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Meryl
Streep is a national treasure. Such pleasure to watch her;
there is an undercurrent of mischief in the twinkle in her eyes as
if she is were having the time of her life and we are inevitably,
inexorably, drawn into her world. As Sister Aloysius, the
principal of a boarding school in the Bronx, her acting in Doubt
is a dramatic tour-de-force with every moue of expression, every
intelligent glance of the eyes, every subtle twist of the mouth
calibrated and honed to perfection. Reinterpreting the role,
she has taken it to dramatic extreme and there are shades here of
her editrix in The Devil Wears Prada. The movie is
triangulated brilliantly, for she is not allowed to get away with
it, to steal the show, and it is testament to both Philip Seymour
Hoffman who plays Father Flynn and Amy Adams as Sister James that
they balance out the equation and hold her in check. Viola
Davis as the mother of African-American student Donald (Joseph
Foster II) is also remarkably good in her duet with Meryl Streep.
Doubt
centers around an old story - and a story worth talking about -
the Catholic church and pedophilia. The script revolves
around the ambiguity of the relationship between Father Flynn and
his student, Donald. The word pedophilia is never mentioned
- and to quote from Borges's appropriately titled The Garden of
Forking Paths: "In a riddle whose answer is 'chess' what
is the one word one is not allowed to use?"
If
John Patrick Shanley's film is about doubt in all its shades of
gray, there is still a heightened consciousness of color in the
production. The nuns walk around in their costumes like
Chanel dresses and as Shanley said, " . . . these people were
dressed entirely in black with touches of white . . . so that you
can take a bold color as a background and they will pop out of
that environment the way the Dutch masters did in a Rembrandt
rather than get lost in the background . . . ." Based
on his memories of his childhood Bronx, the exterior used is that
of his childhood church school, but the interior is highly
designed and constructed. Shanley wanted something entirely
different from the play, something fresh and new, and perhaps why
the sets, the cast, and the interpretation is quite different from
that of the award-winning Broadway production. With
all the talk of proof and certainty there is of course then the
doubt about whether the story is in fact a metaphor for
something much larger. In a play whose answer is perhaps
doubt in the very idea of the Church and the existence of God,
what is that which one is not allowed to mention?
Insinuatingly clever . . . .
See:
Doubt
Written
and directed by John Patrick Shanley; based on his play; director
of photography, Roger Deakins; WITH: Meryl Streep (Sister Aloysius
Beauvier), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Father Brendan Flynn), Amy
Adams (Sister James), Viola Davis (Mrs. Miller), Joseph Foster II
(Donald Miller), Alice Drummond (Sister Veronica), Audrie Neenan
(Sister Raymond), Susan Blommaert (Mrs. Carson), Carrie Preston
(Christine Hurley) and John Costelloe (Warren Hurley).
Tags:
film
theatre
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