Screen
Baumann, Paul
SCREEN THE BOOKS WERE BETTER 'HANDMAID'S TALE' & 'RED OCTOBER' Dull-witted adolescent righteousness is the sacred vocabulary of The Handmaid's Tale. Adapted from Margaret Atwood's well-received...
...The Hunt for Red October has suspense, or at least induced anxiety...
...Ideologically, the commander and his cohorts preach the Republican party platform...
...It all has the leaden touch of an undergraduate satirical review...
...This drear fable is animated by a kind of giddy blaspheming that takes a parodic delight in equating hymn singing with brainwashing, religion with fascism, sexual modesty with oppression, and most traditional notions of femininity with patriarchal violence...
...More contradictory, Kate's truest and deepest actions and Richardson's most powerful dramatic moments come in reclaiming her status as a mother...
...Indeed, much of the action takes place in a neighborhood that looks like the set for "Leave it to Beaver...
...Connery is dressed up to look a bit like Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, and he barely can summon the energy to lift an eyebrow every now and then...
...PAUL BAUMANNs...
...Prissy but brutal matrons run the program with switches at the ready...
...In short, every mention of God and religion is accompanied by some predictable atrocity or obvious secular platitude...
...Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the commander and his staff indulge in Hugh Hefner-like fantasies...
...She is called upon to submit to a hands-on procreative procedure in the presence of the unfruitful wife...
...And welcome, comrade, to a new world of cliches...
...But what is that roll of toilet paper doing hanging in the middle of the sonar panel...
...As a result of industrial and nuclear pollution, the vast majority of women are infertile...
...Ramius's attempt to defect and hand this bit of technological wizardry over to the Americans brings the world to the brink of apocalypse...
...A few concrete bunkers and military watchtowers, and a gaggle of black-uniformed guards serve as more menacing representations of our zoning ordinances...
...As allegory this negative Utopia is simple-minded and inert...
...Working ovaries are in great demand...
...In orthodox feminist fashion, The Handmaids Tale is intent on laying the blame for violence and oppression on a male fear of female sexuality and autonomy...
...Abortion, prevalent before the revolution, is righteously denounced...
...Undesirables are herded into concentration camps...
...Oddly, it's a kind of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid pairing...
...It's a macabre ritual, the work of a fastidiously prurient mind...
...Connery is as grave and resolute as Lenin...
...But this is all manipulation of a very mechanical sort...
...On the American side we are introduced to a succession of virile if chaste can-do types...
...Gilead's unique contribution to infamy is its treatment of women...
...Taking in his surroundings, the defector quotes Christopher Columbus...
...Richardson's Kate has an affectless demeanor that soon grows tiresome...
...Kate's truest soulmate is a wise-cracking lesbian played by Elizabeth McGovern, who has been convicted of "gender treachery...
...A handmaid, consecrated to her task in a mock religious ceremony, takes up residence with the sterile spouses...
...Scott Glenn, one of the nastiest looking hombres in the movies, commands the U.S...
...The sundering of the (dare we call it) natural relationship between mother and child is what gives The Handmaid's Tale what little emotional life it has...
...Robert Duvall, who affects an eerie impersonation of Ronald Reagan, is the police and military commander for the Scripture-thumping junta...
...To say the least, there is nothing subtle about this inverted world...
...Rape is judged a woman's fault...
...Indeed, the movie, which was directed by Volker Schlondorff, seems to be the work of people whose experience of evil is so slight that they can equate the folksy reactionary gibberish of Reaganism with genocidal misogynist violence, and the simplistic moralizing of Christian fundamentalism with totalitarianism...
...Much of the story is taken up with the convent-like indoctrination procedures used on the handmaids...
...What is about to unfold, we are told, takes place in the country of Gilead, where something went "very wrong...
...The ship's jet-like propulsion system makes it virtually undetectible by the Americans, and thus a destabilizing weapon...
...Adapted from Margaret Atwood's well-received novel, the movie is a feeble and incoherent political allegory set in a futuristic time but a very familiar landscape...
...Kate manfully rises to violence in defense of her dignity, but she must rely on a handsome blue-eyed stud (Aidan Quinn) for rescue and love...
...Director John McTiernan crosscuts deftly between blinking circuitry, underwater obstacles, gaining torpedoes, and sweaty brows...
...No, this pornographic political fantasy is more a symptom of the dehumanization inherent in mass secular society than a plausible cautionary tale about the evil lurking in the heart or under the pillbox hats of church-going suburbanites...
...submarine crack the mystery in less than ten minutes...
...Ramius, a secession-minded Lithuanian, is the grand old man of the Soviet submarine force...
...A class of fecund concubines, or "handmaids," is requisitioned by the state...
...subversives are exterminated...
...In the end, Ryan takes Ramius up a river in a still pristine American wilderness...
...sub that tracks Ramius down...
...Much of the glitzy electronic video equipment, all bathed in soft, numinous lighting, looks real enough...
...A reading from Genesis is used to sanction the most absurd and vile of sexual violations...
...slave labor tends to the municipal lawns...
...Alec Baldwin plays Jack Ryan, the dedicated, impossibly earnest CIA analyst who must convince his gung-ho superiors to hold their fire until he can schmooze with Ramius...
...Dunaway, as usual, slices through the pretense, giving the horror some real flesh and blood...
...Give us a break...
...He speaks like Jerry Falwell and operates like Heinrich Himmler...
...The Hunt for Red October is prostrate before the mumbo-jumbo, the sacred incantations, of military virtue and American exceptionalism...
...Traumatized by the murder of her husband and the loss of her young daughter, Ms...
...Provoked by the political influence and licentious antics of various "pressure groups," a Bible-touting and sexually purified elite has taken over America...
...Ironically, that atavistic longing is where real freedom resides in this fashionable horror story...
...PAUL BAUMANN...
...His approach to the Soviets seems modeled after George Bush's horror of broccoli...
...A leather fetishist lurks just below the surface of every outspoken prude...
...Natasha Richardson {Patty Hearst), Vanessa Redgrave's gifted daughter, plays the handmaid Kate...
...Sean Connery stars as Captain Markos Ramius in this water-logged adventure taken from the novel by Tom Clancy...
...America's moral superiority guides every missile, deflects every threatening torpedo...
...Ryan brightly responds, "Welcome to the New World, sir...
...And why, if the Red October is such a threat, does the hot-shot sonar expert aboard the U.S...
...These women are brainwashed and then distributed as breeding stock among the elite...
...When she comes up against Faye Dunaway, who plays the commander's predatory and imperious wife, this blunt approach seems especially unfortunate...
...Women are physically mutilated for masturbating and hanged for illicit fornication...
...Moving away completely from the politics of sex brings us to The Hunt for Red October, patriotic holy card confidently boasting that a Jeffersonian Democrat with an insatiable longing for a recreational vehicle is locked in the heart of every Russian...
...Blessed be the fruit," is one of the pious encomiums mouthed by the politically correct...
...He forsakes his vocation, however, when asked to skipper the new super-quiet sub Red October...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 8
