OK, I’m making the last part up. As for the rest–none of which is found in Nathaniel Hawthorne–it’s all up there on screen in Roland Joffe’s stupefyingly wrong-headed movie. By turning Hester into a feisty feminist rebel and Dimmesdale into a hunky P.C. loverboy, it may sound as if Joffe and screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart have created a camp marvel. Be warned: you’ll giggle only if you can stay awake.
Joffe is much too high-minded to merely give us a trashy bodice-ripper. (In an ideal world, he’d have cast Fabio and Suzanne Somers.) Determined to show up those Puritans for what they really were, he pillories his 17th-century villains on the rack of 1990s sexual politics. That’s not just silly and smug; it’s dramatic suicide. The real sin of this “Scarlet Letter” is that it doesn’t respect the concept of sin. The story makes no sense if you rob it of guilt, remorse and redemption. Once you’ve “liberated” Hester, there’s no reason she and the skinny-dipping minister don’t immediately hop in their wagon and make haste to the nearest Club Med. The sooner the better.
