Zoë Saldaña
as Rosemary Woodhouse

Zoë Saldaña co-produced and starred in the recent remake/reinvention of the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby, but the new version makes some very odd and uncomfortable changes.

Zoë Saldaña is an amazingly talented woman, and she’s often talked about how happy she is to be a role model and shining example of strong women, strong women of color, and a proud Latina. That’s why her involvement—as a producer and star—of NBC’s recent remake of Rosemary’s Baby is so puzzling.

The two-part mini-series is available here DVD. It’s clearly based as much on the lasting impression that Roman Polanski’s1968 version left behind as the Ira Levin best-seller that served as the original source material. And it seems obvious that Hollywood’s hunger for “known” names and franchises led them toRosemary, even though the Polanski film is more than 45 years old and the book itself had been out of print for years prior to this revival.

Given that name recognition, you’d think the producers would stick as close as possible to the original book or movie. Instead, they chose to make some significant changes that make the new film oddly uninvolving and even a little uncomfortable to watch.

Ruth Gordon
in the original Rosemary’s Baby

Here are just a few of the questions that the new Rosemary’s Baby stirs up:

The story moves from New York City to Paris. The City of New York c. 1968 was one of the great “characters” of Polanski’s original. The people looked real; the ‘villains’ of the piece, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, look like the dotty couple that live above you in the co-op; Ralph Bellamy and Elisha Cook Jr. and even Charles Grodin lend a sense of reality and eccentricity to the piece. But in the new version—and inexplicably—the action is moved to Paris; the diabolical Castevets are played as younger and far more sophisticated and beautiful Europeans by Jason Isaacs of Awake and Harry Potter and relatively unknown (to America) French actress Carole Bouquet.They are beautiful and sleek…and completely unmemorable.

Patrick J. Adams and Zoë Saldaña

The story itself is transformed by putting a woman of color in the center of a painfully white world. Basically, we’re looking at the truly uncomfortable story of a black woman who is roofied and date-raped by a blue-eyed devil (literally), who is helped by her (white) husband, bullied by (white) friends and (white) foes alike, and ultimately becomes the lifelong (black) slave to her white-devil baby. And yet there’s virtually no mention of this uncomfortable racial component at all. Even the impregnation is played differently in the original, Mia Farrow’s Rosemary was almost entirely unaware of the oddness of her impregnation; in Saldaña’s version, she is clearly drugged and semiconscious during her rape, where she sees visions of her husband, Castevet, and the blue-eyed devil during the act. Having her aware and then immediately, conveniently amnesiac after the ugly act says something entirely different in 2014 than it did in 1968. It turns it from dark seduction by a never-seen Satan into, well rape.

There are plenty of references to the original film, causing some truly inexplicable decisions. Just one of them: Rosemary’s haircut. Her ‘friends’ decide that a woman in the midst of a difficult pregnancy, who has catastrophically lost weight and looks like hell would feel and look better if you hacked off her luxurious hair and give her a short cut (clearly a pretty bad wig) that just happens to look exactly like Mia Farrow’s haircut from 1968. There’s really no reason for this decision at all except to call out to the original film, and that’s no real reason at all.

L-r: Carole Bouquet, Jason Isaacs, Zoë Saldaña and Patrick J. Adams

The difficulty is “Rosemary” never does anything for herself. She does what her husband (Patrick J. Adams Suits), her friends (real and Satanist), her doctors tell her. She runs to friends or cops and anyone other than herself for rescue. What, she can’t buy her own ticket out of town? Can’t go to a hotel by herself? As if she hasn’t the brains, the courage, or the presence of mind to take care of herselfin the year 2014. How is this realistic, understandable, or sympathetic? To be fair, Rosemary does show some pluck in Part 2, fighting the Satanist Conspiracy, but she’s so hysterical and disjointed that even wedon’t believe her.

It all seems to out-of-step with Saldaña’s own on- and off-screen persona. What a puzzlement. Zoë Saldaña and her sisters produce a movie about an intelligent and beautiful woman who’s supposed to be sympathetic, but is in fact bullied by her husband, by her strange neighbors, by her doctors. Here’s a woman who’s played some of the strongest women on screen, from her work in Avatar and Colombiana to her current turn as Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy. She’s certainly allowed to make her own artistic decisions, but the reasoning is hard to follow, and the meta-message simply unfortunate.

L-r: Zoë Saldaña, Carole Bouquet and Jason Isaacs

Bottom of it all: Not very scary, not very engaging, a poor showcase for a wonderful actress. The real horror here is that Rosemary’s Baby is about a black woman being forced to have a white…thing’s…baby, and then having her child stolen from her or willingly allow herself to become a slave to her rapists for the rest of her life. It’s creepy in a very ungood way. And if anybody thought moving it to Paris and populating the film with Europeans would keep anybody noticing that…no. It didn’t. It just made you want to take a shower after the final credits.

Judge for yourself. You can use Amazon’s Watching Instantly to see the original Rosemary’s Baby right here, or buy both part of the new version for less than $15.00 here, and see for yourself. Look for Saldaña as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic Nina, and listen for her voice as Maria in the amazing animated feature Book of Life, both coming soon.