The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Welcome to the fourth film of

The Hunger Gamezzzzzzz

Grade: C

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

The career path of Jennifer Lawrence parallels the character arc of Katniss Everdeen, from reluctant combatant to reluctant heroine to reluctant messiah. Lawrence, fresh off an unlikely Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone when she debuted in the first Hunger Games, is now a three-time nominee and winner for Silver Linings Playbook. At just age 25, she’s outgrown this franchise, and the weariness shows.

Mockingjay – Part 2 is the monotonous end to an elongated finale marching towards inevitability. The only change that came from splitting author Suzanne Collins’ final book in the Hunger Games trilogy into two films is the unfortunate subtext now accompanying talk of enemies that “do not share our values,” and its depiction of war refugees amassing on the Capitol, embedded with assassins bent on killing the nation’s president. And the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman over 21 months after his death.

Still the PR face of the revolution against President Snow (Donald Sutherland, the only actor who “gets” the inanity), Katniss is charged with wandering into war zones after the battles have been fought to film propos to motivate the rebels. She inexplicably pines for poor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), last seen trying to strangle Katniss due to Snow’s brutal brainwashing, which we don’t see. Team Gayle (Liam Hemsworth) is summarily disbanded, and a bunch of characters get their curtain calls, like Effie (Elizabeth Banks), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci). Meanwhile, rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) isn’t above bombing civilians in order to liberate the 13 Districts of Panem.

It’s a two-hour-plus tedium of “shoot-yammer-kiss-rinse-repeat.” The dialogue is stilted and still stuck to the page, while the action sequences are sporadic and narratively inconsequential—it’s a movie about a war without the war. Instead, Mockingjay – Part 2 is about the ethicality of war, about the corrupting belief that the ends justify any means. But these messages are conveyed here in the most mundane, least imaginative terms.

In the unimaginative hands of director Francis Lawrence, any intrigue and emotion are drained away in deference to dutiful adaptation—the most emotion Jennifer Lawrence displays is while yelling at a cat. The entire film exists to service a 10-minute twist you could see coming an entire movie ago, and the heroine who ultimately embraces the bucolic benefits of motherhood. This is how The Hunger Games end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

The people have spoken: how many 

"Hunger Games" movies should have been made.

Grade: Incomplete

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

During the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (hereinafter Mockingjay – Part 1), Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and her fellow rebels flee underground to escape an aerial bombardment by the Capitol’s forces. Holed up in a dark bunker, Katniss passes the time by shining a flashlight at her pet cat Buttercup and watching with amusement as the feline futilely follows the darting but insubstantial luminescence.

The scene is couched as a metaphor for the manner President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and the all-powerful Capitol is toying with the insurgents. It’s equally applicable to the band of moviegoers huddled in darkened theaters, entranced by the incandescent glow of a silver screen sequel that portends promise but delivers precious little. Mockingjay – Part 1 is almost entirely centered around the marketing of a rebellion, which is oddly appropriate for the film adaptation of a book that’s split in two in order to wring out every cent of box-office potential.

It’s The Matrix: Revolutions of The Hunger Games film series. There’s Zion, in the form of an underground city housing the rebel inhabitants of District 13. Like Neo, Katniss is in full messianic mode after her defiant arrow in the Quarter Quell triggered widespread arisings throughout Panem. Moreover, the film is a tedious progenitor that exclusively subsists on its already strip-mined mythology.

When Katniss awakes in District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, borrowing Meryl Streep’s wig from “The Giver”), PR flack Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the other leaders of the rebellion ask her to serve as the symbol for their cause, the “Mockingjay.” The totalitarian Capitol is suppressing freedoms. The Mockingjay emblem has been banned. Summary executions are being carried out throughout the districts. And District 12, Katniss’ home, lies in ruin, littered with the charred remains of its 10,000 citizens.

“But where’s my motivation!?” Katniss seems to ask. Sadly, that requires a District 8 hospital full of wounded, which is promptly destroyed by Snow as soon as Katniss and a camera crew pay it a visit looking for inspiring verite footage for their war promo. Done and done. Plutarch and Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) produce the “propos,” Cressida (Natalie Dormer) is brought on to put Katniss through her paces, and Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) is in charge of wardrobe.

On the opposite side of the propaganda war is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is being held inside the Capitol and, perhaps against his will, beaming out disinformation about Katniss and the rebellion during a series of televised interviews. Katniss wants Peeta rescued, but she also pines for Gale (Liam Hemsworth). And while the Team Gale/Team Peeta narrative goes nowhere fast, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) is unwisely relegated to sporadic court jester.

“Moves and countermoves,” Snow mutters at one point, and nothing better describes the entirety of the film’s plodding plotline. The true misstep of Mockingjay – Part 1 is the obvious padding it fashions around a two-hour movie about half of Suzanne Collins’ YA novel. Katniss and Gale go hunting and sit by a river, for no purpose. Katniss croons “The Hanging Tree” for the cameras, again while sitting by a river. Katniss kills a few minutes chasing after her sister Primrose (Willow Shields) after she decides to save Buttercup just as the blast doors are closing before a bombing attack. “I just couldn’t live with myself,” Willow whimpers without any apparent sense of context.

But mostly it’s endless speechifying from Katniss, from Snow, from Peeta, from Finnick (Sam Claflin) and especially Coin, shrewdly cast as far less monstrous as Snow but no less dictatorial. There’s a moment late in the film that conveys the film’s apparent aim when, as the rebel leader is delivering one of her innumerable pep talks, we glimpse Plutarch in the background, mouthing along the words to his speech. It’s a Wag the Dog moment that conveys how selling a war is an integral part of winning one. But it’s also a point that could have been established in a couple of scenes, not the entire feature-length film. After all, the previous Hunger Games attacked reality television and economic inequality, but not at the expense of a storyline.

Like Katniss, Lawrence puts gumption behind her cause—aside from one crying scene too many, she does nothing here to tarnish her acting luster playing a character that now feels suddenly stagnant. It’s the leaden messaging that weighs down this perfunctory placeholder. Maybe Katniss will shoot more than one arrow in Mockingjay – Part 2. Let’s hope so, because the lethargic Part 1 wildly misses the mark.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

This Stormtrooper doesn't mean I'm in

the new Star Wars sequel ... I think

Grade: C +

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Sam Claflin and Jena Malone

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 26 min.

For proof positive of the critical capital that Jennifer Lawrence has already amassed, look no further than the early plaudits being heaped on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second installment of the Suzanne Collins-penned trilogy. This otherwise banal actioner, with its darker-than-average themes, rests firmly on the able shoulders of its 23-year-old Oscar-winning star.

And while Lawrence’s presence saites critics, her role as Katniss Everdeen is cobbled from a Whitman’s Sampler of pop cultural influences. She shoots arrows like Legolas. She’s embroiled in her very own love triangle—Team Gale or Team Peeta? And, her rise in status to societal savior from a totalitarian overlord is Neo-esque. Indeed, for all the Battle Royale and The Running Man allusions in the premise to The Hunger Games, its sequel is more akin to The Matrix Reloaded: a bridge film that laces its protagonist’s messianic maturation into a middling, muddled plotline.

Fresh off their Hunger Games win, Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are conscripted by President Snow (Donald Sutherland) into a victory tour to quell rising restlessness throughout the 12 districts. While Katniss and Peeta are able to mask their mutual antipathy for the cameras, they aren’t so good at hiding their distaste for Snow’s oppressive regime. Of course, the fact that Snow oscillates between entertainment diversions and public executions and floggings doesn’t really instill a sense of stability amongst the masses.

So, Snow declares that the 75th Annual Hunger Games, aka the Quarter Quell, will feature tributes (players) who are reaped (chosen) from the existing pool of past victors. Snow confides in new game master Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) that this format is designed to purge the districts of tributes who have gotten too uppity, a concern that doesn’t appear to actually exist until Snow breaks the pledge of lifelong financial security made to those who previously survived the gauntlet of the Games.

Although this Hunger Games: All-Star Edition promises a cunning competition like none before, the way the narrative eventually unfolds—culminating with an abrupt cliffhanger—utterly undercuts this construct. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Jennifer Lawrence in the spotlight, Catching Fire is essentially two-thirds fashion show and one-third recycled action sequences. And amid the dourness, only Stanley Tucci—all ponytail and pearly caps—provides any perceptible energy as TV emcee Caesar Flickerman.

Indeed, whatever profundity is in Catching Fire concerns the manner a co-opted media is a powerful, dangerous weapon in the hands of a government trying to tame its populace. Still, this hardly revelatory concept isn’t enough to fill the 146-minute running time—indeed, The Hunger Games is what viewers play who watch this film on an empty stomach. And if that’s still not enough Katniss and Co. for you, take heart that Collins’ final book, Mockingjay, is going to be split into two films. You know, like Twilight: Breaking Dawn and the entire Hobbit series. What could go wrong with that?

The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Ides of March

A Pretty Face in the Crowd

The Ides of March
Grade: B -
Starring: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.


Despite the implication of its title, George Clooney's new film, The Ides of March, is only obliquely connected to the mother of all tales of political skulduggery, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It does have a Brutus, however, a 30-year-old political operative named Stephen Myers, the media adviser to the presidential primary campaign of Mike Morris, ultra-liberal governor of Pennsylvania.


Buoyed by populist positions on the environment and America's oil dependency, Morris (played by Clooney) is the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination heading into the crucial Ohio primary in the month of March. Morris is also an avowed atheist, setting the film sometime around the year, I dunno, Not in My Lifetime A.D.


We're constantly told that Stephen (played by the suddenly ubiquitous Ryan Gosling) is a political wunderkind. Still, the only proof provided of his genius is a cynical national service scheme, breakable since those impacted by Morris’ failure to implement the program aren’t old enough to vote. Of course, this ignores the fact that both they and the parents left footing the bill will be able to vote in four years during President Morris’ reelection.


In the midst of the Ohio campaign, Stephen succumbs to the advances of Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), a fetching 20-year-old intern and daughter of the DNC's chairman. It is also around this time that he makes the ludicrously naive mistake of agreeing to a clandestine meeting with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager for Morris' opponent, a fact Stephen fails to promptly reveal to his boss and mentor, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The series of betrayals and recriminations that follow push the film through its suspenseful paces.


The Ides of March is an adaptation of Beau Willimon's 2008 play Farragut North, loosely based on the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. Directed by Clooney from a screenplay he wrote with his Good Night, and Good Luck collaborator Grant Heslov, the film is a polished potboiler that produces moments of brilliance—a scene in which Morris receives a call from a deceased character's cellphone during the press conference assembled to announce that person's death is a sequence that would do Hitchcock proud.


Otherwise, Clooney's films still have a tendency to lurch and discount nuance in a trite, often ham-fisted hunt for the big twist or big metaphor. Characters rendezvous at public park benches for top-secret meetings. Air turbulence during a plane flight is conjoined with the onset of trouble in the Morris campaign. At the conclusion of one scene, Clooney holds the image of Stephen's silhouette cast against the backdrop of a giant American flag a beat too long, to the point that any symbolism of the moment starts giving way to parody.


Nevertheless, Clooney's main asset as a director is his power to recruit a crackerjack cast. Hoffman and Giamatti are utterly at ease playing wily but burned-out politicos—I left wanting a movie that focused on them. Wood gives her best performance since The Wrestler, even if Molly is written as a two-note character who morphs from sassy, feckless sexpot into tortured innocent, despite the fact that the events that propel her character had already occurred when she meets Stephen. Meaty if underwritten roles are ably filled by Marisa Tomei, as a hard-bitten New York Times reporter, and Jeffrey Wright, playing an ambitious Southern senator with enough delegates in his back pocket to sway the election. Clooney himself wisely underplays his screen time, which heightens the impact of his bountiful charisma whenever he appears.


Gosling is capable as always, yet his performance is also undercut by the screenplay. Shakespeare's treatment of Julius Ceasar's trusted confidant-turned-assassin is a complex portrait of altruism tinged with naïveté. By contrast, Stephen proves an opportunist of jarring, disjointed absolutes, a loyal idealist who too easily casts aside his principles to keep his seat in the political game and, yes, further the filmmakers' agenda.


The Ides of March is part of a long lineage of behind-the-scenes political dramas, including State of the Union, All the King's Men, The Candidate and especially Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' adaptation of a roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 run for the White House. However, Clooney's movie is intended for interpretation through a more contemporary prism. Three years into the Obama presidency, Clooney, long a poster child for limousine liberalism, makes a movie about a Democratic candidate whose high-minded oratory belies someone who, when pressed, surrenders his ideals for the sake of political expedience and self-preservation. It seems that leveling cynicism toward the current administration has become as fashionable for progressives as when they used to heap indignation onto the previous one. Beware The Ides of March, for scorned liberals, as Marc Antony might say, are all "honourable men."
 
Neil Morris

Moneyball

Ah, this is the interesting life

Grade: B

Director: Bennett Miller

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, and Kerris Dorsey

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 6 min.

Moneyball may be about an old pastime, baseball, but it's reminiscent of a film about a more contemporary activity: The Social Network. Both are about Gen-Y whiz kids rising up and training their trumpets on the walls safeguarding venerable Jerichos—in Social Network it was Madison Avenue, while Moneyball looks at how detailed statistical analysis shook up the tradition-laden world of major league baseball.

As it happens, Aaron Sorkin, last seen accepting a screenplay Oscar for The Social Network, also revised writer Steve Zaillian's treatment of Moneyball. The long-gestating Moneyball film project, directed by Bennett Miller (Capote), adapts Michael Lewis' 2003 book about the Oakland Athletics and its general manager Billy Beane, who adopted the principles of "sabermetrics" in identifying undervalued baseball players as a means for cash-strapped clubs to compete with rich rivals like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Along the way, Beane (played by Brad Pitt) challenges the sport’s sacred cows, including his own scouts and head coach (Philip Seymour Hoffman, giving little to do besides scowl a lot), who resent the radical redefinition of an archaic system of player evaluation foisted by Beane and his Yale-educated assistant, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).

Moneyball is an enjoyable, entertaining movie thanks to breezy dialogue (Sorkin’s unmistakable contribution) and the performances by Pitt and Hill. Their contemporary Abbott & Costello act guide the film, with Beane as the competitive, jocular ex-jock and a Brand as the portly egghead. Hill, best known for his Judd Apatow comedies, impresses in his first high-profile dramatic role. And while those who contend age has finally turned Pitt into a good actor didn’t pay attention to his mid-90s turns in 12 Monkeys, Fight Club and Kalifornia, what has changed is that the 47-year-old actor now sports a more weathered visage for the camera to exploit.

Still, that recommendation remains equivocal, as Moneyball is also a flawed work that fails to emulate the moxie of its protagonists. The film focuses primarily on Beane, a divorcé whose teenage daughter periodically pops up to strum a ditty she composed about dad that sounds like a B-side off the Juno soundtrack. Beane’s own playing career was a washout, and the most intriguing moments of Moneyball are those that wonder whether his embrace of computer statistical analysis is his way of exacting revenge on the stodgy scouts who once imprudently advised him to turn down a college scholarship in favor of a pro contract.

However, it’s Brand who is the purveyor of this new system, making the script’s failure to develop his backstory an egregious omission. This is particularly puzzling since Brand is fictitious character (Paul DePodesta, Beane real-life right-hand man, figures in Lewis’ book but asked that his name not be used in the film), leaving the filmmakers free to explore why a nerdy, seemingly nonathletic Ivy Leaguer would apply his gifts to baseball analysis. Was it to get back at the jocks who teased him as a child, his way of fitting into a long inaccessible world, or something else? The possibilities are rich, but unfortunately the payoff is miserly.

The climax to Moneyball boils down to a will-he-or-won’t-he affair over whether Beane would accept a lucrative offer from the Red Sox and their owner John Henry (Arliss Howard), whose soliloquy on the sea change brought by sabermetrics is a highpoint. The sequence is meant to call-back the last time Beane had to decide whether or not to take the money. A more skillful treatment, however, would have turned his conversation with Henry into a tragic arc, the moment Beane realizes this new method developed to level the playing field for the have-nots is destined to be co-opted as yet another weapon for the benefit of wealthy haves.

Like a batter checking his swing, Miller seems torn between the crowd-pleasing tropes of the baseball movie genre – the Big Hit in the Big Game – and a commitment to distilling the sport down to a binary essence. Indeed, the film teaches us little about the particulars of sabermetrics (the term itself is never uttered), leaving the viewer to sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about.

There’s nothing in Moneyball as metaphorically audacious as the dueling frat parties in The Social Network – one a stereotypical bash where girls are bused in to serve as objects of drunken revelry, the other an online gathering where the coeds’ digitized images are uploaded and ranked by participants according to their relative attractiveness.

The most subversive Miller ever gets in Moneyball are slow-motion montages of batters taking a base on balls. In the end, the film is much like a sporting event – a lot of fun but ultimately a finite distraction.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com – http://goo.gl/lxDe7

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