Into the Woods

It's OK, dear ... I'm still getting an

Oscar nomination out of this.

Into the Woods

Grade: D

Director: Rob Marshall

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Chris Pine, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Mackenzie Mauzy,  Billy Magnussen, Lilla Crawford and Daniel Huttlestone

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

It’s not homage to the foreboding Grimms’ Fairy Tales creeping into Into the Woods that makes this musical mash-up an excruciating experience. While Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella are regarded as classic children’s literature, it’s forgotten that the subject matter of these and other Brothers Grimm stories are quite dark and violent—in the original Snow White, the Queen, Snow White’s actual mother, wants her daughter killed so she can eat her liver and lungs.

Instead, it’s a schlocky plot that’s further jumbled by unsavory plot turns to both preserve and limit the onscreen body count. It’s the unremarkable Stephen Sondheim soundtrack that provides just one memorable song, “Agony,” a duet between preening princes. But mostly it’s just a rapey, murdery mess that’s neither pleasant nor poignant.

Director Rob Marshall (having long since blown his Chicago credit) ties together the stories of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk with Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. The narrative lynchpin is a Baker (James Corden, heir to “The Late Late Show” after Craig Ferguson departs) and his wife (Emily Blunt), who are cursed with infertility by the village Witch (Meryl Streep) unless they can deliver a quartet of objects to the Witch in three days’ time to break her spell. The four items are the slipper of Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), the cowl of Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), the flaxen locks of Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) and a white cow belonging to Jack (Daniel Huttlestone, last seen playing the French boy who croons with a cockney accent in Les Misérables).

The fable meanders through its mundane paces, including a detour down the gullet of the Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp). Its off-beat interpretations of the classic fairy tales are convivial enough. But once Jack, having pilfered one too many items from the Giant, chops down the beanstalk and kills the colossus, it causes the Giant’s wife climbing down to exact vengeance on Jack and the kingdom.

It’s here where Into the Woods transforms from tedious to terrible. One character dies at the hands of another character for no discernable reason. Then there’s an out-of-left-field act of infidelity that triggers the equally sudden, misogynistic demise of only the female wrongdoer. Adding to the confusion and literary cowardice, all these deaths occur off-screen, while one character who dies in the stage musical is spared, since I guess two deaths are plenty.

However, the film’s true crime is its hamfisted attempt to blend the fantastic with real-life lessons about pain and responsibilities. The clash of tones ill-fitting narratives is jarring, and the already off-putting plot is made more confusing by some selective sanitizing. If you venture Into the Woods, you’re liable to become a supporter of deforestation.

The Giver

Son, I'm afraid this isn't another Tron sequel

Grade: C +

Director: Phillip Noyce

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Alexander Skarsgård, Katie Holmes, Odeya Rush, Taylor Swift, Cameron Monaghan and Emma Tremblay

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

It’s easy to see why it took 17 years to get Lois Lowry’s best-selling 1993 YA novel The Giver on the silver screen. Instead of embracing the potential depth of its subject matter, the film adaptation co-produced by Jeff Bridges and directed by Phillip Noyce—both able filmmakers—is distilled down to a promising premise bookended by empty mythology on one side and convenient, magical-transformative malarkey on the other.

A pre-credits narration informs the audience that after “The Ruin,” humankind rebuilt society into a cluster of utopian “Communities” ruled by a council of Elders and their authoritarian chief (Meryl Streep). Memories of the past have been all but wiped out so society can begin anew. The weather is always good, the trees are fake, there aren’t any animals and no one carries a surname. Your family and occupation are predetermined. Citizens must dress alike and aren’t permitted to lie or use “imprecise language.” Mandatory morning meds keep everyone docile, emotionless and, yes, colorblind. And elderly citizens and deficient infants are “released to Elsewhere”—you don’t need to watch Logan’s Run to know what that means.

