Ridiculous take on the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel as those who worked on this behave like they never even read the book. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1666 a young woman (Demi Moore) fears that her husband (the much older Robert Duvall) is dead after a year of absence. She befriends pastor Gary Oldman (laughable that he could ever be a religious man in a film to start with) and soon romance blossoms. The romance turns physical, a child is born (no one knows who the father is), Moore is forced to wear the titled item, Duvall returns and plots revenge on the man who impregnated his wife while he was captured by wild Indians and Oldman secretly punishes himself as Moore keeps their affair a secret from the townspeople. Where will all this lead? "The Scarlett Letter" is a really disappointing film considering that Roland Joffe' (a once great director in the 1980s who made modern masterpieces like "The Killing Fields" and "The Mission") acts like he is just not comfortable with the material and does not know how to execute the excruciating novel into a cohesive cinematic product. Oldman and Duvall, usually very dependable players, cannot cope here and Moore just continued to under-achieve in front of the camera. Void of intelligence, dim-witted and poorly paced, "The Scarlett Letter" is one of those films that has absolutely no tone and thus becomes a hard experience to get through. Turkey (0 stars out of 5).
