A "SCARLET" FOR THE UNLETTERED

By RICHARD CORLISS

AMONG THE TOP 20 PAPERBACKS on USA Today's best-seller list is The Scarlet Letter--the Cliffs Notes version. Bibliophiles who purchase that slim volume in lieu of dozing over the original will get a much clearer view of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 tale of heroism and hypocrisy than those visiting the new movie adaptation. It's a lugubrious, often ludicrous, wallow.

Even nonreaders know that Hester Prynne (Demi Moore in the movie) was the first woman in literature with her own rating: A, for adultery. She had an affair with the colony's preacher (Gary Oldman) and, while enduring her public shame, fought off the pernitions of her long-lost husband Roger (Robert Duvall). But this plot doesn't kick in until about the 11th or 12th hour of the film. Director Roland Joffe dwells instead on the nude bodies of Moore (caressing herself) and Oldman (skinny-dipping) as Hester and the Rev fall in lust. And stay around for their epochally silly sex scene. It makes Hester's secret seem more like Victoria's.

Douglas Day Stewart's script has little use for the novel's other plot line: Hester's difficulty with her love child Pearl. But this Hester is readier to be martyr and lover than seamstress and mother. She is, you see, America's prototype feminist. (Caucasian feminist, that is--Pocahontas, in the Disney cartoon, beat Hester to the p.c. punch.) And the Rev, weak in the novel, is now a fiery film hero, deserving of the preposterous happy ending the filmmakers tack on.

The stars are actually pretty good--Moore holds the camera's gaze as securely as any actress--but they can't save this revisionist slog. The film blames the 17th century for not being the 20th and Hawthorne for not being Danielle Steel. If this Scarlet got a letter, it would be F.

--R.C.