The Scarlet Letter (1995)

User Rating:

4.5/10   

Director:

Roland Joffé

Writers (WGA):

Nathaniel Hawthorne (novel)
Douglas Day Stewart (screenplay)

Release Date:

13 October 1995 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Tagline:

When intimacy is forbidden and passion is a sin, love is the most defiant crime of all.

Plot:

In 1666 in the Massachusetts Bay colony, Puritans and Algonquian have an uneasy truce. Hester arrives from England...

Plot Keywords:

Jail | Quaker | Massachusetts | Adultery | 1600s

Awards:

1 win & 9 nominations

Cast

Demi Moore	...	Hester Prynne
Gary Oldman	...	Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale
Robert Duvall	...	Roger Chillingworth
Lisa Joliffe-Andoh	...	Mituba
Edward Hardwicke	...	Gov. John Bellingham
Robert Prosky	...	Horace Stonehall
Roy Dotrice	...	Rev. Thomas Cheever
Joan Plowright	...	Harriet Hibbons
Malcolm Storry	...	Maj. Dunsmuir
James Bearden	...	Goodman Mortimer (as Jim Bearden)
Larissa Laskin	...	Goody Mortimer
Amy Wright	...	Goody Gotwick
George Aguilar	...	Johnny Sassamon
Tim Woodward	...	Brewster Stonehall
Joan Gregson	...	Elizabeth Cheever

MPAA:

Rated R for violence and sexuality.

Runtime:

135 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Colour (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

USA:R (certificate #34090) | South Korea:18 | Argentina:13 | Australia:M | Finland:K-14 | Germany:12 (f) (bw) | Iceland:16 | Portugal:M/16 | Singapore:M18 | Spain:13 | Sweden:15 | UK:15

Filming Locations:

Oyster River, British Columbia, Canada

Company:

Allied Stars Ltd.

Trivia:

Three original scores were written for this film. The ones by Ennio Morricone and Elmer Bernstein were rejected. The one used was by John Barry.

Quotes:

Pearl: [voiceover] Who is to say what is a sin in God's eyes.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield (1997) (VG)

Soundtrack:

Agnus Dei

A travesty of a great novel

Why should anyone find it necessary or even appropriate to hijack one of the landmark works of American literature to replace it with an emotionally slack, thematically vacant, and feebly agenda-driven narrative? Demi Moore's curious Scarlet Letter is almost an hour underway before it even reaches the point where Hawthorne's book begins: whereas Hawthorne's novel is a study of sin, psychological torment, and forgiveness, this film has neither heart nor mind behind its high-gloss presentation: it is apparently a libertine tract in defense of adultery, and an attack, pretentiously lofty but incapable of more than junior-high subtlety of thought, on intolerance.

This can only be pulled off at all by systematically reducing Hawthorne's three-dimensional characters to flat and dull-witted markers, inane in their dialogue, a set of manic and breathy artifacts of a soap-opera sensibility. Accordingly, the characters of Hester Prynne (Moore) and her erstwhile husband Roger Chillingworth (Robert Duvall) emerge as parodies of themselves -- bad acting and bad direction across the board by one bad actress and one good actor. Gary Oldman's Arthur Dimmesdale is astoundingly more or less credible for whole scenes at a time, but he has nothing to play against, and the thematic underpinnings of the story have been knocked out from under him. One can defend this film for its cinematography, for its score, and for any number of other production-based virtues, but when they are all added together, they still don't come close to justifying the film's existence. It is a vulgar and banal demolition of one of America's greatest novels.