June 13 - 20, 1 9 9 6

Moll Flanders

Those who hoped literary classics could be no further desecrated than Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter should steer clear of Pen Densham's dismantling of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. After trashing another classic with his screenplay for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Densham resolves the narrative richness of the 1722 novel by dumping it pretty much altogether and replacing it with a mishmash of the Brontës, Henry Fielding, his own impoverished pop clichés, and woeful recent period films like Cutthroat Island. The result is as banal and ridiculous as Letter but not nearly as funny. Robin Wright has the misfortune of playing the title role, a spirited and resourceful girl born in prison to a condemned woman who strives to rise above an intolerant society through the world's oldest profession. Along the way she encounters such ludicrous contrivances as Mrs. Allworthy (a brutally crapulous Stockard Channing), a ruthless bordello keeper; her assistant Hibble (an imposing, variably accented Morgan Freeman); and "the Artist" (John Lynch), a kind of consumptive 18th-century Toulouse-Lautrec who hires Moll for her body but sees through to her soul.

What's most pathetic about this mauled Flanders is Densham's attempts to update Defoe by making it "feminist." Thus we have Moll flamboyantly skewering an abusive priest, fleeing the convent where she's locked up, and rejoicing in the freedom of a fountain. Perhaps had Densham noted the tough and unsentimental independence of Defoe's original creation, he might have spared her this betrayal. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough