Doubt--a review

I’m aware that I will seem completely biased against the movie since I saw the play first, but let me try to deny this bias: about a year after I saw the play, I read the screenplay, and was just as thoroughly riveted. The movie, however—greatly changed from the screenplay I’d read—was a massive disappointment.

Kenneth Turan is absolutely correct: John Patrick Shanley (or Scott Rudin?) was so busy trying to make the movie not seem like it was based on a play (not to speak of the fact that no one should ever let Shanley have a camera ever, ever again) that it ended up being merely weighted down by a bunch of miscellaneous, irrelevant things shoved in there (but OUTSIDE of the location where the play takes place, so that makes it a movie!). The worst crime of all that doing so committed was distracting you from the phenomenal speeches that held you transfixed even when it was just a guy standing in one place on a stage. Oh, but “movies” can’t be like that; that would be too boring for the stupid audiences. Really?? It worked for Dangerous Liaisons, for only one example. In that film, Glenn Close delivers a whole speech from a sofa while the camera merely pushes in on her. But Shanley didn’t trust his own damn words, and so completely destroyed the pull of, for instance, the priest’s first sermon, by cutting away to practically everything but the priest every two seconds. This is not MTV, Mr. Shanley. Teenagers are not going to see this movie anyway, so you may as well have plunked down the camera in front of the actors My Dinner with Andre style and let us focus on your beautiful, beautiful words.

Because of all the new, meaningless material, the movie had me sitting back thinking “get ON with it!” while the play (and the screenplay) was so taut that it had me on the edge of my seat practically every moment. It was enough to make me wish that instead of Shanley, in spite of being the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of the play, those adaptation masters Christopher Hampton and/or Stephen Frears had gotten their hands on it.

[By the way, the rest of this review really isn’t going to make sense if you haven’t already seen it.]

There’s another reason why the suspense was completely bereft from this incarnation. In the play, the scenes between the head nun and the priest are like watching a duel between master swordsmen. You’re contintually wondering: did he do it? Did he not do it? Is she really just overly suspicious? Or is her paranoia actually correct? However, Shanley, oddly, answers those questions for us, when those questions are the entire point!!! Guilt is written across Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face in practically every scene. Thus, instead of the question being “did he do it?” the question becomes “is she going to make him admit it?” which sort of detracts from the whole “doubt” theme, doesn’t it?! It may as well be called Certainty for all I can tell. The guy I saw on Broadway, on the other hand, was absolutely convincing in his denial, which greatly contributes to the gloriously frustrating question as to or whether he did it or not.

I wonder, actually, if casting PSH fed into the perception that he obviously did it. Although I was initially excited to see him in the role, halfway through I realized that casting him was a tremendous mistake: I’m sorry, he just LOOKS like a perv. And I’m not the only one who’s ever thought this! Think of all the times he’s played sketch characters, most notably in Happiness. The guy on Broadway, by contrast, was this beautiful, broad-shouldered, leading man type—the kind of guy a lawyer would point to in a courtroom and say to the jury, does THIS look like the face of a child molester? I’m not saying that means that all pervy-looking guys are child molesters, but just dramatically I think it helps reinforce the ambiguity. I’m also not saying the Broadway guy was a better ACTOR—I’m just saying that his type and the way he was directed made for a stronger contribution to the whole point of the play.

On the other hand, Amy Adams was a welcome presense compared to the god-awful Jena Malone on Broadway, Meryl Streep delivers a typical crazy Meryl Streep performance, and Viola Davis was rightly HIGHLY praised in both Ebert’s and Turan’s reviews. Turan calls her the heart of the movie, and she is so especially because she pulls at YOUR heart. Almost the moment you see her, you completely get the immense weight of what it is to be a mother wanting the most for her son and worried that he’ll never get it, and the rest of the scene only gets more and more unbearably heart-breaking. And I’m pretty sure I was NOT as affected by that role when I saw it on stage.

All in all, massively disappointing. I recommend that everyone see or read the stage play instead of seeing the movie, and while I initially had it on my Best Picture shortlist, it has now been bitterly struck from that highest of tiers.