Movie Review: "The Scarlet Letter"

Another review from Matins of two years past. I remember The Scarlet Letter as being a good read. When we had to read it silently in my high school English class I was the only one who laughed out loud at Hawthorne's intro - and I can still remember people looking at me like I'd lost my marbles. But as for the movie --

I tried to watch the first 15 minutes of the video of 'The Scarlet Letter'. It was so awful that I knew I didn't need to see the 16th minute. Later my wife and I watched the last 10 minutes or so - it was simply ludicrous. How does so much talent go so wrong? Reminds me of what some guests on Charlie Rose said the night before about Marlon Brando in "The Missouri Breaks' - neither the director nor the cast had any idea what they were doing with it, so they decided to just have fun. Perhaps that gave Brando an opportunity to act out his contempt for Hollywood.

Which doesn't explain why 'Scarlet Letter' was so bad. Partly the script was utterly misconceived. Every character in the book is completely rewritten to hit the proper PC note. The script tries to pile every sin of the American past as conceived by the liberal silly class onto one poor little colony struggling for survival. Mistreatment of the Indians, women, slaves, and for all I know cute little puppies. Witch trials and hangings, murder, puritanism carried to murderous lengths, obsessed with sex. It's all jammed in there somewhere.

The Puritans, who at the very least must have been an interesting lot, are pictured in unrelievedly negative tones. You began to wonder how a people eking out an existance on the edge of a wilderness could spend so much time being as nasty as they are here. I thought the Puritans rested at least one day of the week.

Most of the scenes have all of the incompetent, staged earnestness of a high school Christmas pageant. I suppose it could be exhibit 'A' in the Right's indictment of liberals in Hollywood for hating America, but that would be imputing too much serious thought on the part of the perpetrators of this movie. Perhaps they merely thought they were appealing to a 'sophisticated' crowed, the young movie goer, who would understant that too much religion in a community leads to, well, adultry with a capital A, among other things.

Apparently poor besotted, anti-Semitic Mel Gibson judged his audience a bit better.