Roland Joffé's adaptation of the Puritan classic engenders more yawns than hoots: the reconstruction of a Pilgrim settlement of the 1660s is tediously detailed; John Barry's music is slumberously sumptuous. But besides the intermittent rib-tickler (Demi Moore, with her Cosmo-girl's finely sculpted nose, jaw, eyebrows, etc., and her party girl's hoarse croak, uttering archaisms like "Was I alive before I laid eyes on thee?"), there's the all-pervading and pleasantly intoxicating folly (for all those who recall their high-school American Lit.) of recasting Nathaniel Hawthorne as an early champion of women's liberation and a friend of the Native American, of imagining, that is, how Hawthorne would have written the novel if he had written it a century and a half later -- if, moreover, he were not Nathaniel Hawthorne at all and were not writing an allegorical novel but instead were a contemporary Hollywood screenwriter whose credits included The Blue Lagoon and Thief of Hearts and were trying to give the public not what it lacked and needed but what it already had plenty of and wanted still more of. (Lighten up. Just do it. Get over it.) When the credits say "freely adapted from the novel...," they say a mouthful. Gary Oldman, Robert Duvall, Joan Plowright; script by Douglas Day Stewart. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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