Philip Seymour Hoffman Fest: Doubt

2006 nun movie

Rating: 17/20 (Jen: fell asleep)

Plot: The principal of a Catholic school suspects a liberal priest of being like most other priests.

It's a ton of fun watching two actors--Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman--at the tops of their games. This is almost entirely dialogue driven, and that pair of antagonists get more than a few scenes to try to eat each other with words. There's just so much ummph behind each and every phrasing, and I don't think I've seen a pair nail every single word so perfectly before. They push on each other, hammer away, bicker like pros. Sometimes, it's less about the writing and more about the delivery. Sometimes, it's just a word, Streep saying "Candy!" or "This" or Hoffman saying "Intolerance" in ways that show you how much performance matters. They're words like claws. Streep's Sister Aloysius recalls Nurse Ratched, only a little more in-your-face and bitchy. She's got an accent and a loathing of ballpoint pens and Frosty the Snowman which apparently celebrates the pagan belief in magic. I'd find it hard to believe that anybody can watch this movie and root for her character from the first time we meet her, a shot where she's slapping a kid on the back of the head during a church service. That's the first time we see Hoffman's priest, too, giving a sermon about the titular feeling. He's good in two sermon scenes, and hopefully they're enough to get him into heaven. Hoffman gets to show off his extraordinary basketball skills, the same ones he showed off in Along Came Polly. He also creates continuity errors with a forehead vein. Each actor is great individually, but they really seem to turn it up when they're in scenes together. "Where's your compassion?" Hoffman will ask, and Streep will answer, "Not anywhere you can get at it." Some of the most violent dialogue you're ever likely to hear. And I love how the two are shot, sometimes with crooked camera angles and sometimes with just the way they're positioned. In a way, I feel sorry for poor Amy "Am I in the way here?" Adams who just can't keep up, but her character is important as the on-screen representation of the movie's audience trying to make up our minds about who to believe. And that's where this movie really gets interesting. It toys with you, creating doubt with the likability of the characters, subtle clues or red herrings, obvious clues or clues that just seem obvious. It's a movie that requires you to decide for yourself without any real evidence, and it's the kind of thing that could bring out a person's biases and reveal more about the person watching the movie than any of the characters. In a way, it reminds me of that short story "The Lady or the Tiger?" It's the kind of art that holds up that proverbial mirror in front of the viewer. Two people watching in the same room, provided one doesn't fall asleep about five minutes after the movie's started--won't have the same reaction to the central plot or questions of pedophilic behavior or a scene where a boy's mother (played terrifically by Viola Davis in a small role) has a reaction that might not make a lot of sense to some people. It's a powerful movie that'll challenge your thinking a bit. And three more things I want to mention: 1) A pair of birds, the symbolism which I didn't understand. 2) Alice Drummond, the actress who didn't like Dan Marino in Pet Detective, brilliant as the elderly Sister Veronica. 3) A scene where the wind picks up and some leaves swirl around a character. I avoided this movie because I thought it looked really boring. It's definitely not boring!