Doris Lessing, Ursula LeGuin, Kate Wilhelm, and a few others notwithstanding, science fiction has always been lopsidedly a man's game. But anybody with cause to feel persecuted and paranoid will have cause to elaborate those feelings in speculative fiction. And The Handmaid's Tale, by the feminist (and "straight" novelist) Margaret Atwood, is solidly in the s-f tradition, a vision of a neo-Puritan future, in an America now called Gilead, after "a plague of barrenness" has left only one percent of womankind capable of childbirth, and has left the "godly" in charge of selective breeding. The vision, not terribly persuasive but terribly fervent, is so suppositional and shorthand that it's graspable only in the abstract. And the screen treatment (Harold Pinter, writer; Volker Schlondorff, director), with its static backdrop and slow-developing plotline, seems a little oppressed itself -- although a healthy counterbalance to the s-f majority of monsters and machinery. Good work by Natasha Richardson in the underwritten main role, and by Robert Duvall as your good old-fashioned moral hypocrite, and by Elizabeth McGovern as a lesbian dissident. With Faye Dunaway, Victoria Tennant, and Aidan Quinn. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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