One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

.Dav-

Yep, most of us are in the same rowboat this year. Flying blind.  Glad you scored Frozen River, and I know you’ll let me know what you think.

I know you won’t have the WASPs-being-boring-and-insipid problem!

Ok.  I’m picking my picks I feel particularly partial about picking:

*Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

Best Actor: Mickey Rourke

Best Actress: It may be Streep, but I hope it’s Melissa Leo

( It’s the new austerity, as you once noted.  I think too many portrayals of famous men and women have won Best awards in recent years.  These two acting turns reverse that. )

*Best Directing: Danny Boyle/Slumdog

*Best Supporting Actor:  Heath Ledger. And this is tough, because I’ve enjoyed three other performances very much.  But I’m not deserting Heath now.  And he should have won for Brokeback.  -

Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis.

Best Original Screenplay:  I’ll pick Frozen River.

Best Screenplay Adaptation: Frost/Nixon

Best Visual Effects:  Iron Man

*Best Editing: Slumdog

Best Art Direction: I’ve never been sure what this means.  I’ll pick Dark Knight.

*Best Costume Design: The Duchess

Best Original Song: WAll-E

*Best Cinematography: Slumdog

1/2 *Best Original Score: Button  ( Doh!  I was right the first time! Slumdog!)

*Best Animated Film: WAll-E

Best Sound Editing: Dark Knight

1/2 *Best Makeup: Hellboy II: The Golden Army. ( Because Heath’s makeup was the only real stand out in Dark Knight, and Benjamin Button was just weird…maybe they’ll toss B.B. the bone, though.)

Tam

Ah, sometimes e-writing loses voice.  Why is that?  By “voice” I mean tone and  subtlety.  The last sentence of my last post is not meant as an esoteric question put to all of us, meaning the real-time us, but it is a central question of the movie.  And yes, doubt binds us.  Its color is different than joy that binds, or love that binds, or grief that binds, but it binds none the less.

David.  That guy is guilty.  Believe me.  He is.  He gives himself away over and over.  I doubt he’s the one ex-philandering priest engaged in solo self-recovery in an era of suppression of therapy (Don’t ask!  Don’t tell! ) amongst hundreds or thousands of priests guilty of molesting kids.   He’s not been able to keep his hands off the boy.   Nope. The guy’s on probation, he’s broken probation.   He’s not scared of Streep until she lets him know she’s on to him.    He’s a loner.  The boy is a loner.  It’s the pattern.   Do you think Hoffman will come back and sue her for libel or anything? No………..

Anyway.   Thinking it over, Streep’s performance was so strong, it might be too strong.  Might be over the top, not subtle enough.  She just won the SAG, I believe.  Even she was surprised, she didn’t even buy a dress!  I need to view other female leading roles before I say Meryl will get the Oscar.

Hoffman’s performance might be the stronger, in that it is more subtle, and is obviously raising more questions for us all.  N’est-ce pas?

Everyone is speaking French!   Voila!

Thanks for the review kudos; much of it due to ye olde acting class!

“Nothing”
I’m so excited because I’m gonna go
to the High School of Performing Arts!
I mean, I was dying to be a serious actress.
Anyway, it’s the first day acting class-
and we’re in the auditorium and the teacher,
Mr. Karp… Oh, Mr. Karp…
Anyway, he puts us up on the stage with
our legs around each other,
one in back of the other and he says:
“Okay… we’re going to do improvisations.
Now, you’re on a bobsled. It’s snowing out.
And it’s cold…Okay…GO!”

Ev’ry day for a week we would try to
Feel the motion, feel the motion
Down the hill.

Ev’ry day for a week we would try to
Hear the wind rush, hear the wind rush,
Feel the chill.

And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
To see what I had inside.
Yes, I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
And I tried, I tried.

YOU can get a ring tone of this song sent to your cell!

Tam

. . . and the question is how, without explicit evidence, do we deal with what appears to be malfeasance of the worst kind?

Holy smoke, Tammy, to answer that question would take up all the Internets there are. I’ll compress my answer into a 2×4x6-inch brick: Doubt is also about the abuse of authority. Ever notice how self-proclaimed God-fearing people are the first to also demand obeisance as if they were God? History is lousy with methods of dealing with “what appears to be” wrongdoing “without explicit evidence.” Witch trials. Inquisitions. Most recently, the Orwellian “extraordinary rendition.”

You think Flynn is an unrepentent boy-toucher, guilty as sin. (Sorry.) I concluded differently, that Flynn had had his greedy gropes in the past but in this case he was putting the needs of the boy first. His past caught up with him anyway.  (Shanley, the writer, is both clever and wise to keep the extent of Flynn’s guilt unrevealed.)

The dynamics of Doubt are stupefying. We have a bitter nun perhaps doing the right thing — yet who finally shows emotion when she ponders that she may have done the wrong thing. We have the age-old wackiness of celibacy, an institutionalized and untouchable guarantee that the priesthood is heavily populated by those haunted with sexual demons. And the especially nagging problem of the age of consent. In the wonderful moment I’ll just call the Viola Davis Scene, when she desperately begs for any scrap of deference so her son might have a better chance in life, did you catch her suggestion that her son might be the one who is instigating physical affection? 

