Doubt
Yes yes, the first post in...oh I don't want to even think about it.
I must admit that the major critics' disdain for Doubt is a bit perplexing. Perhaps it is the season's tendency towards an endless parade of very serious, thoughtful, and above all Oscar-eligible films (not movies) that is starting to drag the reviewers' mental equipaje down into doldrums ravine. I can't really blame them - even the feel-good Slumdog Millionaire is a little too preoccupied with its own reputation to sink comfortably into a nice fuzzy armchair.
All of which is very odd, for Doubt is, in some odd, subversive ways, the darkest of comedies. Now there's a claim! But when the marvelous, magnificent, mad-madame Meryl Streep glowers down into the camera and ghoulishly slurps out "So...it's happened," I can't help but savor the moment just as much as she. In a film that seems all about people consuming one another, I have to say, the feast is delicious.
This mad-hatter supposition may make slightly more sense when one pauses to consider that the writer (both of the play and the screenplay) and director is John Patrick Shanley, whose most famous previous work is probably Moonstruck (along with Joe Versus the Volcano, which is even more bizarre). Moonstruck is a wonderful bouncing fairy tale of a piece that carreens from scene to scene with a wonderful abandon that much of Hollywood seems to have forgotten, but I can't help but see a few gasps of it in Doubt.
Oh yes, the movie is "slow" compared to other serious movies of its type, although not to other plays. While scenes never seem to plod on longer than their fitness would permit, one gets the feeling while watching that, aside from a few at the beginning and ending, the intervening bits could be jumbled about in almost any order while retaining much the same feel. What falls out of this structure, part poison-tipped vignette and part picaresque melodrama, is an overall portrait of (mostly) pre-Vatican II Catholicism, the 1960s in general, and, of course, the nasty little things humans get up to when they rub shoulders in too tight quarters.
Yes, the film is about priests and little boys. Well, not really, but a great deal of discussion takes place in the movie regarding such a subject, so it seems wise to mention it. Philip Seymour Hoffman is as delicious and understated as ever (one day they will bottle his voice and sell it as the most select of men's perfume), Father to a church and to a school, the latter presided over by Principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). It all begins when the young, naive Sister James (Amy Adams) bears to Aloysius (pronounced "Ah-lo-ISH-uz") her newly kindled concerns regarding Father Flynn and a boy, Donald Muller. The good sister is hardly surprised - after all, it was she who first set the poor James out on the hunt for suspected patriarchal depravities. Instead, she simply grimaces (while cackling on the inside), and begins licking her lips in anticipation of the good Father's expulsion.
There are too simply many delicious little layers in the piece to unravel. Certainly the movie's eponymous doubt is one of the main themes, for the good Sister Aloysius's lack of said doubt is curiously juxtaposed not against that of her antagonist Father Flynn, but rather the audience's own. Characters stamp in and out of nobly dilapidated offices and launch an unending spray of wonderfully understated (except when they're not) attacks and defenses, but we never actually learn the truth or see the deed done. Indeed, we never see much of our primary characters, so bitterly entangled as they are with each other. We are given hints of previous pasts and possible transgressions and nothing more, as if Father Flynn is instead parishioner to a congregation of ice bergs, floating serenely beneath the surface until the occasional, thrilling collision.
Before we finish off this beast, a special word must be said for the character of Mrs. Miller, both in the careful, wonderful potrayal by Viola Davis, and the manner into which she slots into the story. Yes, the story begs us to set up a great comparison between Flynn and Aloysius (as do the reviews, and the movie posters), but the story is really much too complex for just that, and the movie is in danger of having its thunder stolen by the small, energetic scene between the concerned sister and the mother of the boy in question, Mrs. Miller. It turns out that things really aren't so simple after all, neither for the hidebound Sister who sees only what she wants to se, nor for the predetermined viewer who went into the film knowing exactly what it was going to be about and now finds themself confronted with a different beast entirely. Oh yes, priests and little boys...but are you so sure? If anything, it does start to seem a bit...doubtful.
The movie ends as abruptly as it begins, with a few raw pieces of editing in the middle to remind us that this story was a play in the beginning, dammit, and with just about as much resolved as when it started. Something happened in between - many things in fact - but it seems less like a story to me than a portrait. Beautiful, yes, thought-proviking, perhaps, but still stuck in a single moment. In other words, the movie is delicious, but is about as filling as a cake with just as many layers. One can sit back and let the four fabulous performance wash over you, drink in the catharsis like molasses from a barrel, but in the end I suspect you will feel as if you should have eaten the main course after all, instead of skipping straight to the dessert.
