The Handmaid's Tale (1990)

Film adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel of the same name. The story is set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic military dictatorship that has arisen out of a recently collapsed United States. Our protagonist Kate (Natasha Richardson) is a former librarian who is captured by Gilead forces when she attempts to flee the country to Canada along with her husband and child. Because increased environmental pollution has greatly reduced the number of women capable of bearing children and Kate has proven herself fertile via the existence of her young daughter, she is taken by the government to serve as a "handmaiden", a position apparently derived from  the Biblical story of Sarah giving her handmaiden Hagar to Abraham in order to conceive a child. Kate is assigned to be a handmaiden for an important military leader (Robert Duvall) and his rather bitter wife (Faye Dunaway).

Atwood's original novel is basically a long monologue by its protagonist and deals mostly with very internal subject matter via a stream of consciousness narrative that goes back and forth through time as intruding memories interrupt Kate's rendering of her time as a handmaid. This structure presents difficulty when it comes to adapting the story as a film, and this movie can in no way convey the full power and subtitley of Atwood's excellent novel, however it does succeed as a dramatic work in its own right.

The cast is high caliber, the writing strong, the aesthetics intriguing. It is a tale of life under an American Taliban, a subject matter surely more resonate now post 9/11 then it was on original release. Nothing is explicitly spelled out for us in much detail relating to how the world of the film came to be, or even really how it works, or doesn't as the case may be. I actually like that in a work like this, especially given how much of this has to work on a metaphorical level. Gilead is not a likely society to consume the US, though doubtless there is a sizable minority who would like to see something like it put in place. However a policy change here and a new law there and some societal pressure in between can move a nation in a given direction, and here in a story born of an outsiders perspective of an increasing religious right influence on Regan era America, a worst case scenario is put forward, to scare us back a little. This movie, and more so the book it was based on do this, and they make it interesting. ***