I watched the 1990 movie The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time last night. Like most people, I’m a fan of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian, epistolary novel about a young handmaid in a world where women are used for their reproductive capacities, rather than their minds.

I’m also a big fan of Natasha Richardson, who plays the titular handmaid, Kate, or Offred as she’s called, Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Kate’s lesbian friend Moira, and the screenwriter and playwright, Harold Pinter. With a pedigree like this, the movie should have been a sci-fi movie classic in the realm of Harrison Ford’s 1982-movie, Blade Runner. Unfortunately, the movie seems dated, the world’s rules seem underdeveloped, and, while certainly watchable, the movie certainly hasn’t turned into a classic like its literary counterpart.

A book like Atwood’s is certainly difficult to adapt to the screen. The diary format of the book provides Kate’s thoughts and reactions to the regime, while she is forced to remain blank-faced and yielding in her day-to-day life.

In her memoirs, Richardson said how difficult it was to play a character who can demonstrate her feelings so minimally, and was discouraged by the director’s decision to nix her monologue throughout most of the movie. Because of this decision, Kate/Offred’s agency seems further challenged; even the actions she takes for the rebels seem like they have been decided for her, rather than by her. Specifically, her first encounter with Nick in the movie seems abrupt and unexpected; viewers who hadn’t read the novel probably thought that the forceful kiss between Nick and Offred was part of a societal view of her body as a tool to deposit lust, rather than an act of her own lusty choice. This is certainly not a concern in the novel.

Additionally, the world’s rules are left too ambiguous for the viewer to effectively understand them. Perhaps because the movie was made so soon after Atwood’s novel was published, viewers were supposed to know that that United States’ president and Congress were assassinated by the new, totalitarian, misogynistic and white-supremicist regime. Readers also better understood the hierarchical system of the ladies of the house, the handmaids, the Marthas (the maids) and the Commanders. As the movie stands, we don’t understand why the United States is so immensely changed, nor who and where the great population of soldiers for the new government are found or how the female hierarcy is organized.

Do you think The Handmaid’s Tale movie stands up to its literary counterpart?