When I was in an advanced English class in high school, we were allowed to choose one book from a list to essay. I’m not sure what drew me to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but I must have heard of it from somewhere, and so that was the title I chose, much to the confusion of everybody, even the instructor.
I think that reaction is the reason why the book, and the 1990 movie from which it was adapted, isn’t reaching the right audience. Both are truly preaching to the converted, which is even more disappointing when material which should be less relevant over time is, inexplicably, becoming more relevant today. It was only recently that I considered rewatching this movie, which I had not seen since the early 90’s. I only had the vaguest recollections of it, and largely that it was bit too on the nose, despite having its heart in the right place.
Revisiting it today, the experience is unnerving as fuck. In it, a Christian Nationalist country forever at war against unnamed enemies is forcing fertile women into bearing children for those of the elite whose wives cannot bear children. It is telling that the government is aware pollution and radiation are the cause of this infertility, yet the priest officiating the ceremony where women become these handmaids says the infertility is God’s punishment for the sins of abortion, birth control, promiscuity and artificial insemination.
Funny, but it seems to me the last of those would not necessitate the bizarre ritual where Robert Duvall tries to inseminate Natasha Richardson while head rests in the lap of a reclining Faye Dunaway, who is his wife. This strange and ritualistic three-way looks uncomfortable for all concerned through, naturally, our sympathies lie with Richardson.
She was a librarian named Kate before she was captured at the border while attempting to escape with her husband and daughter. He was shot dead. Her daughter fled into the brush, and we later learn the girl has been placed with a family. Per a request from Richardson, Dunaway will obtain a Polaroid of the daughter the mother will likely never see again.
Now she is Ofred, meaning she belongs to Fred, which is presumably Duvall’s first name. The other women are similarly renamed, such as Blanche Baker’s Ofglen, who will prove to be part of an underground anti-government revolutionary force. They only see each other when paired together to do errands, such as shopping for their respective households. A little moment that seemed like a capsule summary of the entire film has the two women having a whispered conversation in the market and a solider armed with a huge gun passing by them commands their silence.
The processing center where Richardson is selected to be a breeder tells us almost everything we need to know about the horrible world in which this takes place. The few women of reproductive age who are free of disease are set aside to become handmaids. We don’t know what becomes of the women who don’t meet that criteria, but they are wheeled away in former cattle trailers with the word LIVESTOCK marked out on the sides. It seems strange to me anybody even bothered to do that, given the treatment the women receive. Maybe these women end up as part of the ruling party’s secret “joy division”. It was no surprise the men who rule the country would be sanctimonious on the surface while being complete dogs off-hours. Again, there are so parallels to the present day as to be almost embarrassing.
It is also telling that the only women selected for the breeding program are White women. God only knows what happens to the few Black people we see of either gender, except they are all being segregation for other processing. We don’t know their fate, but I don’t believe we see another Black person over the course of the runtime. In real life, we have recently seen Neo-Nazism find a voice in mainstream media, spouting venom about an alleged “great replacement” conspiracy which will make Caucasians a minority.
Richardson’s performance is interesting as everything she convey has to be restricted by a being in a suffocating environment where free expression is forbidden. In a way, Dunaway seems to be as much a prisoner, though her cage is one of gold. Duvall seems a bit regretful of Richardson’s situation, and they talk in his private office at night over such games as Scrabble, which she repeatedly wins.
Still, he is one of the people responsible for the world in which they find themselves, with him telling her one night about how he went from being somebody working in market research. He then became “a bit of a scientist”, which he does articulate beyond that, but I’m sure it was some sort of pseudoscience, if not the especially nefarious “Biblical science”. Then he got in good with guys “who made their move” because “the country was a mess. All the garbage rising to the top. All these groups trying to dictate to us what to do: Blacks, homos, all those people on welfare […] women.”
It is so easy to find parallels to today’s world, where Christian Nationalism has reared its ugly head all the way to the top levels of the government, and that never bodes well for women. There is something deeply wrong when our Secretary of Defense—oh, I’m sorry, Secretary of War has aligned himself with fundamentalist pastor Doug Wilson, who demands wives submit to their husbands. Sure, you can write that guy off as somebody akin to those Westboro Baptist wackos, but you even have incredibly powerful influencers as Charlie Kirk making this demand of Taylor Swift on his broadcast of August 26, 2025, in regards to her engagement to Travis Kelce: “Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
Call me crazy, but I view my wife as my partner in life. Neither of us is “in charge”. We make decisions together and we talk things through if we have a disagreement. I don’t understand these men who are so insecure that they feel they need to own somebody like that person is a slave or a dog. And there have been a lot of insecurities of that group pushed to the forefront in the modern world as of late: fear of women in power, fear of minorities having more children than them, fear their testosterone isn’t high enough.
And when men aren’t keeping women down, the ladies are doing a stellar job of doing that to their own. Almost everything about the tradwives movement feels like somebody watched this movie, took notes of all the bad behavior and mistook those for action items. One of the most disturbing scenes in this picture has what appears to be group therapy among the handmaid candidates, starting with a girl who talks about the time we she raped by four boys. The handmaids are encouraged to shame the girl, chanting that it was she who “led the boys on”.
The Handmaid’s Tale opens with text on the screen, starting with this line: “Once upon a time in the recent future, a country went wrong.” That future is here. I always thought both the book and film were merely a parable, and one somewhat exaggerated, about the time in which they first appeared. Frankly, the film, in particular, used to feel a bit ridiculous. And yet, it is now not only horribly relevant, but even somewhat restrained. Still, it is no replacement for reading Atwood’s original novel. Glad I went to school decades ago, because that novel is one of books most frequently banned in U.S. libraries.
Dir: Volker Schlöndorff
Starring Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn