It is obviously not acceptable for Dimmesdale to believe he has sinned, and so the movie cleverly transforms his big speech into a stirring cry for sexual freedom and religious tolerance. Instead of dying of a guilty seizure, he snatches the noose from Hester’s neck and pulls it around his own, only to be saved when the Indians attack, driving a burning cart through the village. The roles of the puritanical local ministers are farmed out to supporting actors, and Dimmesdale is left to hang around sheepishly, keeping his guilty secret but regarding Hester with big wet eyes begging forgiveness and understanding.
Roland Joffe, who directed the film, says “the book is set in a time when the seeds were sown for the bigotry, sexism, and lack of tolerance we still battle today . . . yet it is often looked at merely as a tale of nineteenth-century moralizing, a treatise against adultery.” Actually, it is more often looked upon as a tale of seventeenth-century moralizing, and a treatise against hypocrisy. But never mind. Joffe adds: “And, of course, it is also a marvelous romance.”
Not so marvelous really. After insisting on living alone in a cottage outside town, which sets local tongues a-wagging, Hester is walking in the forest one day when she comes upon a man skinny-dipping in a pond. It is the reverend, although she doesn’t know that. She, and we, see him in the altogether, and then she hears him preaching in church, where he sounds a good deal more like Susan Powter than a Puritan.
Hester entertains lustful thoughts about his body, and they entertain her. (Gary Oldman, marvelous actor that he is, may not be everybody’s ideal of the perfect male physique—remember him as Sid Vicious?—but on the whole I think we can be relieved Brad Pitt was not cast.) Hester’s comely slave girl, Mituba (Lisa Jolliff-Andoh) prepares her bath, and then Hester slowly luxuriates in it by candlelight, while dreaming of Arthur. It is hard to see for sure, but I think she may be indulging in the practice that the nuns called “interfering with yourself.”
Meanwhile, through a convenient peephole, Mituba watches lustfully, for no other purpose, I believe, than to provide the additional thrill of one attractive woman observing another one naked. Will the sin that dare not speak its name make an appearance in Massachusetts Bay? Alas, no; the prospect of interracial lesbian love, appealing as it is to today’s filmmakers, would not quite fit into this story, even as revised and updated.
Soon Dimmesdale visits Hester, they become powerfully attracted to one another, and commit adultery on a bed of dried beans in the shed, while Mituba again watches them, disrobing and crawling into her mistress’s bath. Mituba holds a candle with its flame just above the waterline, and at the moment of their climax, she draws it under the water, extinguishing it with a hiss. This is way better than curtains blowing in the wind; it’s the equal of the moment in Ryan’s Daughter when, as the two lovers coupled, his stallion neighed and her mare whinnied.
The rest of the film is more or less as I have described it, although longer, much longer. Lurid melodrama develops after Hester’s husband arrives, played by Robert Duvall as if he’d never had sex in his life and didn’t want anybody else to, either. The movie’s morality boils down to: Why should this old fart stand between these two nice young people? The movie has removed the character’s sense of guilt, and therefore the story’s drama. (“Do you believe . . . what we did was wrong?” asks Hester.) Hollywood has taken that troublesome old novel and made it cinematic at last, although I’m afraid it’s still pretty dense.
S.F.W.
(Directed by Jefery Levy; starring Reese Witherspoon; 1995)
S.F.W. is the kind of movie to inspire members of Generation X to lie about their age. It qualifies Forrest Gump for a genius grant. It is a portrait of the most singularly stupid, obnoxious character I’ve seen on the screen in many a day—which would be promising, if he were not boring, as well.
The movie stars Stephen Dorff as Cliff Spab, who gets his fifteen minutes of fame when he is one of several hostages held inside a convenience store by mysterious terrorists. The hostage ordeal is telecast nonstop from security cameras inside the store, and Cliff soon becomes a global celebrity because of his nihilistic pronouncements and his debates with the terrorists and fellow hostages. His basic philosophy, expressed in the movie’s title, is “so fucking what?” That’s about as deep as it gets.
The hostage ordeal arrives at a crisis point on Day 36, when the store runs out of beer. Shortly thereafter, Cliff Spab finds himself free and back on the street, the adored hero of millions, his photo on T-shirts. Unfortunately, his parents are slow to applaud his heroism, and want him to clean up his room. He responds by trashing his private refrigerator, filled with beer, and going on a rampage before stalking out of the house.
The media hang on Cliff’s every word. “Everybody wanted a piece of me,” he complains in the narration. “Trouble was, there wasn’t enough of me to go around.” That would have been true even if they had only wanted an itsy-bitsy piece, since there is very little of Cliff to begin with. He is culturally deprived, has a low IQ, is narcissistic and alcoholic, and has one of those vocabularies in which the most popular four-letter word is used as an all-purpose substitute for thousands of other words unknown to the speaker.
Basically, Cliff’s pose is, he wants to be famous for not wanting to be famous. He is a reluctant celebrity, cheered for his reluctance. This pose reaches its absurdist climax when Cliff stars at a rock concert. His act is rather simple. The orchestra plays “Thus Spake Zarathustra” while Cliff walks out onstage and stands there, projecting reluctance to be made into a celebrity, and the audience cheers wildly.
The sayings of Cliff Spab will not soon be anthologized in those books of great movie lines. “If you think about it enough, you can go nuts,” he opines at one point. At another, asked “What are you rebelling against?” he rips off Marlon Brando’s famous response to the same question, “What have you got?” This must I think be counted an original line of Cliff’s, since the movie gives no evidence that he has ever heard of Marlon Brando, or anyone else.
In fairness to Jefery Levy, the director and cowriter, the film is intended as a satirical attack on the cult of celebrity, and it uses unconvincing lookalikes for such as Phil Donahue and Sam Donaldson in scenes where TV takes Cliff Spab seriously. One problem may be that Cliff Spab is seen at such great length that we grow very tired of him. His celebrity is no stranger, I suppose, than the attention given to such other marginal personalities as Kato Kaelin and John Wayne Bobbitt, but then again we have not been made to listen to Kato or John W. around the clock for more than a month. It only seems as if we have.
She’s Out of Control
(Directed by Stan Dragoti; starring Tony Danza, Catherine Hicks; 1989)
What planet did the makers of this film come from? What assumptions do they have about the purpose and quality of life? I ask because She’s Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it’s a first: The first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom clichés and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.
The film stars Tony Danza as Doug, a divorced dad with an unhealthy obsession about the dating behavior of his teenage daughter, Katie (Ami Dolenz). He wants to keep her forever trapped in an asexual prepubescent hinterland, but then Doug’s fiancée Janet (Catherine Hicks) takes the kid for a complete beauty makeover: hair, makeup, wardrobe, and attitude. And the next time Doug sees his daughter, she’s descending the staircase looking like she stepped out of one of those soft-core perfume ads.
Doug spends a lot of time looking at his daughter. He sees her so specifically as a sexual creature, and is so obsessed by what he sees, that in another movie his attention would probably seem perverse. The character he plays in this movie is so dim-witted and lacking in psychological insight, however, that his behavior is not so much perverse as slack-jawed.