The Scarlet Letter To Die For
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva 'A' IS FOR APPALLING 'The Scarlet Letter' & 'To Die For' Freely "adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" states-warns- one of the opening credits of Roland Joffe's...
...A transitional device to let us know that several years pass between the two halves of the story...
...Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale gallops over to Hester (this is the Meet Cute scene), struggling to extricate her carriage from mud, and asks, "Can I help you...
...As Curtis Harnack has observed, "In The Scarlet Letter, guilt and sin allied with moral values that transcend the milieu described...
...The talented chameleon Gary Oldman, as Dimmesdale, looks at ease in period garb and is well-spoken but delivers flurries of emotion so superficially that nothing in his performance abides in the memory...
...This one line transforms Hester Prynne from the embodiment of natural decency and instinctive courtesy into a wisecracking cutie from "Melrose Place...
...Not from up there [that is, on his horse] you can't" Excuse me...
...When her good-hearted but rather dim husband (Matt Dillon) threatens to stand in her way, she seduces a teen-ager and gets him and his pals to murder her spouse...
...So we should judge the movie on its own merit, right...
...and what does she reply...
...For the dialogue scenes, choose a pretty location, place your actors, get them reciting...
...so why does she pursue a deadend job at a cable-TV company...
...The only value this movie has is in the way it perfectly demonstrates state-of-the-art cinematic banality...
...But who populates the movie version...
...Of course, this time-moldered formula wouldn't exasperate if the dialogue were good, but I've already given an example of that...
...The remarkable Robert Duval, in the great role of Roger Chillingsworth, alternates between sleepwalking and spasm but never gets a chance to define a human being...
...Repeat ad infinitum...
...This new Scarlet Letter is the latest revenge of the present upon the past for not being the present...
...Broken by his guilt, Arthur will at last arrive at self-knowledge and honesty...
...Attacking nuclear war in Dr...
...And yet the net result is an impression of stupidity: the stupidity of the character and the story, and the fatuousness of filmmakers entranced by their own slyness...
...Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, z-z-z-z...
...Dimmesdale further sins in his hypocrisy...
...I love the last two words...
...As for the action sequences, they are equally formulaic...
...Within the author's nature struggled two antagonistic world views: the absolute morality of his Puritan forefathers and the liberal, forgiving ethic of a nineteenth-century humanist...
...A slick-chick Hester with an aer-obically sculpted body, a worker-priest Dimmesdale whose main obsession is to translate the Bible into Algonquin, and a Chillingsworth who is closer to Hannibal Lecter than Mephisto...
...Sample dialogue by Douglas Day Stewart: Dimmesdale (admiring the wilderness setting of Hester's house): "It's beautiful...
...So much for the movie on its own terms...
...Okay, here goes...
...Strangelove, Kubrick did indeed make the generals psychotic and silly, but their commander-in-chief, President Mandrake, was shown as moderately intelligent and well-meaning...
...Not for sex, for she's not particularly sensual, and not for money, for his family isn't particularly well-off...
...Then shoot each talking head from over the shoulder of the listener, just before he or she replies...
...As to what it signifies as an adaptation of a great American classic, I'm no Hawthorne expert, but isn't it pretty clear where the power of this novel comes from...
...Pause) Still untouched...
...Hester and Arthur sin by their adultery...
...Demi Moore, chin up and eyes shining, comes on like the cosseted darling of a prep school's drama department...
...Director Joffe knows the drill and sticks to it...
...Edward Harwick (Dr...
...Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is a small-town girl who's determined to become a celebrity television journalist a la Jane Pauley and Connie Chung...
...Rather than panicking when the police move in, she basks in the sudden visitation of celebrity...
...But Pearl's very presence accomplishes that without narration: if she's a baby midway through and a seven-year-old at its conclusion, can't the audience figure out how many years have passed...
...Examples: The film is narrated by Hester Prynne's little love child, Pearl...
...Attacking the folly of war in Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin was shrewd to make his mass murderer brilliant...
...The human race can be satirically skewered only when the satirist shows that even its brightest members serve folly...
