There's nothing subtle about this screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's cautionary fable, but the premise is nothing if not provocative: in a repressive fundamentalist dictatorship (called Gilead, but ostensibly America in the near future) the few remaining fertile women are forced to bear children, in effect becoming sexual servants to the (male) powers-that-be. Gilead may be colored red, white and blue, but there's more than a passing resemblance to Orwell's Oceana; even the act of conception is reduced to a ritual, with the euphemism 'ceremony' doubling for intercourse. A talented cast does its best with Harold Pinter's typically inscrutable screenplay, but under Volker Schlondorff's dispassionate direction the film never achieves a convincing level of oppression or paranoia. Worse, it lacks a story to match its scenario; the handmaid Offred's redemption is achieved only with the help of another man, which seems to deflate the feminist slant. The final result is nowhere near a successful movie, but never less than a fascinating failure.

This is a nightmare vision of the future. It seems 1 out of every 100 women is fertile (for some reason). The ones who aren't perform slave labor. The ones that are are "sold" off to rich families where they have sex with the husband to produce a baby. Kate (the late and missed Natasha Richardson) is one such servant to Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway) and her husband the Commander (Robert Duvall). Kate wants out--but it seems there's no way.The synopsis only scratches the surface of a VERY dark and disturbing movie. It slowly shows how women are treated and used and it just gets more horrifying as it unfolds. The parallels to Hitler's Nazi Germany are fairly obvious but here we have barren women instead of Jews and gays. The good acting by everybody makes this hard to shake off. Aidan Quinn (as Nick) and Duvall are OK; Victoria Tennant is chilling as a leader of the camps; Elizabeth McGovern is just great as a fellow prisoner who befriends Kate; Dunaway is also very good in her role. Best of all is Richardson. This couldn't have been an easy role but she pulls it off beautifully. She died at far too young an age. This is basically an unknown movie and it's easy to see why--it's far too dark and disturbing for a general audience. However the ending is (sort of) uplifting (and changed from the book). Grim, dark and depressing. View it at your own risk. The ceremony sequences are almost impossible to watch and shocked the hell out of me the first time I saw this.

I haven't read Margaret Atwood's novel but judging from this movie version of it, I'd have to guess she dislikes social constraints, war, patriarchal societies, and religion.It's the future, kind of, without much in the way of futuristic technology but a social order that amount to a projection of women's fantasies circa 1970. The Commander (Robert Duvall) rules the roost, and what a roost it is, and with what a codified pecking order. Toxic substances have so polluted our resources that 99 out of 100 women have been rendered sterile. The remaining fertile ones are put through a kind of Fascist Esalen Institute and have their collective consciousness raised. Like the rest of the community -- except for the Rebels who blow things up once in a while -- the school is based on the Old Testament and everyone goes around mouthing clichés like "may the Lord open." The more adaptable of the handmaids graduate and their wardrobe changes from scarlet to a rich blue. The ones who misbehave are punished. Slight infractions include such perversions as masturbation and they lead to the bastinado. More serious breaches of the code, such as fornication, lead to the noose. Sex is for procreation, not recreation. And the Commander has his choice of students whom he tries ad seriatim to impregnate. What he doesn't know is that while his chosen partners may be fertile, he's shooting blanks. The reason he doesn't know this is that men aren't tested, just women.The plot is a little too crazy to describe in detail. The eponymous handmaid is Natasha Richardson, and she takes a lover on the side, Aidan Quinn. The Commander gets what's coming to him, I guess, and the film ends hopefully.Wow, this story dates badly, gushing as it does from the same well as "The Stepford Wives." The difference is that "The Stepford Wives" was so ludicrous as to be funny. (Even the author, Ira Levin, joked about it.) This one takes itself seriously.I don't know where to begin in trying to assess this. The only time this brainwashed student body can express anger is during public executions. There is a scene in which the red-robed young women of the school loose their pustular passion on some poor guy who's supposedly raped a woman. (Actually, "he's a political.") This horde of women descend on him like a pack of African wild dogs and literally rip his head off. It may be a little unlady-like but it happens. When the Mojave Indians waged war, they would stun their enemies and throw the bodies back to the women, where the victim would be systematically deboned and excoriated. And that's nothing, compared to my ex wife.There are many different ways to impregnate a woman to insure the survival of the species but anything other than the old-fashioned way is abjured because the Bible doesn't have anything in it about modern technology. Natasha Richardson must put up with matter-of-fact couplings during her periods of ovulation, and she winds up cutting Duvall's throat, even though he's grown a little fond of her over the months. Not in LOVE with her. He's too insensitive for that. But fond of her in the way that we might be fond of a pet cat or dog.There is a shot of black people being rounded up and hauled away by armed guards. And that scene reminded me of a popular essay from the late 1960s, passed from hand to hand, when everyone wanted Victim Power. It was written, I think, by some college student and entitled "The Student as N*****." Everyone wanted to be compared to blacks -- exploited, looked down upon, and generally held in contempt.The movie reflects this desire for victimhood paradoxically. It rejects the exercise of power by endorsing the empowerment of women. Most "anti-war" movies are similarly configured. We can revel in the horrors our men and women undergo while winning the war and still leave the theater filled with jingoistic pride and ready to kick butt someplace else. Cecil B. DeMille was fond of demonstrating how disgusting decadence and sex were by showing us as much of it as he could.The acting isn't bad, except for Victoria Tennant, who has never uttered a believable line in any of her films. Natasha Richardson is about perfect in the part of the victimized handmaid. She's been there before as Patty Hearst. And she fits the part -- petite, winsome, and thoughtful too. Elizabeth McGovern has the role of the requisite wise guy, secretly rebellious, earthy and full of common sense. Every prison story needs this character.I don't really think, though, that men want to dominate women in the heartless way this film shows, though no doubt that men would like cooperative and, at times, compliant wives, just as women would like husbands who aren't ashamed to talk about relationships and weep. If nothing else, every human being, regardless of sex, has a mother and that fact must in some way shape our attitudes towards women in general. Atwood's paranoid vision is flawed, an obsession rather than a fully thought-out image of what we all are.

thoroughly abject, plain Jane production design and vanilla mush of a story. The premise of this lunatic, virginity-obsessed oligarchy that America has somehow become is merely unexplored window-dressing to a soporific and pedestrian story arc. All in all this film stands as an anti-adaptation of the source material. Hard to believe Volker Schlondorff was a participant in turning this one out. Aside from consideration of this doleful picture it is rather amusing to notice that to a comment every positive review of this film is a transparent excuse for righteous soapboxing against misogynism in society rather than the film per se.