The Unsexiest Sexy Film of All Time

The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin revisits Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter.

By Nathan Rabin

In 2007, with sincere intentions and a staggering tolerance for pain, The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin set out to revisit the biggest cinematic disasters of all time, hoping to discover some underappreciated gems. The resulting book, My Year of Flops, came out this month; here, we present an exclusive excerpt about one of the unsexiest sexy films of all time.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is one of those unimpeachable masterpieces that scare impressionable high school students off reading forever. It's the kind of symbolism-heavy, portentous tome that makes "reading for pleasure" seem like an oxymoron. After being forced to wade through Hawthorne's dense forest of prose and weighty ideas about sin and hypocrisy, is it any wonder that weak-minded young people retreat into the unchallenging arms of reality television and Us Weekly?

Like so many of the dour magnum opuses that fill high-school syllabi, The Scarlet Letter is a bummer. But what if it wasn't? What if Hollywood sank its fangs into this great literary killjoy and turned it into a bloody, sexy melodrama about true love conquering all—one that ended with plucky heroine Hester Prynne, dreamy man of God Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and their adorable tot riding off into the sunset after a narratively convenient Native American sneak attack killed off all those disapproving Puritan scolds? What if it became an anachronistically flower-powered celebration of pure-hearted lovers triumphing over societal repression?

That was the beautiful, idiotic dream of 1995's The Scarlet Letter, a film that sought to improve upon Hawthorne's book by including all the scalping, attempted rape, skinny-dipping, extensive female masturbation, and pervasive interracial homoeroticism missing from the original text. Demi Moore reasoned that it was kosher for the film to change the book so dramatically because so few people had read it. Hollywood transformed an austere narrative into a randy cinematic romance novel, a bosom-heaving tale of ribaldry.

The filmmakers suffered for their sins. The trenchcoat set took one look at the film's ominous title and experienced traumatic flashbacks of battling their way through one of the most demanding novels ever to trouble an American teen's television-warped mind. The smart set, meanwhile, recoiled at the idea of turning Hawthorne's classic tale of sin and shame into a sexed-up, dumbed-down vehicle for a superstar who seemed to view book reading as an endeavor as esoteric and unpopular as learning Esperanto. Critics predictably eviscerated The Scarlet Letter, and it grossed little more than a fifth of its hefty $50 million budget during its domestic theatrical release.

Roland Joffé's film broadcasts its lack of fidelity for its source material with an opening credit crowing that it's "freely adapted" from Hawthorne's novel. Joffé preemptively ducks the inevitable deluge of critical brickbats by advertising, if not flaunting, his faithlessness to Hawthorne. It seems apt that a novel about infidelity should inspire one of the least faithful literary adaptations in American film. This Scarlet Letter is many things. It's a shameless bodice ripper, a potboiler, softcore porn, and a sleazy wallow in sex and violence. It isn't, however, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The "freely adapted" credit gives the film considerable wiggle room, but the filmmakers really should have been honest with audiences and given it a new title, like The Lusty Pilgrim, and a tagline like "The man with the clerical collar... has this wench all hot and bothered!" or "He was a man of the cloth; she wanted to rip his clothes off!" Joffé's heavybreathing, soft-headed erotic drama splits the difference between The Scarlet Letter and Red Shoe Diaries.

Douglas Day Stewart's screenplay makes the mistake of imposing contemporary sensitivities on the literature of the past. He's written Hester Prynne as a sex-positive proto-feminist, a 1990s kind of gal stuck in the upside-down, backward world of the 1660s. He stops just short of including a prorecycling message in a film that neither needs nor can withstand a clumsy infusion of liberal sermonizing. In a performance that suggests the world's horniest Disney heroine, Moore lends her patented air of steely determination to the role of a plucky freethinker who arrives in tradition-bound Massachusetts Bay in 1667 with a mind rife with rebellion, a tongue full of sass, and loins aching for sexual liberation.

With her much-older husband Roger Chillingworth (Robert Duvall) ostensibly back in England, Hester purchases an easily aroused mute mulatto slave girl (Lisa Jolifee-Andoh) to leer lustily at her having sex and masturbating. (And, to a much lesser extent, so the slave girl can help Hester work the land and run errands.) Hester instantly runs afoul of the glowering, repressive town elders, who scold her with harsh directives like, "Madam, you would do well here to use less lace in your dressmaking." That, I believe, was the Puritan way of calling someone a ho.

Yes, the powers that be are keen to give Hester a forced sassectomy, even before she's tending her garden one day and follows a bird and then a deer into the forest, where she encounters the life-changing sight of hunky Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman) disrobing for a skinny-dip. From the lusty gleam in Hester's eyes, it's evident that the Lord has endowed Dimmesdale with more than just a gift for oratory.