...Early in the movie, while crashing a media convention, she's told a salacious story by an executive who doesn't spell out the meaning of the punchline because any moderately bright fourteen-year-old would get it...
...The harder she struggles with her British accent, the higher her eyebrows arch...
...And when Suzanne gets her comeuppance, it's precisely because of her (literally) incredible lack of mother wit...
...The scarlet letter that I would emblazon on the chests of the moviemakers is a big C for Cleverness, the self-preening and ultimately self-defeating sort...
...It's this psychological and moral tug-of-war that produces the true drama of The Scarlet Letter...
...Explain loose ends in the plot...
...By contrast, we can shrug off Suzanne's crimes as the work of a near-idiot...
...In fact, they are portrayed as downright vegetable...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva 'A' IS FOR APPALLING 'The Scarlet Letter' & 'To Die For' Freely "adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" states-warns- one of the opening credits of Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter...
...Instead of Hawthorne's great climax with the minister revealing his own scarlet letter carved by guilt on his flesh, an Indian raid caps the movie and the lovers are allowed to ride off happily into the sunrise...
...and the cuckolded husband, Prynne/Chillingsworth, sins most of all in his vindictiveness...
...Everything in this movie, from the nifty opening credits to the ironic closing shot, bespeaks adroitness of design and pop-culture knowingness...
...So why does she tie herself to a working-class, smalltown boy...
...What is her narration supposed to do...
...But Suzanne doesn't...
...Let Hester merely go to market and what does John Barry's music do but swell up into a crescendo full of echoes of Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, and every other film composer ever hired to make us think of rolling plains, cascading waterfalls, awe-inspiring canyons, and America the Beautiful...
...For how can sin and virtue interact when, according to the ethics of La-La Land, virtue means feeling good, and the only sin imaginable is not doing your own thing...
...To Die For does what no satire should do: it lets us off the hook...
...Judged strictly on its own merits, The Scarlet Letter may be the worst American movie of the year...
...But Hester truly loves Arthur, and her forbidden passion breeds compassion, sensual warmth, courage, fortitude, ma-ternality, honor...
...more importantly, the nuclear arsenal itself was an awesome creation and its delivery system a work of technical wizardry...
...Pearl hasn't even been born in the first half of the movie, and during its second she is too young to understand what's going on around her...
...It doesn't...
...Watson to the late Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes on PBS) makes the Puritan governor a recognizable human being, but the rest of the supporting cast is spurious, with even the great Joan Plowright reduced to dimpling and twinkling...
...Instead of the complex interaction of sin and virtue, we get flippant self-exculpation ("Who is to say what is a sin in God's eyes...
...Illuminate motivation...
...So helpful for those of us who don't know what Eden represents...
...Just as Eden must have been...
...It doesn't...
...She's obviously read a lot about how certain media celebrities had their careers ignited...
...I don't pretend to have seen every American film this year, but I can testify that this glib atrocity is crasser than Showgirls (though not so salacious), drippier than The Bridges of Madison County (though not as sincere), smugger in its political correctness than Pocahontas (though lacking cute, furry animals), more inept in its storytelling than Batman Forever (but without Batman's excuse of having no real story to tell...
...Hester: "Yes...
...All satire attacks the self-destructive stupidity of humankind, yet, if the main characters of the satire appear moronic, the thrust of the satire is canceled...
...To Die For is, of course, a satire and, fortuitously, the first movie of the life-after-O.J.-era...
...Since the heroine is so stupid, the teen-agers she turns into killers must be shown to be dumber than she is...
...Hcriptwriter Buck Henry and director Gus Van Sant wouldn't mind pinning a scarlet letter on the heroine of their movie, To Die For, but this particular A would stand for Ambition...
...Consider: our heroine, from childhood, has lusted to make a splash in the big-city media world...
...You can walk in on this movie at any moment of its running time and witness gross stupidity...
...And-strangest character of all-Chillingsworth becomes a veritable philosopher of the malign, a Puritan version of Goethe's Mephisto...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 20
