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The Handmaid's TaleRating:
Release Date: 11 December, 2001 Retail Price: $19.98 OUR Price: $11.97 You SAVE: $8.01! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
The Handmaid's Tale Reviews
A Dark Fantasy Worth Watching
Margaret Atwood, a Canadian novelist (and poet) wrote the dark fantasy novel upon which this DVD is loosely based. The novel is set in The Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, or at least the parts of the US that are not radioactive. The radioactive parts are called the colonies, where bad girls are sent to die of radiation poisoning. The time is the near future, after the inevitable nuclear war, and the breakdown of government as we know it.
The society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, DVD and novel, is a nightmare: everyone is watched by the Eyes, ,women are strictly controlled. They are forbidden to have jobs. They may have no money of their own. They are irrevocably assigned to classes.. There are, at the top, the chaste, but morally superior, Wives, almost all of whom have been rendered infertile by the inevitable nuclear war. At the bottom are the housekeepers, or Marthas, who are non-entities. In the middle are the Handmaids of the title, who are fertile, but tightly controlled.
Handmaids are forced to have sex with the Commanders, the husbands of the Wives. During this sex, the Wives are intimately present to take in any "love" their Commanders have to give.
The Handmaids are trained to remain unattached to the Commanders. They are prohibited from using makeup or doing anything to make themselves attractive. Handmaids are forced to turn their offspring over to the Wives. And Handmaids are never taught to read. They are left illiterate.
Kate is a Handmaid who, despite her training (read brainwashing), recalls her past, her loving husband, and her adored daughter. She tells with sparkling, and terrifying clarity, how the society came to be the way it is.
The governmental aspect of the story is instructive, but that part of the novel is almost entirely missing from the DVD.
The government is totalitarian and monotheistic. The one god is very strict, and has His Eyes everywhere. Robert Duvall, in the role of a Commander into whose home Kate is introduced, gives a Bible reading performance on this DVD that will chill the truly religious to the core.
Kate's personal story is heartrending. It reminds one of the miseries of, say, the women of Darfur. When the government breaks down, she and her husband and daughter attempt to flee to Canada. Unfortunately, they are caught. Her daughter is "confiscated." Her husband is taken away. She never sees her husband again.
Her "training" is depicted in gory detail, which is more vivid on the screen than in the book.
The DVD is a must-see for anyone who cares about women's rights.
Great book, weak movie
Taken on its own, this is a reasonably enjoyable movie. Some social collapse turns the US in the Nation of Gilead, a brutal theocratic oligarchy. With the social collapse, there was some ecological collapse as well, leaving "one in a hudred" (so they say) women able to conceive. Those fertile few are forced into service, to ensure heirs to oligarchs - male ones, of course - with barren marriages.
Fay Dunaway plays the scheming wife behind The Commander (Robert Duvall). Natasha Richardson takes the role of Kate, or "offred" as she is called in her position as human brood mare. The cover of this DVD gives a hint of what's inside. Richardson has an unusual face, with equal parts strength and fragility in it. It makes her unique - not "pretty", but beautiful in a way that applies only to her. The cover picture has airbrushed that distinctive face into standard, Barbie-doll look, and lost everything in that face that made it real. That's kind of what they did to Atwood's book, too. They jammed it into the conventional mold with a happy ending (or happy enough). That Procrustean fit required a fair bit of trimming - as with Richardson's face on the cover, they discarded everything about the book that made it so memorable.
If you haven't read the book, it's a fair movie. If you have read it, don't get your hopes up.
//wiredweird
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