Movie- The Handmaid's Tale

Ashley Estrada
07.29.2010
The Handmaid’s Tale/ Movie

The Handmaid’s Tale

Reading a book before watching the movie always makes the movie that much better. If I could, I would always recommend to anyone reading the book to any movie first. The reason is because you can always tell what the character in the movie is thinking during silent scenes. There are several movies that I have watched a silent scene in and wished I knew exactly what they were thinking. In The Handmaid’s Tale it is great to have read the book and know exactly how everything is working when watching the movie. This is especially in the beginning scenes I noticed.

In the beginning scenes of this movie, where the girls are all meeting each other and getting use to things is a good example of knowing what Offred was thinking. This is also true for when she meets Serena. This is true because I remember in the book, she was thinking where she knew her from. She was thinking that Serena was on a TV show that Offred use to watch when she was a young girl that happened to be a Christian channel. This meant the rest of the time I read about Serena I knew in the book that she use to be on bible-channel years prior to them meeting.

One more thing I should mention right now is that if I were to have watched the movie first, I wouldn’t have known who ‘Offred” was. Her name in the movie was Kate more than Offred. Although, I did hear her called Offred a couple times, but I can’t remember exactly who in the movie; for the most part she was called Kate.

On the other hand, the movie made a couple things a little more clear. One thing that was more clear in the move was her flashbacks. It is always easy to recognize flashbacks in movies right away because of everything they do normally to distort the picture. While writing a book, it is difficult to change something from flashbacks to present day things without changing the whole setting for that chapter, ect. It was easier to watch the movie when it came to things like this.

A little issue I noticed with the characters in the book was that it talked about Luke in detail. If I would have watched the movie first, I would never know that his name was even Luke. I am pretty positive it never mentioned his name at all. During her flashbacks you can see him lying there, obviously dead, which we can assume that this was a significant person in her life. That is exactly what the movie forces you to do, is assume who this is to her and why she is having these flashbacks. Most movies are the same way, which is why I think it is more fun to read the book

I encourage you next time to pay closer attention to the silent scenes in moves. The best silent scene I have seen in a move was in the movie Unfaithful. If you ever have a chance to watch it, there is a scene where she is on the subway and not one word is said. You can tell a little of what she is thinking because of her emotions in this scene, but not everything. This would be a great time to have read a book before watching the movie and knowing exactly what is going on in her mind. This is just one movie that is an excellent example of the benefits of reading before watching. There are similar scenes to this one in The Handmaid’s Tale, and that is why it was beneficial to do this in the order we did.