The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

Directed by: Volker Schlondorff | 109 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth McGovern, Victoria Tennant, Robert Duvall, Blanche Baker, Traci Lind, Zoey Wilson, Kathryn Doby, Reiner Schöne, Lucia Hartpeng, Karma Ibsen Riley, Lucile McIntyre, Gary Bullock, Allison Holmes

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book of the same name, The Handmaid’s Tale is about a world in the near future. Humans are threatened with extinction because fewer and fewer children are being born. The few women who are still fertile are trained as ‘handmaids’ and divided between ‘commanders’ and their wives. Their only job is to give birth to children, for which they are routinely ritually raped. The film tells the story of Kate (Natasha Richardson) who is placed as a handmaid with the commander (Robert Duvall) and his wife (Faye Dunaway).

This 1990 film had a limited DVD release in 2011, but was re-released in 2019, thanks to the success of the 2017 TV series starring Elisabeth Moss. It is now impossible not to compare the two films. Yet that is not a fair competition, because the big downside to the film is that it is sometimes too short-sighted. With a length of less than 2 hours, the film has to skip a lot of background and depth from the book, where the series with 10 episodes of 50 minutes has plenty of room for that.

It is a pity that some elements in Schlöndorff’s film adaptation are not given space, such as the process that the handmaids go through in Gilead before they are placed with a commander and the dynamics that arise as a result. Forming the mutual relationships between the handmaids also feels unnatural due to lack of time and space. The acting of Duvall and Dunaway as commander and his wife make up for a lot in that respect, because they already know how to accurately portray the balance of power in the first scenes in an impressive way.

With the series in mind, expectations for this film, directed by Volker Schlöndorff (Golden Palm winner for his film ‘The Thin Drum’) starring Faye Dunaway (‘Network’) and Robert Duvall (‘The Godfather’), were maybe just a little too high. Yet Schlöndorff manages to portray Atwood’s dystopia successfully, even if it turns out to be impossible to properly translate the book into a film of only two hours.