All I am saying is, give this piece a chance

Lina Wertmuller's original film was, of course, more complex and much wittier, but Ritchie's remake isn't the shipwreck of a film that most everyone is saying it is. Madonna does a right decent job of portraying her misery, which comes across in the form of utter bitchiness at the beginning of the movie, but contrary to what nearly everyone else is saying, I didn't hate her instantly - I saw a very lonely and desperate character beyond Amber's facade, so her behavior on the island (when the pathetic illusion of social structure is entirely swept away) was thoroughly believable to me.

And Adriano Giannini, the son of the great Giancarlo Giannini, who played the Giuseppe part in Wertmuller's original, fares extremely well here - it is his characterization that truly makes the movie work. Sure, his fisherman is not very smart, but he's not a moron, as some critics wrote; he's smart enough to know when he's being played -- I disagree as well with a lot of critics who wrote that the two of them hated each other so intensely in the beginning scenes that you could smell it. I think he found her challenging and was attracted to her even as she was insulting him - that whole love/hate master/slave deal was lurking under the supposedly superficial surface from the get-go.

Possible Spoilers -=-

If anything, his character is mind-boggling naive -- thinking for a second that she could overcome her dependence on the social structure (that she was so miserable in at the beginning of the movie) once they'd left the island (because he wanted proof that the two of them - mismatched as they were - could be together anywhere). Madonna's character knows herself at least that much and realizes this isn't going to be possible, that the world they created between them when life was stripped down to the bare essentials on the island could not exist anywhere else.

What people seem to be missing here is that Amber is a slave THROUGHOUT the film - overtly for a time on the island, when he is the one who knows how to survive and she's eventually forced to acknowledge this superiority by her submission, which ironically frees her (as only true submission can). But she also had been a slave in her 'normal' life - a slave to money, social constraints, material possessions, blah blah blah -- all the things that make one completely miserable if one stupidly attempts to serve them. This is the true irony at the end: she goes back to being a slave to her superficiality because she cannot tell her husband that she's not going back with him, that she knows Giuseppe wants to be with her even if she didn't get the note he tried to deliver to her. She is not in charge, she never WAS in charge, she is completely helpless, unable to say a word - she just subjugates herself to her husband and her old life by staying on the helicopter and leaving behind her only possible chance for real freedom. And so she ends up where she started out - miserable and empty - but now, even sadder, she has some understanding of how she has contributed to her own lack of freedom, to her own inability to make a change, a choice.