Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/31/08
Upon
divesting its' development slate of projects like Ali, About
Schmidt and The Shipping News in the late 90's, Sony chairman
John Calley uttered these immortal words: “We're not going to make
movies for audiences that need to be dynamited out of their homes.”
He was only saying aloud what most of the industry was thinking, as the
era when Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon could co-exist
as 1998's two 200 million dollar grossers gave way to the one in which
no non-franchise drama grossed 100 million this year. What happened?
Sure, there was a whole lot of self-fulfilling babble about home theaters
and DVDs, but the truth of the matter is that drama as a genre got labeled
with a scarlet B for an entire generation of moviegoers. And,
yes, just as a good many action movies and comedies are soul-numbingly
stupid, a good many dramas are a tad, er, deliberate. But I have
come here to tell you that it need not always be so. In the right
hands, a filmed stage play about a couple of nuns wondering if their Priest
has “acted inappropriately” toward a Catholic school student can emerge
as the year's most gripping thriller. That play is Doubt,
brilliantly adapted and directed by Pulitzer-winner John Patrick Shanley.
In addition to his, the hands are those of actors Meryl Streep, Philip
Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis, who make every one of his ever-so-carefully
chosen words cause to perch on the edge of our seat.
It's
1964, the time between the JFK assassination and the Vatican II reforms,
when the struggle between old and new in the Catholic Church was at its'
most intense. At the St. Nicholas school in the Bronx, that battle
plays out every day. Gregarious Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour
Hoffman) favors loosening old restrictions and treating parishioners like
family. The Principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), believes
everything is as it should be, and rules over her students with an iron
hand. Over the teachers, too, like young Sister James (Amy Adams),
who loves everyone and everything and is constantly prodded by her superior
to be more of a disciplinarian. There's something about Father Flynn
that just rubs Sister Aloysius the wrong way, and after a sermon about
doubt, she asks the other nuns to be on the lookout for... something.
Sister James thinks she witnessed that something when the school's only
black student, Donald (Joseph Foster), is called to the rectory and then
returns looking troubled with the smell of alcohol on his breath.
She goes to Sister Aloysius, who immediately draws the obvious conclusion:
Flynn, who is very close to the friendless Donald, gave the boy wine and
molested him. She's as certain of this as that ball point pens are
evil and Frosty the Snowman is a disturbing and Pagan song.
When the Father offers an alternate explanation, Sister James wants to
accept it and have the whole thing go away, but Aloysius will not stop
pushing, and a conversation with Donald's mother (Viola Davis) gives her
more reason than ever to doubt the divinity of her superior.
So,
is he or isn't he? As they say on TV, you decide. Shanley has
constructed a brilliant investigation of personality in which there are
no real clues, only impressions. Is Flynn's desire to “get closer”
to the students just code for inappropriate conduct? Is Aloysius
just a hateful old woman who wants him to be guilty to prove that change
is bad? The writer/director keeps poking us with little details designed
to subtly provoke: the way the Sister forgot a box of sugar cubes
she gave up for lent in her desk for a over a year, the pride Flynn takes
in wearing his fingernails long, the way a different student (Mike Roukis)
pulls away when the Father touches his arm. Truth be told, most of
our judgments about people are made for reasons like these rather than
any facts we have about them, and Doubt challenges us to stick to
the facts while giving us ample opportunity to either embrace or feel distant
from these characters.
Between
the two of them stands Sister James, a perfect innocent deeply troubled
by the possibilities either of Father Flynn's guilt or having a role in
his wrongful accusation. She wants to do the right thing, and is
pulled one way by Flynn's calls for her to embrace the brighter side of
her personality and the other by Aloysius' demand that she be true to the
discipline of her calling. There's a sensational scene where she
comes to her class in a bubbling rage and disciplines the living daylights
out of the students until one of them cries and it's like a part of the
kindly Sister has died while looking him in the eye.
All
of this works, and does so at a fever pitch of tension, because some of
our finest actors are working at the peak of their powers. Adams
has something pretty much no other actress does, an almost angelic sweetness
that allows her to bring saintly nuns and fairy-tale princesses to life.
Sister James' fragile spirit can barely hold the weight of this crisis,
and being able to see it buckle is quite remarkable. Being untrustworthy
comes easily to Hoffman, so much so that he needs to sprinkle only a flake
of suspicion here and there to make Flynn seem like a man capable of what
he's accused of. But at the same time, he makes a great Priest, and
has a genuine rapport with the kids. Of course, that very discomfort
we have watching an adult male get close to someone else's kids is one
of the hot buttons Shanley so deftly pushes. Davis has only two speaking
scenes, but she's wonderful in them, folded up and desperate to the point
where she'd argue unspeakable positions with a horrible logic.
And
then there's Meryl Streep. On paper, Sister Aloysius is a caricature
of hateful fuddy-duddyness, the kind of woman who ends most movies with
a bucket of something or other dumped over her head. But as events
test her, the Sister proves more decent and honest than we might have imagined,
and is genuinely hurt when Sister James suggests that the school is like
a prison. This is a hard woman who has seen more of the dark side
of humanity than she dares say, and there's a burden on her too, even as
her relentless forward motion denies it. Everyone knows Streep is
a legendary actress, but she's also a great movie star, and those two skills
are fused together here to generate one of her greatest performances:
a judgmental old woman who hates Christmas Carols persecuting a man because
he doesn't cut his fingernails often enough who manages to win us over
to her side. Is she right? We may never know (if I ever meet
Shanley, I'll be sure to ask, although he has reputedly only passed this
answer along to actors who've played Father Flynn. So, if I ever
meet Hoffman...). But she believes she is right. She believes
that those nails and that pen and Frosty the Snowman all add up
to molestation, and the things she uncovers once she starts digging seem
to back her up. “I know people,” she tells him, and who am I to doubt
Meryl Streep? While revealing nothing of its' contents, I'll tell
you that the movie's final scene is as well acted as any you'll see this
year, and it's a special film, and a special performance, that can hit
as hard with its' final line as this one does.
Shanley
wrote the Tony-winning play and won the Pulitzer for it, so the credit
his brilliantly observed dialog and cleverly designed story deserve is
unquestionable. But in only his second outing as director (the other
being the 20-year-old cult favorite Joe vs. the Volcano), he has
a perfect sense of how to make this material work on screen. He doesn't
just open the locations up by taking a number of scenes outside, he makes
the cold a character. As someone who's lived in the Northeast all
my life, I can tell you that a woman sitting on a bench thinking in the
middle of December is thinking about something bad, because otherwise she'd
be doing it indoors. And he takes advantage of all sorts of subtle
ways to make the indoor scenes cinematic, tilting the camera at odd angles
to increase our unease and using the noises of that creaky old school (and
a ringing phone) to maximum benefit. Some directors know what scares
us: here, Shanley knows what makes us uncomfortable, and he goes
to it early and often.
Doubt
gripped me from almost its' first frame and never let me go because I believed
in these characters and I cared about not just what happened to them but
about the answer to its' maddeningly unanswerable central question.
Watching acting this good is its' own reward, but Doubt allows you
to double-dip by putting it in the middle of a truly sensational story.
Yes, Virginia, there is still great drama at the movies. Don't make
me bring the dynamite to get you to it. |