Wondering what The Ruin was and how humans were able—logistically and ethically—to develop these uber-planned communities? Don’t bother. The Giver doesn’t explicate such pesky details about its backstory. Instead, we glean them through the eyes of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), an 18-year-old tapped as the new Receiver of Memory. Jonas will telepathically inherit the entirety of human history and emotion from The Giver (Jeff Bridges), a curmudgeonly elder living in an oversized library near the edge of the town.

As Jonas’ eyes are opened to the wonders of colors, snow, dancing, elephants and war, this carefully chosen Receiver immediately starts to crack like a cheap windshield. One of his only rules is to never share with others what he learns during training, so of course the first thing he does is tell his friends about what he’s learned during training. Jonas gets surly with his delegated parents (Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes) and wants to kiss doe-eyed girl-friend Fiona (Odeya Rush), to the dismay of Asher (Cameron Monaghan), whose unruly and jealous disposition is supposedly the sort of character flaw that gets ironed out by medication.

The Giver is blessed with the handsome cinematography of Ross Emery, who formerly directed photography for the Matrix trilogy and Dark World. The film’s early acts team with a youthful exuberance—conveyed using subtle jump cuts and off-angle shots—churning beneath a futurististic milieu muted by Emery’s black-and-white palette.

But once Jonas visits The Giver and color starts intruding on this sci-fi Pleasantville, the precarious plot starts to unravel. The Giver doesn’t want to just impart wisdom on Jonas, but also radicalize him into shaking up this dystopic Garden of Eden (including some subterfuge involving Fiona and an apple). And once Gabriel, a newborn future Receiver, is slated for “release,” Jonas decides that it’s finally time to go rogue.

Besides the contrivance of how it’s accomplished, it’s hard to accept that this meticulously engineered society could be so easily undone by one young boy and a baby going on a walkabout beyond some invisible border. Or that it hadn’t happened before Jonas came along.

Ultimately, the sense of Sameness plaguing the flawed utopia in The Giver afflicts its cinematic presentation. In the end, Jonas finds his Rosebud and a cabin echoing with Christmas carols. But viewers are left to mull an aftermath of Jonas’ journey as unexplained as everything before it. Maybe the audience needs its own Giver.

August: Osage County

Your god can't save you now

Grade: F

Director: John Wells

Starring: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis and Benedict Cumberbatch

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 1 min.

The actors don’t just chew the scenery in August: Osage County—they engorge it. For two excruciating hours, otherwise talented performers are untethered from any directorial moorings, running with sharp dialogue and other dangerous devices. The actors run this asylum, but it’s the audience who feels like their undergoing a lobotomy.

Adapted with little medium modulation from the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts, August: Osage County lures an abnormal family back to their Oklahoma homestead in the wake of the disappearance of Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), its patriarch—we’ll call him “the lucky one.” Violet (Meryl Streep), Beverly’s crass, boozy, pill-popping wife, is “consoled” by her sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and daughters Barbara (Julia Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen (Juliette Lewis). The women’s dimwitted menfolk are along for the ride, including Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney and Benedict Cumberbatch as a slack-jawed kissin' cousin.

This family gathering assumes the form of a bilious orgy of shrill insults and stunning dysfunction, all compressed into a single hellish weekend. Indeed, just one of the caustic exchanges would be enough to send all but the most masochistic relatives packing. Instead, they stick around for revelations of incest, infidelity and pedophila, laced with a torrent of barbs aimed at everything from clothing to hairstyles to being vegan. The situations are not only uncomfortable but also contrived.

Among the lot of regrettable performances, Streep’s is singularly risible. Her Violet is a midwestern melange of Norma Desmond and Joan Rivers, with an accent stuck somewhere between Tulsa and Tuscaloosa. Only Roberts and Nicholson manage to save any shred of dignity, but the former is constantly undercut by ludicrous prose and predicaments, while the latter is spared by simply having the good sense to drive away from this madhouse.

