One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Uh-oh, Tammy. Plenty of Oscar big-dogs are suddenly in town. I’ll take them in this order: Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, The Reader.

Taken too. Liam Neeson always refreshes; K and I are both still baffled over 1995, the year everyone went gaga over the corny, pretentious Braveheart when Neeson’s similar and far superior Rob Roy got no respect. And while I’m plugging Neeson: ever see Gun Shy? Sandra Bullock produced it in 2000, gave herself a small, charming role. It’s a funny, offbeat take on macho culture, quite refreshing.

Back to Frost/Nixon. It’s a crackerjack entertainment, brisk and, as history, useful. (Unlike Oliver Stone’s “history” in JFK, which is loony — I fear for kids who use it for Cliff’s Notes.) It’s unusual to see Ron Howard employ subtlety but it’s sharp the way he has Pat Nixon, Milhous’s classically long-suffering wife, floating about as if a ghostly peripheral.

And more movies with Oliver Platt, please.

I’ll get you our DVD of the real Frost-Nixon clips. It’ll change the movie, not necessarily for the better.

• The movie’s dramatic arc is phony, dramatic-license-yadda-yadda. The fact that Nixon was on board for 20% of the profits is a major factor to the actual event, suppressed in the movie.

• The movie’s David Frost is presented as a bit of a fop and a twit. You’ll see the real David Frost possessing a feral, engaged intellect and a genteel hunger and willingness to probe for truth. (You may also realize that in comparison our current stock of hero interviewers like David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos are fops, twits, and pretty much useless.)

• The movie needs Nixon to lose his cool. The real-life Nixon was unsurpassed at lying to himself. He did not lose his cool. You may find the real Nixon more chilling than Langella’s, and therefore more awesome.

D.-

First thing, I gotta get a look at the real interviews!   Fab.  I watched them back in the day, but certainly don’t recall details.   To compare this film with the real deal–I don’t know, the era just turns me on.  I was basically a kid, but my younger sister tells me I jumped up and down when Nixon resigned, screaming “Do you know what this means?  This is huge history, this has never happened, our President is an ex-president, he’s ceased to exist as Commander in Chief!”

Sarah replied, “Tammy, I’m six.”  My parents drank whiskey sours.  My brothers said something to the effect that I should be under house arrest, not Nixon.  Baby sister Annie told me in her own spirited way that her diapers needed changing.

I admire your review discipline.  The last credit line states that though the movie chronicles real events, there’s a fair amount of made up stuff.   I’m dying to know what.

Frost/Nixon is a Samson and Goliath tale.  A boxing parable.   “In this corner, wearing a Rep tie, Riiiiiiiiiiiichard M. Nixon!   And in this corner, wearing blue satin shorts and lip gloss,  Daaaaaaaaaavid Frost!” Get ready to rumble.   They go a round, throw some punches, bounce off the ropes, head back to their corners, get rubbed down, get a pep talk, strategize. Frost sees some stars, but in the final round, Nixon’s down for the count.

The movie is not about Watergate so much as it is about the emotional aftermath of Nixon’s presidency.

Langella plays Nixon so well; see how he inhabits this man without hitting the character over the head?  Lots of close-ups, his face fills the screen.  It is impossible not to start re-considering him.  Narcissist Nixon excels at painting himself the wronged hero.  He disarms accusations by spinning a Checkers story befitting the circumstance.   Frost and his crew meet the man, and they’re all knocked off their moorings.

This movie, as a reviewer put it, “…provides considerable insights into Nixon’s intelligence, caginess and fraudulent sentimentality…” Yes.  Fascinating.  Here’s an image that came to mind:  Nixon as a huge menacing Macy’s Day balloon, a gigantic floating presence staring down at us mere mortals.  But he’s fragile, and all it took was a sharp needle, inserted just so, to bring him crashing down.  All the air goes out of him.  He’s rendered meek, quiet, stunned.   He needs a friend, he pets the Dachshund.

I found myself thinking, too, of an endangered gorilla—a lone male, staring out at us, dark eyes, wary, alert, and a bit startled.  This Nixon was cagey, but so primal.

Well directed by Ron Howard.   A Beautiful Mind.

The interviews themselves were a journalistic triumph; the jury is still out as to whether they were historic.

