DYSTOPIAS are, by definition, unpleasant. But the two most celebrated English dystopias, Brave New World and 1984, manage to be scary without stooping to gloating mean-spiritedness. That, along with a sadomasochistic brand of feminism, is what Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is about, and that, too, comes across in Harold Pinter’s screenplay as directed by Volker Schlöndorff. The film has been around too long for a detailed review now—especially since I have scant use for Atwood, Pinter, and Schlöndorff in general—but a few words about the acting seem indicated.
Faye Dunaway and Elizabeth McGovern give their by now customary mannerism-bespangled performances; Aidan Quinn refines his technique of tilting his face down and his gaze up; while Victoria Tennant, Blanche Baker, and Robert Duvall do nicely. In the title role of Kate, the young woman who becomes the joyless sperm receptacle for the Commander, and the character with whom Margaret Atwood identified herself, Natasha Richardson is miscast. Because she is the daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave, she has it made on stage and screen, yet she is singularly unappealing: hard-featured, frozen, cocky, stolidly invulnerable. (With a little more smugness, she’d be the ideal Margaret Atwood in a film biography.) Yet the story depends on our concern for Kate. About the cold, carapaced Miss Richardson, it’s hard to worry: she’ll make out all right even if she has to kill for it.
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