At one point, Violet’s stoic Native American caregiver (Misty Upham) takes a shovel to the head of a lecherous character. If only she’d kept swinging at the rest of this calamitous clan, this story would have a happy ending.

Hope Springs

You mean I'm going to get an Oscar nomination

for pleasuring Tommy Lee Jones?

Hope Springs
Grade: B +
Director: David Frankel
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

It wasn’t The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, or even The Dark Knight Rises that most held my rapt attention this summer movie season. No, the thrill of watching two luminous American thespians exhibit the craft of acting in Hope Springs beats all the CGI pyrotechnics money can buy.

After 31 years of marriage, the everyday for Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) is a monotonous cycle of silent meals and sexless nights spent in separate bedrooms. When Arnold isn’t dozing off in his recliner using the Golf Channel as a sleep aid, he’s concocting feeble excuses to rebuff his wife’s timid advances.

At her whit’s end, Kay cashes in her CD and enrolls her and her skeptical husband in an intensive one-week program run by Dr. Bernard Feld (Steve Carell), a published marriage counselor nestled in the titular, oh-so-quaint Maine village (Connecticut substituting). Carell proves his acting mettle by, ironically, being smart enough to back off and simply moderate Steep and Jones’ exquisite, poignant and often wrenching dissection of a marriage gone stale.

Guided by director David Frankel (who helmed Streep’s Oscar-nominated turn in The Devil Wears Prada), it’s a joy to watch two actors convey complex emotions with a simple turn of phrase or sidelong gaze. Writer Vanessa Taylor’s characterizations are glaring at times, with Kay too dowdy, even saintly, and Arnold too cantankerous, even detestable. And an overly tidy finale is as predictable as the music accompanying it: “Why” by Annie Lennox transitions into Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over.”

Thematically, Hope Springs is a senior-circuit adaptation of “Fireproof” without the religious pablum. And, I could have done without the repeated forays into a PG-rated, geriatric take on “50 Shades of Grey.” Still, the film dares to tackle head-on the dearth of emotional and, yes, physical intimacy in long-lasting marriages that subsist on comfort and routine, sometimes enduring for their own sake.

Such seriousness blended with comic grace notes could have gone horribly wrong in less talented hands. But, Streep and Jones make you feel the pain, embarrassment and stubbornness often standing in the way of the spiritual and sexual healing process. If Hope Springs proves anything, it’s that age ain’t nothing but a number.

Neil Morris

The Iron Lady

Grade: B –

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Starring: Meryl Streep, JimBroadbent, Harry Lloyd, and Alexandra Roach

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

If ever it was possible for an opening scene to buoy an entire feature-length motion picture, The Iron Lady would be it. Having wandered away from her London home and past her caretakers, a senile, octogenarian Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) is shopping in a small corner mart. As loud Indian music blares over the loudspeakers, a besuited businessman pushes past her while yammering into his cell phone; a young black customer in headphones faintly rolls his eyes at the doddering old woman. There’s irony when Thatcher – a middle-class grocer’s daughter – does a double-take when told that a pint of milk costs 49 pence. No one recognizes the iconic Cold Warrior, but what’s more, it is a world she no longer recognizes. It’s a biting collage of class and culture as brilliant as anything Stephen Frears has ever filmed.

Off this lofty perch, however, falls the rest of this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (co-writer of Shame). Told in flashback rote, the narrative oscillates throughout from the present-day senescent Thatcher to her early days as an ambitious Oxford grad with an eye and gut for politics. The nee Miss Roberts (portrayed by Alexandra Roach) falls for and marries Denis Thatcher (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd), but only after he agrees to abide by her political ambitions.

From there, it’s off to a whirlwind of biographical touchstones: Thatcher (now played by Streep) being elected to Parliament in 1959; unseating Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative party; her accession to England’s first female PrimeMinister in 1979; her 11-year reign, highlighted by trade union strikes, IRA terrorism and, of course, the Falkland Islands conflict; and being deposed as party head in 1990.

The film’s true iron lady is Streep. Her role is susceptible to suspicion as it blatantly contains all three ingredients of the Oscar formula – British, biographical and disability-centric (in the case of the latter-day Thatcher). However, Streep’s depiction goes well beyond mere impersonation, ably portraying Thatcher at both her most harrowing and heroic. She essentially plays two different characters and does so with trademark subtlety and sublimity. At a dinner party hosted by the elder Thatcher, a guest asks how she would handle a recent terrorist attack were she still in office. Streep pauses, the question seemingly evaporated before reaching her blank countenance, before suddenly summoning, as if by instinct, a cogent diatribe against the evil of modern-day global terrorism.

While Ms. Lloyd hits all the historical high notes, the fragmented narrative and stunted 115-minute running time doesn’t afford the opportunity to flesh out any context. We’re subjected to constant news reports about IRA bombings – including the murder of Airey Neave and the 1984 attempt on Thatcher’s life at theBrighton hotel – but little about their cause and effect on Thatcher’s policies. Her decision to engage in the Falklands is chalked up to a steadfast nationalism and adherence to principle that guided every aspect of her life. However, in a more enterprising (and perhaps honest) script, Thatcher would recognize and, indeed, shrewdly exploit the popularity that comes from being a wartime leader, particularly a female one. How Ms. Lloyd ignores any juxtaposition with Elizabeth I mounting a grey gelding to address the troops at Tilbury is beyond me.

More problematic, however, are the director’s incessant returns to the dementia-suffering Thatcher, staring into mirrors and being regularly visited by the apparition of her now-deceased husband, played by Jim Broadbent, who essentially acts as a one-man Greek chorus. Beyond the precious time squandered at the expense of Thatcher’s time in office, these scenes posit her relationship with Denis as the guiding force in her life. This belief, while in keeping with the accounts of her daughter Cathy and other confidants, is not developed throughout the rest of the film. Moreover, there’s a dissonance between Mr.Lloyd’s demure, wealthy young aristocrat and the daft Denis (both before and after his death) whom Broadbent channels – it actually took me a few minutes to figure out they were the same character.

As part of a makeover to make her appear more commanding to the public, the future Prime Minister participates in a bizarre speaking exercise straight out one of the therapy sessions in The King’s Speech. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, unfortunately, The Iron Lady never finds its true voice.

Neil Morris

It's Complicated

You're old...isn't that funny?

Grade: C

Director: Nancy Meyers

Starring: Meryl Street, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinksi, and Lake Bell

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

“It’s Complicated” is, indeed, but just not in the way one would expect. At its rail-thin best, it is a leisurely tale about two former spouses who – years after he, Jake (Alec Baldwin), left she, Jane (Meryl Streep), for a younger set of abs with a conspicuously natty name, Agness (Lake Bell) – begin to rendezvous in secret at sundry bedrooms and her kitchen. Being that the ways to a man’s heart are through his stomach and other lower extremities, it is little wonder that Jake begins to long for the comforts of what might have been instead of weekly trips to the fertility clinic with his headstrong trophy wife. There is something relevant here to ponder: The vain hunt for eternal youth versus the earned dividends of hearth and home.

It’s a universal story, really. Oh, unless you don’t own a boutique bakery and live in a sprawling Santa Barbara ranch house that you want to remodel with a new kitchen and bedroom (sledgehammer irony alert…). Or, if you’re not a Porsche-driving attorney who can apparently spend every waking minute jetting from coast-to-coast to jump in the sack with your ex-wife. Or, unless your grown children aren’t a gaggle of lobotomized Stepford kids who can emote either hurt or hilarity, but only on cue, and who have married and/or graduated college but always seem to be around for dinner parties and sleepovers where the whole family dons their pajamas and munches popcorn while watching The Graduate.

In truth, It’s Complicated is more the insular perspective of writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose innocuous parables of independent women that she wrote while married in her 20s and 30s – Private Benjamin and Baby Boom –have given way to pseudo-feminist pap the now-divorced Meyers spins about high-strung, self-pitying SoCalers of privilege with “problems” the average moviegoer could only hope to have the chance to suffer – Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and now this.

Poor Jane feels a bad case of empty nest syndrome coming on, despite her bustling business, creature comforts, dalliance with Jake, and the non-threatening advances of her architect, Adam, played by an emasculated Steve Martin. All the while, she is cheered on her middle-aged coffee klatch – including the suddenly ubiquitous Rita Wilson, happy to walk-through only her third-worst film of 2009 behind Old Dogs and My Life In Ruins.

Movies are about escapism, and perhaps some will identity with scenes in which Jane and Jake both mourn and guffaw how time (and, in Baldwin’s case, bad eating habits) have ravaged their once-youthful bodies. But, jokes like Jane and Adam rediscovering the joys of getting stoned are overbroad and simple-minded – usual only to allow Martin to flash some glimpse of his inner wild and crazy guy. Almost every one-liner, sight-gag, and screwball set piece falls flat, none of them advancing the film’s purportedly complex tableau.

Fans of Baldwin and John Krasinksi will barely recognize them as the same talented comic actors from 30 Rock and The Office, respectively. For her part, Streep is in full Mamma Mia mode, trying to use her trademark chortle to mask the film’s numerous cinematic sins. Alas, this task proves too complicated, even for one of our greatest film actresses.

Neil Morris

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Ocean's Fourteen

Grade: B +

Director: Wes Anderson

Starring the voices of: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Wallace Wolodarsky, and Eric Anderson

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 27 minutes

In many ways, Wes Anderson is the perfect director to adapt a Roald Dahl children’s novel.

It isn’t that Anderson is slavishly faithful to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, the basic premise is still about a chicken-thieving fox trying to outfox – and save his friends and family from – three evil farmers. Indeed, the film opens with the book’s familiar limerick: “Boggis and Bunce and Bean; One fat, one short, one lean; These horrible crooks; So different in looks; Were none the less equally mean.”

But, Anderson also makes room for his recurring film motifs: The comic mix of poignancy and dry humor; the use malapropism and eggcorns; the inclusion of folk and rock music; even the onscreen titles are printed using Futura Bold font. For the voices of the animal characters, the director casts several of his oft-used actors, including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, and Jason Schwartzman.

Moreover, Anderson scrubs the class-conflict subtext in Dahl’s 1970 original text and, in its place, turns the parable into another tale of personal destiny and family dysfunction, a la The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. Ultimately, the suitability of Anderson is that he is, in many ways, the modern-day, cinematic counterpart to the eccentric Dahl. If anything, the animated backdrop affords Anderson more freedom for his trademark quirkiness than live-action settings.

Voicing the titular vulpine paterfamilias, George Clooney sounds like the sort of sly fox who could routinely talk himself and friends into and out of trouble. After swearing off a life of crime for a career as a newspaper journalist, Mr. Fox moves his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) and son Ash (Schwartman) out of a hole and into a hardwood tree that happens to overlook Boggis’ chicken farm, Bunce’s duck and goose warehouse, and Bean’s (Michael Gambon) apple cider cellar.

Mr. Fox and his opossum super, Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky), launch clandestine, nocturnal raids that prompt the farmers’ escalating efforts to kill him. Felicity suffers her husband’s instinctual, dangerous schemes, while Ash struggles to win his father’s affections over his athletic, popular cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). The lessons to be learned include embracing and being true to one’s self – it is worth noting that the woodland creatures here talk, dress, and act like urban sophisticates except when performing basic functions like eating or arguing, when they assume their natural growling, scarfing traits.

That said, the joys of Fantastic Mr. Fox are far simpler. Juxtaposed nicely with rudimentary stop-motion animation, the dialogue is at once cerebral and sassy. Unlike in some of their previous efforts, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach never venture into pretentiousness; if anything, the closing battle royalé and coda are overly trite and tidy. The truth is that Anderson’s films usually connote a depth they do not actually possess. What’s fantastic about Mr. Fox is that any deeper meaning is only icing on the cake. For once, Wes Anderson just wants you to have a good time.

Neil Morris

Julie & Julia

I'm happy to accept this award on Ms. Streep's behalf...

Grade: C +

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Times: 2 hours, 3 minutes

As shallow as a soufflé, Julie & Julia is a puff pastry of epicurean ecstasy. It is a testament to the enduring talents of Meryl Streep and the iconic chef she portrays. But, in the vacuous hands of director Nora Ephron, it is an example of subtraction by addition, as two storylines that would barely sustain a feature-length film by themselves are diluted to the point of near irrelevance (in the case of Julie) and paucity (in the case of Julia) for the sake of splicing them together under a single title. Simply put, the ingredients don’t mix.

Streep is a deservedly acclaimed actress, and she is a mistress is two characters traits: accents and the ice queen. Thankfully, it is Julia Child’s Boston Brahmin brogue that Streep emphasizes for her charming, disarming portrayal of the famous chef, author, and television personality. The Julia-half of Ephron’s screenplay is drawn from “My Life in France,” Child’s autobiography that recounts the culinary experiences she and husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) indulged while living in post-World War II Paris and Marseilles, along with the infancy of her writing career.

Streep and Tucci – reuniting after costarring together in The Devil Wears Prada – portray these as heady times for the Childs, full of the wonderment of French culture and cuisine juxtaposed against the dismal tide of McCarthyism swamping citizens at home and foreign diplomats working abroad, like Mr. Child.

Against the glare of this iconic spotlight, the marginalized (or not outright marginal) protagonist of Julie & Julia is actually Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a struggling author who cures personal and professional malaise – and jumpstarts her literary career – by starting a Web blog in 2002 chronicling her mission to cook all the recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” over a year.

We’re told that the tie binding these two is that they are both strong, resourceful women who find inspiration in the joy of cooking. Thing is that Julie’s domestic travails in her tiny New York City apartment and her post-September 11^th job inside a cubicle working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation pale in comparison to Child’s worldly ventures.

The film is satisfied with the morsels of manufactured tension it concocts along the way (particularly during Julie’s timeline). Still, it is telling that its funniest scene is the replaying of a 30-year-old Dan Akroyd skit.

Moreover, Ephron eventually tethers a giant elephant in the kitchen near film’s end. I suppose the director and Powell deserve some measure of credit for including the dim view the actual Julia Child held for Powell’s Internet adventures in cooking. But, by addressing the rift only in passing, it serves to erode the essential connection between the two women suggested by both the screenplay and the film’s title. It also further minimalizes Powell’s standing in this two-headed narrative, making you wonder whether it was more than the rain that caused Child’s longtime publisher, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), to cancel a dinner date with Powell.

They are both talented actresses, but in Julia & Julia (just as in Doubt), Streep gets to chew the scenery, while Adams gets consumed by it.

Neil Morris

Doubt

The Devil Wears a Wimple

Grade: B

Director: John Patrick Shanley

Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, and Joseph Foster

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 44 minutes

Amid a surfeit of murky epistemology, the narrative highpoint in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt comes during an exchange between Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the stern Mother Superior at St. Nicholas church in the Bronx, and Ms. Muller, (Viola Davis), the mother of a 12-year-old who is also the Catholic school’s lone African-American student. Sister Aloysius informs Ms. Muller about her suspicions over a possible inappropriate relationship between her son Joseph and the church’s charismatic new priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Wearing the burdens of keeping her factory job and maintaining a stable household as if they were lead weights filling the pockets of her winter overcoat, Ms. Muller eschews conventional morality in a tearful response that is both unconscionable and sadly understandable.

