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.

How much I hate shopping

Everyone who knows me knows that I defy the stereotype that girls love shopping. I know, can you believe it? But to my mind, HOW could anyone POSSIBLY love shopping?!?!? Why the FUCK would I enjoy parting ways with my money that I took no small pains to earn for something that I might not end up liking in a few months, when instead I could be putting it in an account to earn 3% interest for things that actually might be important in the future (rent, car payments, etc.)??

I suppose this may seem to mean that I’m just naturally frugal, but I’m actually not the cutting-coupons type; I’m actually kind of bad at that sort of stuff. I suppose I just think it’s easier not to buy something than to have to take the trouble to buy it for less. And so I spend money on those things which I absolutely need to (e.g. gas), or things I try to resist but can’t help myself and buy it anyway (e.g. the occasional latte). I think this comes from when I was growing up, when we were so poor that I hardly ever got what I wanted (including violin lessons, which most (rich) parents would be thrilled for their child to actually want), and I suppose this got ingrained in me, along with contempt for all of consumer society (could that just be a way of sugaring the bitter pill of deprivation, thinking that it’s not that I CAN’T participate, but that I’m too ABOVE it to want to? Possibly, but if so, I don’t want to be disabused of that illusion.).

Anyway, the downturn in the economy has, not surprisingly, exacerbated this tendency, and there’s a specific example that has even me sort of horrified. So, I’ve had a job for the past month that requires “business” wear, which means wearing my only slightly bearable office-setting-appropriate heels. And every day I think about buying some comfortable flats, but every day I balk at the notion of plunking down any amount for shoes when my job is only temporary, I still have Christmas presents to get, and the economy could make my situation even lousier at any moment. Essentially, I’m trying not to spend money on anything I can actually resist, and even though I’m a girl, I find shoes and clothing of any kind eminently resistible (just ask anyone who’s seen my ridiculous array of drab outfits).

This may sound like I should just shut up and not get them, but meanwhile I can only hobble like a block in the heels I’m wearing. One of my ankles has started hurting. I don’t even know what bunions are, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting them. And this is where long-term and short-term thinking come in. Who knows: I could actually be slowly injuring myself with the shoes I have and end up paying more to a doctor than I would have if I had just bought some damn shoes. And yet I still adamantly refuse to.

It’s even more than just a refusal, actually: it’s almost a physical AVERSION to it.
I’ve tried. Recently, I walked into a shoe store, started looking around, and when the salesman asked if I needed help, I bolted. I suppose this is an issue for another blog entry, but I hate, HATE salespeople. They act as though merely your entering the store is a promise that you’ll buy something, and if you don’t, seem utterly offended. You haven’t noticed this? Then it’s probably just my proletarian projection of guilt. But it’s more than that: it’s that the whole process of making someone fetch shoes at your bidding reeks of the hierarchy of a capitalistic society.

I’m sorry for elaborating on such a seemingly banal circumstance, but I think it illustrates how far I’ll go these days to avoid shopping, in spite of my girlness. :P

The Tragedy of Underrated Performances--specifically, Jason Butler Harner in Changeling

Helen Mirren rightfully won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Queen. However, there was another performance in that movie that was COMPLETELY overlooked: that of Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. This will undeniably happen again (as Sheen himself has ironically commented) in Frost/Nixon, where Frank Langella has the zanier part of the two, but where it was Sheen who completely transfixed my attention when I saw the show on the London stage.

It just goes to show you what a freakin’ marketing machine the nominations process is. If the studios don’t think you have a chance, they don’t invest in you, and thus NO ONE notices how excellent your performance is. Because, I mean, it’s one thing for Sheen not to have been nominated, but to not even get any buzz in town for it???

This is an extremely roundabout way of getting to my main point, which is that Jason Butler Harner totally ROCKED Changeling. I mean, it’s a tour-de-force performance. TOUR DE FORCE. (One which made me peg him immediately as having come from New York theater, so I looked it up and—ka-ching!—yep: NY theater actor. HA HA! I can totally call these things, just as I totally called Eddie Redmayne (from The Yellow Handkerchief) as having been trained in England, because American actors his age are just not that good. On another note, it looks like I actually must have seen Harner in The Cherry Orchard a couple of years ago, but I only vaguely remember him. Clearly not as memorable a performance.) It’s the kind of performance from an unknown that makes you go, “Who IS that???” (As everyone did for Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.)

However, which actor from that movie is the one getting the Oscar buzz?? Fucking Angelina Jolie. Not that she isn’t good in it—she is (although I agree with the New Yorker that “Angelina Jolie stays perfectly in character (too perfectly—her performance is dull))—but he’s the one with the UNBELIEVABLE performance. So why isn’t he getting any attention, in spite of adulation from the critics? According to Ebert, “The film's most riveting performance is by Jason Butler Harner as the murderous Gordon Northcott. The character could not be adequately described on the page. Harner's mesmerizing performance brings him to sinister life as a self-pitying weasel specializing in smarmy phony charm. He doesn't play a sick killer. He embodies one.”

Meanwhile, film.com doesn’t breathe a word about him as a Best Supporting Actor contender. Instead, they mention James fucking Franco. Not that he didn’t do a decent job, but he practically had NOTHING to do!! He doesn’t stand a chance. Even the far too comprehensive list at InContention.com leaves Harner off. Not that these sites are definitive oracles of the Oscars (I’d never even heard of them prior to looking this up), but I think they are actually a good barometer of who’s getting buzz and who isn’t: they validate my sense that no one in town is talking about him.

And I think that’s tragic. Just like it was tragic when Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was completely overlooked for ANY nomination, when I—and anyone who’s seen it—found it one of the most ingenius movies I’d ever seen and in a just world would have at LEAST been nominated for best screenplay. I’m not saying that the Academy Awards are the end-all and be-all of determining what a good performance is, but it’s nice when a brilliant performance gets exactly as much attention and acclaim as it deserves. Who knows, maybe in these last few weeks, Harner will pull ahead in the ridiculous horse race that is Oscar season, although surely, Heath Ledger will be the one to attain the laurel for his own portrayal of a murderous psychopath. But you can’t help that. I just don’t get why he’s not even in the running.