The Scarlet Letter.

Freely "adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" states--warns--one of the opening credits of Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter.

So we should judge the movie on its own merit, right? Okay, here goes.

Judged strictly on its own merits, The Scarlet Letter may be the worst American movie of the year. I don't pretend to have seen every American film this year, but I can testify that this glib atrocity is crasser than Showgirls (though not so salacious), drippier than The Bridges of Madison County (though not as sincere), smugger in its political correctness than Pocahontas (though lacking cute, furry animals), more inept in its storytelling than Batman Forever (but without Batman's excuse of having no real story to tell).

You can walk in on this movie at any moment of its running time and witness gross stupidity. Examples: The film is narrated by Hester Prynne's little love child, Pearl. Why? Pearl hasn't even been born in the first half of the movie, and during its second she is too young to understand what's going on around her. What is her narration supposed to do? Explain loose ends in the plot? It doesn't. Illuminate motivation? It doesn't. A transitional device to let us know that several years pass between the two halves of the story? But Pearl's very presence accomplishes that without narration: if she's a baby midway through and a seven-year-old at its conclusion, can't the audience figure out how many years have passed?

Let Hester merely go to market and what does John Barry's music do but swell up into a crescendo full of echoes of Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, and every other film composer ever hired to make us think of rolling plains, cascading waterfalls, awe-inspiring canyons, and America the Beautiful.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale gallops over to Hester (this is the Meet Cute scene), struggling to extricate her carriage from mud, and asks, "Can I help you?", and what does she reply? "Not from up there [that is, on his horse I you can't" Excuse me? This one line transforms Hester Prynne from the embodiment of natural decency and instinctive courtesy into a wisecracking cutie from "Melrose Place."

Sample dialogue by Douglas Day Stewart: Dimmesdale (admiring the wilderness setting of Hester's house): "It's beautiful." Hester: "Yes. Just as Eden must have been. (Pause) Still untouched." I love the last two words. So helpful for those of us who don't know what Eden represents.

Demi Moore, chin up and eyes shining, comes on like the cosseted darling of a prep school's drama department. The harder she struggles with her British accent, the higher her eyebrows arch. The remarkable Robert Duval, in the great role of Roger Chillingsworth, alternates between sleepwalking and spasm but never gets a chance to define a human being. The talented chameleon Gary Oldman, as Dimmesdale, looks at ease in period garb and is well-spoken but delivers flurries of emotion so superficially that nothing in his performance abides in the memory. Edward Harwick (Dr. Watson to the late Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes on PBS) makes the Puritan governor a recognizable human being, but the rest of the supporting cast is spurious, with even the great Joan Plowright reduced to dimpling and twinkling.

The only value this movie has is in the way it perfectly demonstrates state-of-the-art cinematic banality. Director Joffe knows the drill and sticks to it. For the dialogue scenes, choose a pretty location, place your actors, get them reciting. Then shoot each talking head from over the shoulder of the listener, just before he or she replies. Repeat ad infinitum. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, z-z-z-z. Of course, this time-moldered formula wouldn't exasperate if the dialogue were good, but I've already given an example of that. As for the action sequences, they are equally formulaic.

So much for the movie on its own terms. As to what it signifies as an adaptation of a great American classic, I'm no Hawthorne expert, but isn't it pretty clear where the power of this novel comes from? Within the author's nature struggled two antagonistic world views: the absolute morality of his Puritan forefathers and the liberal, forgiving ethic of a nineteenth-century humanist. It's this psychological and moral tug-of-war that produces the true drama of The Scarlet Letter. As Curtis Harnack has observed, "In The Scarlet Letter, guilt and sin allied with moral values that transcend the milieu described." Hester and Arthur sin by their adultery; Dimmesdale further sins in his hypocrisy; and the cuckolded husband, Prynne/Chillingsworth, sins most of all in his vindictiveness. But Hester truly loves Arthur, and her forbidden passion breeds compassion, sensual warmth, courage, fortitude, maternality, honor. Broken by his guilt, Arthur will at last arrive at self-knowledge and honesty. And--strangest character of all--Chillingsworth becomes a veritable philosopher of the malign, a Puritan version of Goethe's Mephisto.

But who populates the movie version? A slick-chick Hester with an aerobically sculpted body, a worker-priest Dimmesdale whose main obsession is to translate the Bible into Algonquin, and a Chillingsworth who is closer to Hannibal Lecter than Mephisto. Instead of the complex interaction of sin and virtue, we get flippant self-exculpation ("Who is to say what is a sin in God's eyes?"). Instead of Hawthorne's great climax with the minister revealing his own scarlet letter carved by guilt on his flesh, an Indian raid caps the movie and the lovers are allowed to ride off happily into the sunrise. For how can sin and virtue interact when, according to the ethics of La-La Land, virtue means feeling good, and the only sin imaginable is not doing your own thing?

This new Scarlet Letter is the latest revenge of the present upon the past for not being the present.