-tetes with Kate...

...Miss Atwood's icy homeland to the north...

...What the Kremlin doesn't know is that Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), who has been put in charge of the sub, is eager to vacate the Evil Empire, and has chosen as his officers other would-be defectors...

...singlehandedly, he talks White House officials into buying his argument and helping Ramius out...

...You're not an equal, you're a handmaid: that is your role in life...

...At least so its advertisements brag: "One woman's story...

...It's a big movie, but McTiernan likes getting close to, and lingering over, little things...

...singlehandedly, he figures out that Ramius is heading our way not be-cause he's gone crazy and wants to bomb New York (as the Soviets have told U.S...

...On the other hand, he likes being around the feisty Kate and enjoys being beaten by her in cards and Scrabble...

...ultimately, both actors' efforts seem largely wasted...

...It's not long before we realize that Gilead is America—an America, to be specific, of the near-future, in which an anti-feminist revolution has brought to power a ruthless autocracy that takes its notions of sex, marriage, and justice straight from the Old Testament—and that the country to which Kate and her family hoped to escape was (where else...

...Just as the world trembled at Sputnik, declares a Kremlin lackey, so the world "will tremble again at the sound of our silence...