In fact, the more I found out about the project, the more sense it made. A century and a half ago, in the years before audience research, Hawthorne had composed his somber psychological drama with no way to know if readers might prefer a French and Indian War bodice-ripper instead. With nothing at stake but his own immortality, he could make his book as downbeat as he liked, but director Roland Joffe isn’t about to take that chance with a $40 million movie. Generations of English teachers have confronted their students’ bafflement at Hawthorne’s climax, in which Hester’s secret lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, confesses his sin and expires of grief on the town scaffold. Joffe said last week he wants the audience to understand that event as just a metaphor for Dimmesdale’s liberation, an interpretation that allows the movie to end on the less depressing note of Dimmesdale and Hester riding off together to start a new life. “As they reach the edge of the forest,” according to a version of the script obtained by NEWSWEEK, “Hester … unfastens the scarlet letter, letting it fall by the wayside. The rear wheel of the wagon rolls over it, partly burying it in the mud.” This is an ending Hollywood won’t have to test, because for years an English teacher in Emmetsburg, Iowa, named Tom Hoover has been asking his classes to Write their own endings to “The Scarlet Letter” and the students overwhelmingly preferred happy endings.
In many other ways, screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart-best known for his script for “An Officer and a Gentleman”-has improved on the novel to suit Moore’s particular talents. For instance, he’s given her a bathtub, so she has an excuse to admire her naked body in the mirror. (“Don’t look so perturbed, Mituba,” Hester tells her African servant-oops, sorry, did we forget to mention that Hester now has a slave?-"‘Tis only a bathtub, not a toy of Satan. ‘Tis quite the fashion in Europe.") Dimmesdale does his bathing in an ocean cove, having been transformed from the delicate and tremulous character in the book to someone who might plausibly be played by Richard Gere (although he reportedly turned the part down): “The broodingly handsome Arthur Dimmesdale … his body is lean, his stroke through the water sure and steady.” Hester has a barn, where she goes with Arthur when they want to be alone. " Passions soaring wildly," they do exactly what the Puritan fathers accused her of doing.
That’s another scene that Hawthorne left out of the book. In fact, the novel’s action begins long after Hester’s affair, when she already has a daughter, and covers the next seven years. The screenplay, by contrast, focuses on the affair and its immediate aftermath, which provides dramatic unity while enabling Stewart to virtually eliminate the character of Hester’s daughter, Pearl. That’s just as well, because I noticed in the book that Hester tried to control Pearl’s behavior using “both smiles and frowns.” I wasn’t sure Moore had the range to pull it off.
Of course, you can’t Please everyone. Hawthorne scholars, who fill American Transcendental Quarterly with papers on topics like “Covenant Theology and Arthur Dimmesdale’s Pelagianism,” will probably point out that the movie’s witch-trial subplot wasn’t in the book. Others may object to the way Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, meets his death in the screenplay: he hangs himself after mistakenly killing the wrong man, while disguised as an Indian and hoping to murder Dimmesdale and have it blamed on the Wampanoags. That would seem to detract from the exquisite subtlety of his psychological torment of Dimmesdale in the novel. The nation’s English teachers will walk out en masse on the big battle between the Puritans and the Indians, which Hawthorne also left out of his book, not realizing that someday “The Last of the Mohicans” would gross almost $150 million.
If this makes “The Scarlet Letter” sound like just another crass, mindless Hollywood costume epic, you’re missing the point of the story, which Joffe helpfully explained isn’t so much about religion as “the relationship between men and women politically.” Presumably this is what Moore’s associate Suzanne Todd meant when she told Vanity Fair that “we liken Hester Prynne a lot to Anita Hill.” “Let us pray for a brighter day,” Hester tells the condemned witch (in the movie). “Let a new truth be revealed to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.”
Looks like that day is getting closer; filming starts this summer.
