'Handmaid's Tale' film a prime example of how hard adaptations are

Like a lot of fans of the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's best-seller The Handmaid's Tale (although it's weird to describe yourself as a 'fan' of something so relentlessly bleak and upsetting) I was surprised to learn that there had previously been a 1990 big screen version of the dystopian book about a society where women are systematically sexually abused and brainwashed.

Then I saw it -- and now I understand why it didn't have a lot of staying power.

It boasts two major actors -- Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall -- which should be intriguing. I actually think Duvall is fine in the movie as "The Commander," he is a closer approximation of what I pictured in Atwood's book than Joseph Fiennes. Dunaway is another story, this is around the point in her career where she always seemed campy, which is a shame since she was such a dynamite actress in her prime.

But there are many other, huge problems with this version -- which I tried to watch as objectively as I could -- while knowing that Elizabeth Moss's Emmy winning TV series has cast as a large and iconic shadow over this material.

First off, if makes the colossal error of jettisoning the main character's inner monologue which helped ground the book and later the TV version. Instead, the movie is weirdly detached and matter-of-fact, portraying its horrors with no context or emotion.

Speaking of no emotion, the lead performance of the late Natasha Richardson sadly misses the mark. She doesn't have the most expressive face and her line readings are stuck in neutral. Apparently, the role was originally going to be Sigourney Weaver's -- which would have been interesting since her career has largely been defined by playing strong women -- so it would be subversive to show her being stripped of her independence.

But instead we feel nothing for Richardson or her plight. The film does hew fairly closely to the book's narrative -- at least until the last act. But while it hits the same story beats, it strangely seems to be selling itself as eroticism instead of the terror that it is supposed to evoke. The tonally wrong nature of the project is self-evident in the 1990 poster, which makes it seem like soft core porn.

Of course, Atwood's book, which is both complex and wide-ranging would be difficult to adapt into a feature length film at any time. It's premise is so bold that it can be over-the-top if not handled very creatively and intelligently. The makers of the Hulu series have managed to do just that -- with an end result that is harrowing but which feels very vital to the current political and cultural climate.

Apart from trying to take advantage of the popularity of a best-seller, it's not entirely clear what the intentions were of the filmmakers behind the 1990 film version. It looks fairly cheap (my wife presumed it was a television movie when she saw me watching it) and it's Cliff Notes-style handling of more nuanced ideas in the book are infuriating.

But I absorbed it all as both a cautionary tale and a shining example of how great written work can go wrong when it is transferred to the cinematic medium.