94 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very poor adaptation of an excellent novel..., December 10, 2003
This review is from: The Handmaid's Tale (DVD)
I first read Margaret Atwood's book The Handmaid's Tale for a women's studies course at my local community college and I enjoyed it very much. It is a very important work, much in the same vein as Orwell's "1984," but more hopeful, and told from the perspective of a woman. However, the movie was a huge disappointment and loses much of Atwood's message.
A quick overview of the story: Offred is a Handmaid in a futuristic, dystopian society known as Gilead. The birthrate in Gilead is very low due to severe toxic pollution, and so the remaining fertile women are selected to be Handmaids whose sole purpose is to become pregnant by the upper class men (called Commanders). As soon as they provide their Commander with a child, they are packed off to another household to do it all again. If they are ever unable to bear more children, they will more than likely be labeled "Unwomen" and shipped away to a work colony to die. Handmaids are not allowed to read, and can only leave the house with permission. The book consists mostly of Offred's thoughts about her former life and her current position. There are hints of a resistance movement, but no one in this world can ever be sure that anyone else is trustworthy. Offred does not know what is real, or what is safe, and lives in constant fear. The regime has made it illegal for a man to be termed infertile, so if a Handmaid has no children, it is blamed on her without question. Offred's Commander is obviously incapable of fathering children, and she faces relocation to the colonies if she does not conceive. As her time runs out, the suspense builds to a crescendo of urgency and terror.
The film does not capture the full horror of the world Offred, the story's main character, lives in. In the movie she appears to have almost unrestricted freedom of movement, able to wander about the house and even leave it without permission (for example, she just trots off to the Red Center one day and spends the night - this never happened in the original story), whereas in the book she was monitored constantly. There is also absolutely no reference to the Handmaids not being allowed to read, so a viewer that has not read the book would likely wonder at the significance of the scene where the Commander presents Offred with a magazine as a gift. Offred also smiles quite often in the movie, and there are no allusions to her frequent thoughts of suicide, which are readily apparent in the novel.
My biggest disappointment with the movie, however, was the altered ending. Atwood's book leaves us wondering, and actually gives the reader the task of creating the end of the story themself through the way they choose to live their life. The movie, however, provides us with a very neat, tidy, pretty little ending that allows the viewer to forget all about the characters without a twinge of conscience - they're obviously ok, right? So what's that got to do with my life? The movie ending does nothing to make the viewer think or realize that if we aren't careful right here and now in our own lives, everything might not turn out so prettily. There is no lesson, or moral to the story, when Atwood very plainly intended for her work to pack a real punch.
I really don't think the novel is even a good candidate for adaptation into a movie, because the book is very slow, centering mostly around Offred's thoughts. She cannot do much, so most of the time she just sits in her room, and it is her contemplations during this time that make up the bulk of the writing. It would be very hard to accurately represent the novel in film without making the movie boring. The director of this film obviously realized this and so he spiced it up and tried to make it into an action movie. It just doesn't work.
To make matters worse, the acting in the film is very wooden. Natasha Richardson, who plays the main character, is particularly unconvincing. It is hard to feel for the characters because they just don't seem real. The whole atmosphere of the film is stiff and unnatural.
Nevertheless, before I close, I would like to point out the few things I actually did like about the movie (and hence why I'm giving it two stars rather than just one):
The scene depicting the monthly "ceremony" is particularly moving. It is rather hard to watch, but I believe it really captures the event as described in the novel. I particularly liked the fact that the camera focuses for a moment on Serena Joy at the end of the scene, showing her emotions as the Wife - something we don't get so much of in the novel.
The movie also does a good job of showing the relationship between Offred and the Commander. The viewer can easily see that the Commander sees Offred as a pet - something fun to play with and indulge, but nothing he really cares about. She is like a toy for him, and one that can easily be replaced, just as Offred has replaced the Handmaid before her.
Overall, though, I would not recommend this movie to anyone. It just doesn't convey the message that Atwood intended, and it's not even very entertaining in and of itself. Read the book instead. You'll get so much more out of it.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely scary, but worth watching, January 7, 2003
This review is from: The Handmaid's Tale (DVD)
The first time I watched The Handmaid's Tale I was hooked! Like Huxley's Brave New World, it is a scary vision of a possible future in which birth is regulated by the government. Unlike Huxley, however, The Handmaid's Tale is also a vision of something far worse--what happens when religion is twisted around and used as a means to force people to do something they don't wish to do, especially if said religion controls the State. Whether it's Christianity or New Age, or any other religion for that matter, a religion-controlled State can be a very bad thing.
The actors in The Handmaid's Tale are a very good bunch. Natasha Richardson as Kate/Offred turned in a stunning performance, as did Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall as Serena Joy and the Commander. Aidan Quinn was excellent as Nick, and I loved Elizabeth McGovern's scheming, wily Moira. Victoria Tennant gave me the chills in her role of Aunt Lydia, and the role of Ofglen, though small, was wonderfully handled by Blanche Baker.
All in all, The Handmaid's Tale is a good movie. My only gripe with the DVD is that it didn't have any extras apart from the trailer, but the film itself is definitely worth watching.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, weak movie, November 19, 2005
This review is from: The Handmaid's Tale (DVD)
Taken on its own, this is a reasonably enjoyable movie. Some social collapse turns the US in the Nation of Gilead, a brutal theocratic oligarchy. With the social collapse, there was some ecological collapse as well, leaving "one in a hundred" (so they say) women able to conceive. Those fertile few are forced into service, to ensure heirs to oligarchs - male ones, of course - with barren marriages.
Fay Dunaway plays the scheming wife behind The Commander (Robert Duvall). Natasha Richardson takes the role of Kate, or "offred" as she is called in her position as human brood mare. The cover of this DVD gives a hint of what's inside. Richardson has an unusual face, with equal parts strength and fragility in it. It makes her unique - not "pretty", but beautiful in a way all her own. The cover picture has airbrushed Richardson's charm into a standard, Barbie-doll look, and lost everything in that face that made it real. That's kind of what they did to Atwood's book, too. They jammed it into the conventional mold with a happy ending (or happy enough). That Procrustean fit required a fair bit of trimming - as with Richardson's face on the cover, they discarded everything about the book that made it so memorable.
If you haven't read the book, it's a fair movie. If you have read it, don't get your hopes up.
//wiredweird
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