Anyway, I was taken by your powerful review. Well done. Yep, Meryl does own this role through an apparent secret indulgence in who-knows-what pains from the past. Hoffman . . . well, he’s a cat. Dude can play anything with always fresh riffs. Amy Adams got an Oscar nom, as did Viola Davis — no contest, it’s Davis’s — but unlike Hoffman and Streep, Adams did not strike me as contemporary to the mid-60s. A minor quibble.

Yes, there was plenty of heavy-handedness but I’ll groove on heavy-handedness that works, like Crash. (Shanley’s original title was Doubt: A Parable.) Shanley certainly puts in italics the fact that Catholic church is a man’s world save their work garb  – the priests get to drink, smoke and carry on while the nuns are expected to remain grim. He also dedicated his story to the nun who would be played by Amy Adams. I once had a crush on a nun too.

D.

I’ve not seen John Patrick Stanley’s original play Doubt, and I wish otherwise, because this film can’t be fully appreciated or critiqued unless one has seen the play on which it is based.   The play won four Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize; its writing, structure and characters are hugely powerful; gigantic themes dealing with the Catholic Church’s past and future are stripped to essence and, I believe, made that play aerodynamic, even as its message, and questions, explode on stage.

I didn’t see the play, but here’s what I think happened to the film:  Too many obvious metaphors.  Lots of big winds blowing Streep and her flock about;  windows opened whooshing in too much bad weather, over and over—light bulbs go out over and over, and even a cat’s pouncing on a mouse gets tossed into the stew.

Films adapted from plays usually feel like plays on screen, rendering a certain stilted quality. I was happy to see that this adaptation did not feel that way, save a few moments where I was taken back in time to my Greenwich Village acting classes.  Streep, Hoffman and Amy Adams played certain scenes like students in the midst of a successful improv exercise, conducted by Meisner, the great acting teacher.  The scene you refer to in your comment–I believe you’re talking of the confrontation in Streep’s office between the three–immediately felt like actors feverishly working to access one another’s emotional life. Exceptionally well done, but I felt a tinge of disappointment when I realized I was thinking about acting class.

I was totally taken up by the film, even as I perceived flaws. The central conflict concerns Father Flynn’s (Hoffman’s) possible molestation of a 12-year old altar boy.  This is Streep’s movie, all right.   That performance will be hard to beat.  Her Sister Aloysius is a holy warrior, out to nail (and not to the Cross) Father Flynn for his alleged crime.  Streep’s pinched, white face is bloodless, save for reddened eyes. She looks soaked by formaldehyde.    She’s at once the Wicked Witch of the West and a holy presence.  Another symbolic ingredient: Streep whipping around the room, enveloped in billowing black habit, wielding a lightbulb changer that looks ominously like a pitchfork.  Or, it’s an illuminating torch.  Depending on how you look at it.

Flynn is guilty.  He gives himself away in speech meant to portray him as a man of…change.  In fact, he sounds lovesick.  And those nails.  The whole long fingernails things is overdone, too.

Stage acting is about being big, about projecting.  Screen acting is about conveying a ton of stuff via smaller gestures and speech.  Doubt’s actors convey epic emotion  in their eyes, in each facial tic; otherwise they are completely blacked out–muffled–by weighted, suffocating garments.  The only part of their body they may use to convey content is their face. And their hands.  The challenge is well met by all.

Some gems:  The early morning scene when the Sisters of Charity emerge from their bedrooms to move down a hallway being illuminated by the first golden light of day—like swans floating out onto a lake.   The conversation between Streep and the young boy’s mother (Viola Davis), and the great heartbreak and impossibilities it exposes.  The moment in the washroom where Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), receives a small gift from Father Flynn.

Doubt is everywhere, doubt is shared misery and a communal bond.  Doubt leaves us sleepless and the question is how, without explicit evidence, do we deal with what appears to be malfeasance of the worst kind?

T.

Tammy,

I’d heard gripes that Doubt does not offer the tidy resolution we’re trained to expect from movies. That’s for me! Indeed, Doubt is a thinky-think film that dares to use ambiguity as a selling point. See title.

Not that I was looking forward to yet another round of therapeutic unloading from a recovering Catholic. But throw Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep onto the screen, I’m there. Add Amy Adams, whose Hollywood  hotness is so hot that putting her in a Boston quasi-burqa, from which only her pert nose and huge blue eyes can be observed, in a sense makes her naked. She’s gotta act. How well does she perform against her two mighty co-stars? You tell me. 

John Patrick Shanley directed this movie from his play, and it feels very much like a play. The claustrophobia is a mood assist. Near the middle is a great scene which encompasses an astonishing number of issues both contemporary (it’s set in the mid-1960s) and modern: Hoffman’s possibly-diddling priest, Meryl’s Wicked Nun of the West, and — from one character (an astonishing Viola Davis — got your Best Supporting Actress trophy right here) you get just about everything you need know about civil rights in the 1960s: the grip of poverty, the passion to rise out of poverty, the rage poverty causes, the poverty caused by racism. This scene is a captivating and potent theatrical experience.

Hoffman and Streep do not disappoint. They are so subdued in their characters — their prides and fears and compassions and who-knows-what-else continually roil across their faces — that not once did I think “acting award.” Genuine.

I’m sure you’ll have a lot to say about Doubt.