The Scarlet Letter movie review (1995)

The story, you may recall, involves a Puritan woman named Hester Prynne (Demi Moore) who is found to be pregnant even though her husband has not arrived in the Massachusetts Bay colony and is feared dead.

After refusing to name the father of her child, Hester is condemned to wear a scarlet letter on her bodice. Her daughter Pearl is born, and grows up as a willful little vixen. It is revealed that the father of the child is Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman), leader of the local bluenoses denouncing Hester. And then her long-lost husband, Roger Prynne (Robert Duvall), turns up, assumes another identity and tries to determine who was the thief of his wife's affections. The novel ends with poor Dimmesdale confessing his sin, crying out "His will be done! Farewell!" and dying.

It is obviously not acceptable for Dimmesdale to believe he has sinned, and so the movie cleverly transforms his big speech into a stirring cry for sexual freedom and religious tolerance. Instead of dying of a guilty seizure, he snatches the noose from Hester's neck and pulls it around his own, only to be saved when the Indians attack, driving a burning cart through the village. The roles of the puritanical local ministers are farmed out to supporting actors, and Dimmesdale is left to hang around sheepishly, keeping his guilty secret but regarding Hester with big, wet eyes that beg for forgiveness and understanding.

DirectorRoland Joffe says "the book is set in a time when the seeds were sown for the bigotry, sexism and lack of tolerance we still battle today . . . yet it is often looked at merely as a tale of 19th century moralizing, a treatise against adultery." Actually, it is more often looked upon as a tale of 17th century moralizing and a treatise against hypocrisy. But never mind. Joffe adds, "Of course, it is also a marvelous romance." Not so marvelous, really. After insisting on a life alone in a cottage outside town, which sets local tongues a-wagging, Hester is walking in the forest one day when she comes upon a man skinny-dipping in a pond. It is the Reverend, although she doesn't know that. She, and we, see him in the altogether, and then she hears him preaching in church, where he sounds a good deal more like Susan Powter than like a Puritan.