If only the rest of this film adaptation of Shanley’s award-winning play were as daring and audacious. Armed with little more than furtive observations reported by a young, idealistic nun (Amy Adams), together with her own inflexible intuition, Sister Aloysius hurls herself into rooting out Father Flynn’s purported guilt. Set in 1964, the contrast between the two antagonists is stark and intentional: Sister Aloysius’ traditional, pre-Vatican II leanings versus Father Flynn and his more progressive ecumenical ideals. Their joust serves, at least for a while, as a proxy for the ongoing conflict within the Catholic church.

The doubts in Doubt are many: Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence; the viability of the church’s hierarchy; the influence of God over the transgressions of mankind; etc. Unfortunately, the mysterious truth behind Flynn’s relationship with the underage student, which is not meant to be fully known, becomes much clearer due to Shanley’s telegraphed direction. If this is not intentional on Shanley’s part, then it is a glaring error, although it left me fascinated with Flynn’s inability to grasp his immorality while tacitly acknowledging immoral acts, along with the notion that his refusal to genuflect before Sister Aloysius’ reproval might be because she represents the repressive authority figures he (and Joseph?) has suffered his whole life. Other the other hand, if the writer-director is trying to level the moral playing field, he fails miserably: In one corner, we have a didactic disciplinarian with an aversion to everything from ballpoint pens to “Frosty the Snowman,” while in the other we have…a pedophile.

Although Doubt never shakes the stagy strictures of its source play (especially Sister Aloysius’ perfunctory declaration during the abrupt final scene), Roger Deakins’ gorgeously austere cinematography and a uniformly fine cast contribute to the film’s overall success. Streep and Hoffman, in particular, deserve praise for their portraits of pitch-perfect minimalism – the caliber of their performances is the one thing that is never in doubt.

Neil Morris

Mamma Mia!

The Golden Oldie Girls

Grade: C –

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgärd, Christine Baranski, and Julie Waters

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

If you feel the need to tap your toes to ABBA’s greatest hits, plug in your iPod. If you have a hankering for a faded jukebox musical, trek to the Great White Way and buy a ticket to the Winter Garden Theater. Otherwise, the film adaptation of Catherine Johnson’s long-running stage production Mamma Mia!, based on ABBA’s songbook, is a shrill, garish pop-opera that uneasily treads the line between show-stopping and surreal.

On the eve of her wedding, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) tries to identify her father by inviting the three likely candidates to the seaside Greek villa run by her mother and erstwhile flower-child rocker, Donna (Meryl Streep): Sam (Pierce Brosnan) is a wealthy, New York architect; Harry (Colin Firth) is a vaguely gay London banker; and Bill (Stellan Skarsgärd) is a wandering free spirit. As Donna’s middle-aged gal-pals/former backup singers, the braying, fun-loving Rosie (Julie Waters) plays like the fifth Golden Girl while thrice-divorced Tanya (Christine Baranski) releases her inner cougar on the native island boys.

The end result is Gidget viewed through the prism of a Bob Fosse fever-dream. Director Phyllida Lloyd, a veteran of the British theatre, fashions her feature film debut into a poorly paced, oddly drab affair that resembles a tedious, 1970s B-musical (even though the film is set in 1999). Most of the filming took place on the lots of England’s Pinewoods Studios, and there are abundant, obvious green-screened scenes. Moreover, while the ABBA ditties carry infectious beats, the lyrics are shoehorned into the narrative and do nothing to develop either characters or plot.

During its few blessed quiet moments, Streep flashes a dash of much-needed acting acumen. The rest is all histrionics and caterwauling – I’d rather hear a Ringo Starr revue than one more intonation from Brosnan. “Take a chance on me?” If it’s Mamma Mia! asking, no thanks.

Neil Morris