I must admit that the major critics' disdain for Doubt is a bit perplexing. Perhaps it is the season's tendency towards an endless parade of very serious, thoughtful, and above all Oscar-eligible films (not movies) that is starting to drag the reviewers' mental equipaje down into doldrums ravine. I can't really blame them - even the feel-good Slumdog Millionaire is a little too preoccupied with its own reputation to sink comfortably into a nice fuzzy armchair.
All of which is very odd, for Doubt is, in some odd, subversive ways, the darkest of comedies. Now there's a claim! But when the marvelous, magnificent, mad-madame Meryl Streep glowers down into the camera and ghoulishly slurps out "So...it's happened," I can't help but savor the moment just as much as she. In a film that seems all about people consuming one another, I have to say, the feast is delicious.
This mad-hatter supposition may make slightly more sense when one pauses to consider that the writer (both of the play and the screenplay) and director is John Patrick Shanley, whose most famous previous work is probably Moonstruck (along with Joe Versus the Volcano, which is even more bizarre). Moonstruck is a wonderful bouncing fairy tale of a piece that carreens from scene to scene with a wonderful abandon that much of Hollywood seems to have forgotten, but I can't help but see a few gasps of it in Doubt.
Oh yes, the movie is "slow" compared to other serious movies of its type, although not to other plays. While scenes never seem to plod on longer than their fitness would permit, one gets the feeling while watching that, aside from a few at the beginning and ending, the intervening bits could be jumbled about in almost any order while retaining much the same feel. What falls out of this structure, part poison-tipped vignette and part picaresque melodrama, is an overall portrait of (mostly) pre-Vatican II Catholicism, the 1960s in general, and, of course, the nasty little things humans get up to when they rub shoulders in too tight quarters.
Yes, the film is about priests and little boys. Well, not really, but a great deal of discussion takes place in the movie regarding such a subject, so it seems wise to mention it. Philip Seymour Hoffman is as delicious and understated as ever (one day they will bottle his voice and sell it as the most select of men's perfume), Father to a church and to a school, the latter presided over by Principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). It all begins when the young, naive Sister James (Amy Adams) bears to Aloysius (pronounced "Ah-lo-ISH-uz") her newly kindled concerns regarding Father Flynn and a boy, Donald Muller. The good sister is hardly surprised - after all, it was she who first set the poor James out on the hunt for suspected patriarchal depravities. Instead, she simply grimaces (while cackling on the inside), and begins licking her lips in anticipation of the good Father's expulsion.
There are too simply many delicious little layers in the piece to unravel. Certainly the movie's eponymous doubt is one of the main themes, for the good Sister Aloysius's lack of said doubt is curiously juxtaposed not against that of her antagonist Father Flynn, but rather the audience's own. Characters stamp in and out of nobly dilapidated offices and launch an unending spray of wonderfully understated (except when they're not) attacks and defenses, but we never actually learn the truth or see the deed done. Indeed, we never see much of our primary characters, so bitterly entangled as they are with each other. We are given hints of previous pasts and possible transgressions and nothing more, as if Father Flynn is instead parishioner to a congregation of ice bergs, floating serenely beneath the surface until the occasional, thrilling collision.
Before we finish off this beast, a special word must be said for the character of Mrs. Miller, both in the careful, wonderful potrayal by Viola Davis, and the manner into which she slots into the story. Yes, the story begs us to set up a great comparison between Flynn and Aloysius (as do the reviews, and the movie posters), but the story is really much too complex for just that, and the movie is in danger of having its thunder stolen by the small, energetic scene between the concerned sister and the mother of the boy in question, Mrs. Miller. It turns out that things really aren't so simple after all, neither for the hidebound Sister who sees only what she wants to se, nor for the predetermined viewer who went into the film knowing exactly what it was going to be about and now finds themself confronted with a different beast entirely. Oh yes, priests and little boys...but are you so sure? If anything, it does start to seem a bit...doubtful.
The movie ends as abruptly as it begins, with a few raw pieces of editing in the middle to remind us that this story was a play in the beginning, dammit, and with just about as much resolved as when it started. Something happened in between - many things in fact - but it seems less like a story to me than a portrait. Beautiful, yes, thought-proviking, perhaps, but still stuck in a single moment. In other words, the movie is delicious, but is about as filling as a cake with just as many layers. One can sit back and let the four fabulous performance wash over you, drink in the catharsis like molasses from a barrel, but in the end I suspect you will feel as if you should have eaten the main course after all, instead of skipping straight to the dessert.
posted by fire_eye at 7:37 PM
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