On the occasion of Pat Nixon’s funeral,  I watched Nixon on television, walking behind his wife’s coffin.  He was inconsolable.  He sobbed openly.  It was heartbreaking.

T.

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.

Tam,

It is with tremendous discipline that I limit this post to discussing the movie Frost/Nixon. K ushered into our home over the holidays a DVD of the original Frost-Nixon interviews; I just finished reading “Nixonland,” a whopping, fascinating tome of hot scholarship by Rick Perlstein. So there’s lots to say about Richard Milhous Nixon even without an Oscar-nominated movie to distract.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Frost/Nixon. Ron Howard had become an efficiently boring director for middlebrow tastes; I personally can’t forgive him for wedging a goddam car chase into that movie about the mathematician, a movie about science that wallowed in pure emotional hysterics. (Hence its Oscar haul.)

Howard’s efficiency is well used here. Peter Morgan’s screenplay and both stars, Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, had already been buffed onstage. It’s a crisp two bours and a delightful history lesson for those who wonder why the heck “-gate” gets attached to every unseemly event in politics.

Lots of actors have taken a shot at Nixon; Frank Langella comes the closest to getting under the man’s skin. Langella avoids the jowl-shaking caricature and lets us witness the brilliant political calculations Nixon routinely performed under pressure.

I like this movie mostly because it challenges how I feel about Nixon. He was built of timber destined for greatness; his weaknesses are a critical area for study, assuming mankind can learn from history. There’s a fabricated scene when Morgan imagines a Nixon drunk-dialing Frost. It’s an encapsulation of the thesis Rick Perlstein explores in “Nixonland,” which by the way is subtited “The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.”

Hi, D.

Wow, I’m looking forward to seeing all the movies suddenly landed in town!  You are ahead of me, but I shall be catching up tout de suite.

In the meantime, I’m passing on some info on a film course happening here this spring, sent to me by, I believe, the professor’s wife.   Here’s the jist:

What: Four-Day Film History and Analysis Course in Jackson Hole

Where: Jackson Hole, specifically at Spring Creek Ranch.

When: Week of May 18, 2009 ( Orientation May 17 at 6:00 pm )

Who: Course Professor is Brian Rose, Professor, Media Studies Program, Fordham  College at Lincoln Center, New York City. Professor Rose has lectured and written extensively about film and television.  Promotion material says Rose has interviewed most of today’s best-known directors, producers and actors from Martin Scorsese to Ron Howard, Sean Penn to Meryl Streep.

Themes: Classic Hollywood; Post-war Hollywood and the end of the studio system;  The Language of Film; Filmmaking Around the World; From Book to Film – how books are  adapted; New Directors including Coen Bros., Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, Mike Leigh.

Cost: $999, not including travel to Jackson or accommodations.

For information, visit www.internationalfilmacademy.com, or email info@internationalfilmacademy.com.    307-203-2710.

That’s today’s shill.

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.

D.-

Quick post, relevant to nothing but my own interest in the arts and how they reflect culture.  A link popped up on one of my Google Alerts for Handmade Nation, a documentary set to be released sometime this winter.

Dave-

We’ve experienced this movie quite differently.  Although I see  caricature in the way Clint plays Walt, I also see a man of the sort I’ve known, and that makes Clint’s Walt Kowalski a character I responded to.  Many’s the time I’ve listened to people I otherwise respect use racial epithets.  Listening to that language, particularly if it is being aimed at a specific person, is horrible.   It springs from fear and insecurity.

Walt keeps the world at bay out of fear.  He’s not comfortable in his own skin. Speaking of tools, his drinking is a tool.  A tool to drown sorrows and pain.   Walt has lots of tools.  Whether they’re working for him or not is another matter.

I was moved by the story, the interactions.  I found this character sympathetic; he pays the ultimate price, after all.   Not a major film, perhaps, but one that will stick with me.  Bullets bounce off Clint, until they don’t.  If this is his last time starring in one of his films, it is a strong finish; much stronger than the last film he was involved with, Changeling.  Hooking up with Jolie for a movie that was, by most accounts, mediocre, when he expected fireworks, must have been disappointing.

What a filmography!   What contributions he’s made.   Clint Eastwood is many things, and one of the things he is is an American hero-action figure.